Before the MCU. Before the DCEU. Before every major studio started scrambling to stitch their films together into a grand shared mythology with its own timeline, its own rules, and its own inevitable crossover event, there was a quiet suburb of Chicago that most people drove right past without realizing it.

There was Shermer, Illinois.

If you grew up watching John Hughes films in the 1980s, you already lived there, whether you knew it or not. You sat in detention at Shermer High School with five kids who had nothing in common. You watched a senior with a red Ferrari and a borderline-criminal level of confidence play hooky for a single legendary day. You witnessed a girl celebrate the worst sixteenth birthday in recorded history while her entire family forgot she existed. You just didn’t know those kids might have passed each other in the hallway.

Hughes knew. He always knew.

The Town That John Hughes Built

In a 1999 interview with Premiere magazine, Hughes pulled back the curtain on something fans had suspected for years but never heard confirmed quite so directly. “When I started making movies,” he said, “I thought I would just invent a town where everything happened. Everybody, in all of my movies, is from Shermer, Illinois.”

That sentence alone is worth sitting with for a second. Not “most of my movies.” Not “some of my characters.” Everybody. In all of his movies.

He went further. He named names. “Del Griffith from Planes, Trains and Automobiles lives two doors down from John Bender. Ferris Bueller knew Samantha Baker from Sixteen Candles.” And then the kicker: “For 15 years I’ve written my Shermer stories in prose, collecting its history.”

The man had been quietly world-building for a decade and a half. He had notes. He had a history. He had a creative bible for a fictional Illinois suburb that never made it to the screen in any complete form, but lived fully formed in his head. Stephen King has Castle Rock. Faulkner had Yoknapatawpha County. John Hughes had Shermer.

The fictional town was rooted in something real. Hughes grew up in Northbrook, Illinois, the actual Chicago suburb that served as the spiritual and geographic model for Shermer. He attended Glenbrook North High School there, which directly inspired the schools in his films. When Ferris Bueller yelled “Shermer!” from that parade float, Hughes wasn’t making something up. He was writing the place he knew in his bones.

Same School, Different Saturday

The most famous and most verifiable connection in the Hughes-verse is the one between The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It’s not subtle. The very first shot of The Breakfast Club is the exterior of Shermer High School. A year later, when Cameron is dragging his feet about Ferris’s scheme, a banner in the background reads “Go Shermer.” These aren’t Easter eggs buried for superfans to decode. Hughes put them right there in the open, practically daring you to notice.

So here’s the uncomfortable math: John Bender, Claire Standish, Brian Johnson, Allison Reynolds, and Andrew Clark are all attending the same school as Ferris Bueller, Cameron Frye, and Sloane Peterson. They might have been sitting in the same lunch period. Bender definitely would have had something to say about Ferris’s red Ferrari. Andrew would have been at the same pep rallies as the rest of the Bueller crew.

A popular fan theory, based on careful analysis of a Cubs game featured in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off… specifically a foul ball caught by Ferris off the bat of Claudell Washington in the eleventh inning of a Cubs-Braves game at Wrigley Field… places the events of that film on June 5, 1985. The Saturday detention in The Breakfast Club? Two days later. That means while Ferris was dancing on a parade float, Claire Standish was picking out her earrings, completely unaware that forty-eight hours later she’d be confessing her deepest insecurities to four strangers in a library.

The Class of Shermer High

If you follow the thread far enough, almost every major Hughes teen film is populated by characters who could have attended the same school, lived on the same block, or at least known each other’s names.

Samantha Baker from Sixteen Candles was a sophomore, making her a year or two younger than Ferris. Hughes confirmed they knew each other, which honestly tracks. In a town the size of Shermer, everybody knows everybody, whether they want to or not. Sam is the kind of girl who would have heard all about Ferris’s legendary day secondhand and rolled her eyes about it. She had enough going on of her own, between her family forgetting her birthday and the older boy who apparently noticed her despite the chaos.

Gary and Wyatt from Weird Science round out the Shermer High alumni in a more surreal direction. The film explicitly confirms the Shermer setting. Lisa, the supernaturally created woman at the center of the story, is even seen teaching a gym class at Shermer High at the end of the film. Gary and Wyatt are the kind of kids who exist in the margins of every Hughes film: smart, overlooked, slightly desperate, and better than people give them credit for. They just happened to take a more… unconventional route to self-confidence than most.

Then there are the characters who exist on the wrong side of the tracks — or, more specifically, on the wrong side of Hughes’s very specific sense of Shermer’s geography. In his mind, the town had a nice part, with big houses and well-kept lawns, and another side entirely where characters like Bender lived. Andie Walsh from Pretty in Pink came from that other side too. So did Keith, the working-class kid at the center of Some Kind of Wonderful, who was as much a Shermer High student as any preppy with a sports car.

Speaking of which, Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful deserve a moment together, because the connection between them is less geographical and more philosophical. Hughes wrote both films. He was famously unhappy with the ending that test audiences pushed Pretty in Pink toward, in which Andie winds up with the wealthy Blane instead of her devoted best friend Duckie. He thought the wrong character won. So he essentially wrote the same story again… a working-class kid, a devoted best friend who’s secretly in love with them, a popular rich kid from the other side of Shermer… and this time he gave it the ending he wanted, with Keith choosing Watts over the glamorous Amanda Jones. Same town. Same themes. A do-over that Hughes apparently felt was completely justified.

Beyond the High School

One of the most unexpectedly poetic connections Hughes ever articulated is the one between John Bender and Del Griffith.

Think about that for a second.

John Bender, the volatile, leather-jacketed kid from The Breakfast Club, all sharp edges and barely-contained fury, burns so brightly in that library that it’s hard to imagine him aging at all. He’s frozen at seventeen in our imagination. But Hughes said that Del Griffith, the cheerful, relentless, shower-curtain-ring salesman played by John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, lives two doors down from him.

Same neighborhood. Same street.

There’s something genuinely moving about that if you let it land. Del Griffith is a man who has made his peace with who he is. He is loud and messy and takes up too much space, and he knows it, and he keeps going anyway. He is desperately, achingly lonely in ways the film only half reveals until its devastating final act. But he is fundamentally a decent man. And Hughes placed him in the same zip code as a kid who was raised to believe he didn’t deserve decency.

It doesn’t require a stretch to imagine Bender growing up, getting out, making a life for himself… a life that still involved some rough edges and too much talking on road trips… and winding up two doors down from the guy who once handed him a beer at a neighborhood block party. Hughes never filmed that story. But he thought about it enough to mention it in an interview more than a decade into his career.

Kevin McCallister from Home Alone also gets folded into the Shermerverse by many fans, and the evidence is at least circumstantial. The film is set in a Chicago suburb, written by Hughes, and shares his signature blend of slapstick comedy and genuine emotional underpinning. Whether or not Kevin technically attends Shermer Elementary somewhere down the road from Ferris Bueller’s old house is probably unanswerable at this point, but the spirit is right. The McAllisters feel like Shermer people. The kind of family that would definitely know the Buellers through a neighborhood association.

The Recurring Cast as Character

Part of what makes the Hughes-verse feel like a universe rather than just a collection of movies with similar vibes is the faces that keep showing up. Anthony Michael Hall appeared in National Lampoon’s Vacation, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Weird Science across a three-year stretch that turned him into the defining cinematic nerd of his generation. Molly Ringwald anchored Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink in succession. These weren’t just casting decisions. Hughes was consciously building a company of actors the way a theater director assembles a repertory troupe.

The characters they played were technically different people. But there’s a reason it always felt like you recognized them. Hall’s Brian Johnson in The Breakfast Club could have been Farmer Ted from Sixteen Candles after a rough year. Ringwald’s Claire Standish and her Andie Walsh are obviously different women, but they share a bone-deep knowledge of what it costs to care about things in a world that keeps telling you not to.

Hughes understood that the audience’s emotional memory of a face carries meaning. When you see Anthony Michael Hall walk into a room, you already feel something before he says a word. He built that into his universe intentionally.

What He Left Unfilmed

The most tantalizing thing about the Hughes-verse is how much of it exists only in the notes he kept for fifteen years and never published. He had a history of Shermer. A timeline. Connections that were planned but never made it to the screen. He knew which characters had met. He knew who lived on which block, and why, and what that meant about who they were.

None of that ever became a movie. Hughes stepped away from directing in 1991, moved back to the Chicago suburbs, and largely retreated from the public life of Hollywood. The notes stayed private. The history of Shermer stayed unfilmed.

That’s probably fine, actually. There’s something right about a shared universe that exists in the margins… that lives in a detail on a banner in the background of a shot, or in an offhand comment in a magazine interview, or in the particular way a director shoots a suburban street at dusk that makes it look like the same street in three different films. The Hughes-verse wasn’t built to be discovered all at once. It was built the way good towns are built: slowly, over years, by someone who just kept showing up and adding to it.

Somewhere in a fictional suburb of Chicago, John Bender and Del Griffith are neighbors. Ferris Bueller and Samantha Baker knew each other’s names. And five kids who spent one Saturday in detention are still, in some corner of our imagination, figuring out who they want to be when the day is finally over.

What’s your favorite connection in the Hughes-verse? Drop it in the comments. And if you think Duckie should have gotten the girl, now is the time to make your case.