In 1998, the box-office zeitgeist tended toward extraterrestrial threats, forced conformity and bugs. That summer, Deep Impact and Armageddon concurrently depicted scrambles to avoid mass extinction events from asteroids, while the previous year saw otherworldly menaces in Event Horizon and The Fifth Element, and a more dramatic tone in Contact. Elsewhere in 1998 mainstream cinema, The Truman Show and Pleasantville focused on artifice and conformity. A year earlier, extraterrestrial bugs laid siege in Starship Troopers and wreaked havoc inside human skin in Men in Black, and genetically altered creepy crawlies clandestinely preyed on humans in Mimic. Meanwhile, teen-centric films and television series were heavily influenced by the pen of screenwriter Kevin Williamson, whose Dawson’s Creek series premiered in January 1998, while his scripts for Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer sprang sequels later in the year.
All of those threads converged with The Faculty. Released on Christmas 1998, the sci-fi horror film, co-written by Williamson, also largely tapped into thematic influences from the past two decades, especially the work of John Carpenter. This isn’t surprising, given that Williamson, who cites Halloween (1978) as his inspiration to begin screenwriting (and who had an uncredited hand in the Halloween H20 script that same year), was brought in to punch up a previously written screenplay and was set to direct The Faculty before deciding to helm another project instead.
In nearly every aspect, The Faculty acts as collage. Admittedly, there are virtually no new ideas here, but rather homages to forebears, direct references to contemporary influences and modernization of classic sci-fi tropes. Taking place as it does at a late 20th century high school, there are also Hughesian coming-of-age teen drama archetypes aplenty—the central core of protagonist students include a The Breakfast Club-like collection of a jock, popular girl, underachieving burnout, bullied geek and gothy outsider.
While not composed of original elements, collages still have artistic merit, especially when rendered so vividly. Yet, The Faculty was met with a middling critical reception and relatively disappointing box office receipts, and the current “critic’s consensus” on Rotten Tomatoes describes it simply as a “rip-off of other sci-fi thrillers.” Lost in that glib summary, however, is the self-aware meta-commentary oozing through nearly every frame. Popularized by Williamson’s Scream (1996) script, this meta approach to genre fare was also nothing new at the time. But utilizing a sci-fi perspective provided a unique angle. Previously, this kind of meta film was more common in the straight horror of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and then Scream, with nods and winks at the audience morphing into outright horror comedy in more recent projects like The Cabin in the Woods (2011) and This Is the End (2013).
Unsurprisingly, Williamson and his co-writers went the Scream route here. Our young heroes, their school afflicted by a parasitic alien that takes control of its human hosts, try to figure out the “rules” governing the alien menace by referring to ‘50s sci-fi books like Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppetmasters, along with direct references to contemporary aggressive aliens found in Independence Day, Men in Black and The X-Files, the latter of which was adapted from the television series that same year. In one scene, ostracized nerd Casey (Elijah Wood) and loner emo girl Stokely (Clea DuVall) debate whether those types of movies may only be considered science fiction because the aliens use such stories as a decoy. Or maybe Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are providing the world with a warning, or are even aliens themselves.
Clearly, the genre-rules schtick works less well here than in Scream. But taken as a whole, The Faculty so drenches itself in its meta concept, that its very fiber is one of reference and homage while also dredging up familiar coming-of-age themes, especially around conformity versus individuality. The alien parasites are strange, aquatic, shrimplike organisms that essentially act as one being, replicating itself and infecting teachers and then students to create a hive mind. The parasite’s hosts look no different than before, and other than an unquenchable thirst for water and some uncanny smiles, their behaviors doesn’t change much either, ramping up the suspicions of the ragtag group of surviving students, who band together to unravel the alien scourge before it spreads to the whole town, and perhaps the whole world.
If the story of a group of isolated survivors, trapped within a facility while distrusting whether one another are still human, sounds familiar, that’s because it’s closely aligned to Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), right down to a test to prove the humanity of the group. Brainy burnout Zeke (Josh Hartnett) deals drugs and whatever other contraband fellow students are willing to buy. (In a Williamson self-reference, Zeke even sells VHS porn promising that it features Neve Campbell and Jennifer Love Hewitt.) When one of his homemade drug cocktails, called “scat”—he describes it as “mostly caffeine and other household shit”—turns out to be an efficient way to kill the water-dependent alien parasites by acting as a diuretic, Zeke makes everyone in the group snort it, à la Kurt Russell’s blood test in The Thing. When an infected teacher is decapitated during a car chase, her head sprouts legs and starts crawling, prompting Zeke to drop an f-bomb that’s a direct reference to a similar unbelieving response to the ambulatory head in that Carpenter classic. While such overt references may be construed as “rip-offs” to the more cynically minded, a more generous reading would view this as similar to the homage found in 1996’s Mars Attacks! than to derivative box-office chum.
In keeping with both the collagist approach and with the late ‘90s time-capsule feel of the film—it opens with the Offspring’s “The Kids Aren’t Alright,” for crying out loud—the antagonistic faculty are even a hodgepodge of recurring minor characters in wildly popular TV shows from the prior decade, as Cheers/Frasier, Seinfeld and Twin Peaks are represented within the cast by Bebe Neuwirth (Lilith), Daniel von Bargen (Mr. Kruger) and Piper Laurie (Catherine Martell), respectively. Meanwhile, Jon Stewart plays a key role in a film released a mere two weeks before he began hosting The Daily Show, and pop music gets some love with an up-and-coming Usher in a minor role.
All of this makes for popcorn-movie comfort food. The ‘90s were a ripe time for pop culture/cult classic reference and fawning fandom—hell, Kevin Smith started a whole career out of it. Sure, the CGI creature effects are amusingly dated, and the film would’ve greatly benefited from the practical effects used by the likes of Carpenter. And yeah, the soundtrack is garbage (unless Creed covering Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen” sounds appealing), but even that serves as an artifact of its time, populated with ‘90s acts like Stabbing Westward, Shawn Mullins, Oasis, the Layne Staley-fronted supergroup Class of ’99 and, well, Garbage. While coming-of-age tropes in a ‘90s film may resonate most with those of us who came of age in the ‘90s, there’s broader appeal to be found in a film so wholly of its time going to great lengths to emulate and reinterpret classics that came before it.
Admittedly, the film lacks the bleak ending of The Thing or Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Casey manages to kill the “queen” and thereby free all of the infected faculty and students who hadn’t previously died. In true Breakfast Club style, the brooding Ally Sheedy type trades in her black clothes for a pastel cardigan after getting with the reformed jock. The geek gets with the popular girl. The burnout even makes the football team. But even though the film would’ve benefited with a darker ending, by wearing so many influences on its sleeve in a campy sci-fi romp, The Faculty makes for a fun throwback even if its pleasures are only skin deep.
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