Cullen Wade
Recently, I watched Andrew McCarthy’s 2024 documentary Brats (not to be confused with Bratz which is actually worth your time), in which a 60-year-old movie star grapples with the psychic toll of someone calling him a brat four decades ago, and it got me thinking about slasher movies. Let me explain.
“The Brat Pack” refers to a loosely-delineated group of young actors who starred in popular teen movies of the 1980s, generally in the orbit of John Hughes. In McCarthy’s documentary, authorities ranging from Malcolm Gladwell to Rob Lowe repeatedly argue for the Brat Pack’s breakout as a seismic shift in the Hollywood profile of the teen movie. Gladwell calls it a “generational transition,” and, as McCarthy puts it, “Hollywood discovered the box office potential of a young audience … In the history of Hollywood, it had never been like this.”
