31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 25: The Faculty

Day 25: The Faculty (1998), dir. Robert Rodriguez

Streaming Availability: YouTube

"I'm not an alien, I'm discontent."

Congratulations, folks, we've traveled semi-linearly through time far enough to reach... my era. I was seven-years-old in 1998, and I remember this movie very well. It got tons of advertising, Dimension Films thought The Faculty would be a huge deal, a Scream-level smash hit. Instead, it's just one of dozens of teen horror movies in the late-Nineties boom. Not that I'm complaining, I like these kinds of movies a lot. (Check out Urban Legend sometime.) These slick thrillers were proudly self-aware of their genre influences. They're movies full of characters reading their own TV Tropes page, years before that website existed. The Faculty is The Thing for kids too young to remember Ronald Reagan. It's Invasion of the Body Snatchers for the MTV generation. 

(In case you don't know, there once was this thing called "Music Television" that was considered extremely important for youth culture. The Faculty's soundtrack is full of Nineties rock bands like The Offspring, Creed, Garbage, Oasis, and notably, Class of '99. That was a "supergroup" manufactured specifically for this movie, consisting of a very unwell Layne Staley, Tom Morello and some guys from Jane's Addiction. They do a mostly unnecessary cover of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1) and "(Part 2)" and that was their only songs. The whole Alt Rock teenage rebellion scene had mere years to live before Nu Metal took over. Indeed, MTV itself would lose all relevance as any kind of music/youth culture concern, becoming just a reality show network seemingly overnight. This all feels like a completely different universe now. Nobody cares about being "sell-outs", nobody is selling any kind of counter-culture "revolution" through music unless you're a reactionary country singer angry about participation trophies, and more importantly: do they even make movies for teenagers anymore? If you wanted to sell a movie to Gen Z, do you partner with streamers now or something?)

"Irony" was a big thing in the Nineties, even if the word started making less and less coherent sense. The Faculty is part of the Ironic Horror movement. These movies are full of characters who have grown up renting genre movies from the video store, so now live in a scary movie. Reality has been rewritten by the genre, so why not acknowledge it? Scream is full of characters who know "the rules" and yet still perform to exact genre expectations. It never gets to the point of full Fourth Wall breaking, if anything, the metafiction is like a crash course for new audiences. "This is how the slasher movie works, please enjoy." The self-aware aspect is never a negative, this is not a question of immersion. The cast of Scream are a bunch of kids who love slasher movies. Meanwhile, in The Faculty, there are characters debating whether this invasion follows the rules of Robert A. Heinlein or Jack Finney's novel. This is not about tearing down the alien movie, we're not mocking it, the post-modernity actually enriches it.

The Faculty straddles another genre, so it is just as much a metafiction on Teen Movies, specifically the rigid RPG Job Classes established by things like The Breakfast Club. You know: The Nerd, The Jock, The Cheerleader, The Rebel, Etc. Its conception of high school is built around these defined roles, so any deviance from the archetype is an offense to meta-reality, and thus is evidence that you're less than human. If the outcast girl is suddenly hooking up with the star quarterback, something cosmic has gone wrong with the fabric of space-time. High school subjectivity itself is completely artificial, so why not extend that to the artificiality of genre tropes?

There's a lot of pressure to conform to social norms in high school even outside Hollywood's ridiculous role-playing idea of it. The passage to adulthood is scary, there's an identity transformation involved. This whole Alt-Rock youth movement was built to "fight" against it. Therefore, a Body Snatchers plot works perfectly.

Kevin Williamson wrote Scream and The Faculty and quite a few more movies in this mold, always working with the Weinsteins (unfortunately). Those are not good people, but they threw real money behind their teen horror movies. They all ended up with incredible casts. The Faculty is stacked top to bottom to almost preposterous levels. Our creepy alien pod teachers are Robert Patrick at max ham, Salma Hayek, Famke Janssen, and Bebe Neuwirth. There's actually too many character actors because Piper Laurie and Daniel von Bargen end up left out of the movie halfway through. A pre-Daily Show Jon Stewart gets stabbed in the eye by heroic students. Within the young adult cast there's Elijah Wood, Clea DuVall, Jordana Brewster, and Josh Hartnett. An up-and-comer by the name of "Usher" is on the poster, even though he has a very minor role.

The cast is so immense that Laura Harris and Shawn Hatosy feel out of place because I did not immediately know their names or could recall at least six movies they've done. They're not bad, Laura Harris gets to do a hysterically fake Georgia accent as The New Girl, Marybeth. (And to The Faculty's credit, that bad accent is entirely intentional.)

Interestingly for a movie so willing to carry its inspiration on its sleeve, the characters never mention The Thing, because that movie is all over The Faculty. The bad boy, Zeke (Hartnett with some tragic Nineties hair) has invented a kind of drug called 'Scat' that rapidly dehydrates you along with giving a high, and that serves as the big "test" scene, replacing the blood sequence. Later, Famke Janssen will get her head ripped off and it will wander around on its own on tentacle legs. Since this is PG-13, nobody is allowed to say "you gotta be fuckin' kidding me..." but don't worry, I said it for the movie. There's that same paranoia of who is who and whether anybody's story adds up, which fits well into the Scream who-done-it mold.

The way the alien possession works is never all that clear. (Not that this mechanism makes that much sense in any version of Body Snatchers: why does sleeping kill you anyway? You never needed to ask because it never mattered.) Principle Drake (Neuwirth) is murdered by her teachers in the opening of this movie when she's still human. She comes back later, possessed, now dressed in a scandalous blouse for a teacher. However, the aliens just seem to be a kind of slug monster that burrow into your flesh to control you, not sure how there's a healing factor here. Everybody will come back as human again, even Famke Janssen, who was briefly decapitated. Mr. Furlong (Stewart) dies outright and still comes back with just an eyepatch. There seems to be some kind of meddling involved to keep the rating PG-13, which might be why the Scat drug is basically cocaine but we're told is actually crushed up caffeine pills. Can't have kids doing hard Schedule I drugs, can we?

The Faculty is the first movie we have that's using extensive CG effects. Some of them are not great - The Thing did the head crab gag a lot better than The Faculty does. But there is a final giant slug monster that's a decent practical effect. I like the design of the little slugs. I like the detail that these creatures are very hydrophilic, so their hosts need to drink ample water. Robert Rodriguez does a good job filming adults sipping from the water fountain with a lot of menace. Robert Patrick sure stands creepily in the middle of sprinklers like he's Michael Myers.

Next time! Sometimes aliens like water, sometimes they don't. Signs!