Halloween Horror: The Faculty
Watching Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty in 2024 is like watching a movie that you would see within a movie (like Stab within Kevin Williamson’s own Scream series). It’s all such an obvious construction made up 1990s cliches, from the plot to the tone to the cast. The Faculty follows a group of high schoolers who discover that their teachers are being controlled by alien parasites that are infecting their small town in Ohio. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers for the MTV generation. In broad strokes, it epitomizes so much of what we associate with 1990s horror movies that it almost seems grown in a lab (or generated by AI).
There’s the high school setting, drawing on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which premiered the previous year) and Scream (which is also written by Faculty scribe Kevin Williamson). There are the characters, who are cynical and wisecracking high school types who use their pop-culture savvy to outwit and outlast humans possessed by alien parasites. There are the visual effects, which blend practical goo and latex gore with early CGI that is rough and uncanny in that way only 1990s VFX was. And then there’s the cast, which is a murderer’s row of 1990s movie figures.
The core crew of kids includes Elijah Wood, Josh Hartnett, Jordana Brewster, Clea DuVall, Laura Harris, Shawn Hatosy, and Usher—several of these actors became big stars while still embodying a certain type of 1990s convention. And then there are the various actors who round out the adult cast: Famke Janssen, Piper Laurie, Bebe Neuwirth, Robert Patrick, Christopher McDonald, Daniel von Bargen, Jon Stewart as the nerdy biology teacher, and Salma Hayek as the school nurse. It all makes you sit back and pause for a moment, and ask yourself, wait, all these people starred in this movie, at this time, about this subject matter? It seems somewhat unreal because it all makes too much sense. But the film’s messiness, its obviousness, in that distinctly hamfisted way only a human can accomplish, is where it distinguishes itself from the simulacra that you find in movies in 2024. The Faculty may be high concept, conventional, even cynically constructed horror movie making from the 1990s, but it’s clearly made by humans, complete with human faults and particularities, making it something of a charming, if goofy, artifact of the era.
Kevin Williamson attempts to replicate the magic of his Scream script but is only partially successful. The film’s meta cleverness is often charming. The scene that recreates the iconic blood test scene in The Thing, wherein Josh Hartnett’s drug dealer/chemistry whiz forces all the kids to take his homemade drug to prove they’re not alien pod people, is clever Gen X storytelling, almost parodying his generation’s call to not sell out; only a sellout wouldn’t do drugs and, thus, only a sellout could be an alien in disguise. But it never rises to the brilliance of the scenes in Scream where Jamie Kennedy’s horror movie nerd is describing horror beats as they play out in the frame behind him. Scream manages the neat trick of laying bare the machinations of horror storytelling without robbing those machinations of their impact. The Faculty is clever about sci-fi horror beats, but it’s never truly scary, even if it’s uncanny in moments.
The metanarrative approach is not novel when viewed today, as it was entirely sublimated into the Joss Whedon brand of storytelling, which has largely taken over pop culture via the MCU. But other elements of the film remain endearingly unconventional from the vantage of 2024, chief among them the film’s unabashed pro-drug message. In the movie, the ability to do drugs is what helps determine whether a person is real or not, and the drug is literally the key to defeating the aliens. In 1998, this approach spoke to a generation that relished the chance to say screw you to the “Just Say No” Reaganites (embodied by adults in this film who are secretly plotting their destruction). In 2024, it reads as refreshingly low-stakes and unserious since today, even movies with ostensibly pro-drug messages are full of dire discussions of overdoses and death. You could never bake a goofy drug plot function into a movie starring teenagers in 2024.
The Faculty is trapped in 1998, but that makes it a fair order better than the equivalent market offering of 2024. You don’t watch it for novelty. You watch it to be reminded that big, broad genre movies were the work of human beings, once upon a time.
6 out of 10
The Faculty (1998, USA)
Directed by Robert Rodriguez; written by Kevin Williamson, based on a story by David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel; starring Jordana Brewster, Clea DuVall, Laura Harris, Josh Hartnett, Shawn Hatosy, Famke Janssen, Piper Laurie, Bebe Neuwirth, Robert Patrick, Usher Raymond, Jon Stewart, Elijah Wood.
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