Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In the late 1990s, just as the horror genre was threatening to get stale after the ’80s over-indulged on slashers, there came one movie that reinvigorated the genre with a smart and thrilling take on tropes we’d come to know so well. …That movie was Scream, and it is rightly regarded as one of the greatest movies in horror cinema. Scream started a teen horror craze that lasted through the rest of the ’90s and into the early 2000s, and while, like any genre, it eventually succumbed to diminishing returns, there were some diamonds in that rough.
The Faculty was one such diamond, and as we approach Halloween 2017, I’m discovering that any time I come across it on cable and idly tweet about my love for it, I’m reminded that a lot of people feel this way too. Horror is one of those genres where you find out that the random movie you were obsessed with in your teens was the random movie a bunch of other people were obsessed with, too. And so while, for most, The Faculty is indistinguishable from other also-rans from that era — your I Know What You Did Last Summers and Urban Legendses — but it’s more than that.
What’s so good about The Faculty, you ask?
The movie tells a simple story of a small-town Ohio high school that ends up the flashpoint for an alien invasion of parasitic little slug creatures who inhabit the human body, voraciously consume H2O, and act as a kind of hive creature, taking orders from some unseen queen.
In other words, it’s exactly like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the 1956 movie about aliens who took over humans one by one. Back in the ’50s, the movie was a paranoid allegory about creeping Communism. In 1998, without the Reds to fear, the allegory at play is instead about outcasts and conformity and something about high-school football.
Genre director extraordinaire Robert Rodriguez directed this one — right in between From Dusk Til Dawn and Spy Kids, if you want a sense of just how eclectic Rodriguez’s career has been — off of a script by Scream scribe Kevin Williamson.
The very first scene in the film, depicting a football practice, is scored by an Offspring song, so right away, you’re there. 1998. Bill Clinton was still president. TRL was in its infancy. The Offspring were still relevant.
It’s easy to forget, once the movie becomes about discovering the alien in your midst and combating evil with knock-off cocaine, that there’s a huge streak of commentary in this movie about over-valuing football over academics and arts in high school education. The football coach is the first one taken over by the aliens and so becomes the prime bad guy. And the second scene is a teachers’ meeting where the principal tells them all there’s no money for their programs because the football team gets all of it. I love horror movies with a message! In this case, the message is that Piper Laurie should get some budget to put on a production of Guys & Dolls!
Oh, right, that cast! The titular faculty, who get taken over by alien slugs in the first half-hour, are played by: Bebe Neuwirth, Piper Laurie, Robert Patrick, Jon Stewart, Famke Janssen, and Salma Hayek. And, sigh, Harry Knowles from Ain’t It Cool News (recently disgraced after sexual harrassment allegations) gets to make a cameo, because geek cinema is a disgrace.
Before the aliens take over, the teachers are all nerdy, nebbishy, lazy, and in Salma Hayek’s case, sick with the flu. Afterwards, they’re all hyper-aggro, tough, and glamorously sexy! Bebe Neuwirth’s principal goes from world-weary to vampy, and Famke Janssen goes from Darryl Hannah in the first half of Steel Magnolias to Darryl Hannah in Blade Runner.
The cast of teenagers is great too, and that’s not even including Usher as a football star and future The Ranch star Danny Masterson as a high-school drug enthusiast. Elijah Wood, still three years prior to Frodo changing his life, plays Casey, the nerdy photographer who ~notices things~. Delilah (Jordana Brewster) is the popular girl who is head cheerleader, queen bee, a super bitch, and also an ace reporter for the school newspaper? Kevin Williamson must’ve been on a High Schoolers Are Deeper Than Their Stereotypes kick, because Josh Hartnett is Zeke, the burn-out drug dealer peddling off-brand coke inside plastic pen tubes out of his trunk … who is also secretly brilliant and has a science lab in his garage?
It also needs to be said that Zeke is sporting the single worst haircut in the history of cinema. This is not intentionally bad. None of the characters reference it or mock him for it. There is not a deleted scene from the prologue that explains that Zeke had to hastily chop off all his hair in order to sell it and purchase life-saving medicine for a dying family member. It just … looks like this.
And somehow he pulls this off?? I can’t explain it.
Anyway, the others teens are Clea DuVall as Stokley, an angry, misanthropic goth girl, Shawn Hatosy as Stan, the football star who doesn’t want to play football anymore, and Laura Harris (who you only recognized if you’d watched the Canadian teen soap Fifteen when it ran on Nickelodeon) as Marybeth, the good-girl exchange student. There’s six of them instead of five, but if you squint, you can recognize in them a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. It’s a near certainty that Williamson pitched this script as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets The Breakfast Club,” and if he didn’t, he should have.
The homages don’t stop there. One of the film’s best sequences is a direct tribute to John Carpenter’s The Thing. See, once the kids realize their teachers (and increasingly more of their fellow students and also the cops) are aliens, they’re forced to fight back, and in their confrontation with science-teacher Jon Stewart, Zeke stabs him in the eye with one of his cocaine pens. It … really does the trick.
Science-whiz Zeke theorizes that the drug dehydrates the aliens and is the only thing that kills them (chopping off limbs only leads to creepy-crawly limbs scurrying around). So now they not only have a weapon, they also have a litmus test. Since the aliens can take over humans in basically an instant, everybody is suspect. So just like in that iconic scene in the thing, Zeke lines everybody up to test who’s human. Each is forced to snort this coke (which is really just caffeine, Zeke is forced to admit, in what I can only assume was a production note so that the movie wouldn’t be so explicitly celebratory of cocaine’s hidden benefits for high-schoolers) to prove themselves. Casey goes first, and Elijah Wood is straight-up adorable:
Followed by Delilah and Marybeth facing off as the final two.
True to The Thing, one of them is an alien, and then all hell breaks loose.
The film goes on, racing excitingly from creatively staged action scenes (Famke Janssen’s severed head skittering around the parking lot is a highlight) to paranoid face-offs.
Of note is that Hartnett is a capital-S Star in this movie, triumphing over a terrible haircut to strike an unsettlingly sexy figure. I can’t have been the only teen forever branded by the sexy/badass sight of Zeke yanking the blade off of a paper shredder to fight off Jon Stewart.
ICONIC.
And as with any ’90s movie, picking out the generational ephemera is a must. I already mentioned The Offspring, but how about this kissing scene, in which Zeke’s very ’90s look (superfluous male ring that has no real significance; long tee under short tee with sleeves that reside halfway down the hand at all times) is on full display.
It’s almost beside the point to give away the movie’s ending. If you’ve seen it, you know; if you don’t, you should watch it today. Except to just say this: it’s a pretty crappy alien invasion plot if your strategy is to embed your queen with five outcasts from the community and then take your sweet damn time turning them into aliens. That’s all.
This movie really does have it all, from heavy ’90s vibes to a plot that hinges on teens taking drugs to Salma Hayek getting a slug puked into her ear. I dare you to choose a better Halloween night viewing option.
