All Your Teachers Are Belong to Us

1998’s The Faculty (dir. Robert Rodriguez) breaks the golden rule: never mention a better work of art in yours. The diagnosis is typically fatal. The viewer’s mind trails off, thinking about what could’ve been, the more entertaining time they could be having. This is always a risk when watching writer Kevin Williamson’s films [other credits include Scream (1996), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999) and Dawson’s Creek (1998-2003)], since his brand of satire doesn’t just deconstruct, it explicitly states, announces its purpose like a footman at a Victorian ball.

And yet it works. By God, The Faculty works.

And I don’t think it’s because of the script, which is The Breakfast Club (1985) meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the 1956 and 1978 versions are the most famous) meets Y2K. Our absurd cast includes Zeke (Josh Hartnett), an edgy, guarded genius and school drug dealer (and maker), Stan (Shawn Hatosy) the school’s star quarterback who suddenly feels pangs of conscience for coasting through academic life and so quits the team to “earn his Ds,” and Casey (Elijah Wood), a bullied, nerdy hobbit whose only personality trait seems to be getting pushed around. Stan’s girlfriend, Delilah (Jordana Brewster), the head cheerleader and queen bee of the school newspaper drops him when he quits the team. Usher Raymond (yes, that Usher) even plays a sadistic bully and friend of Stan’s (his torturing of poor Casey is never really remarked upon by the victim’s new popular friends). In a normal late-90s high school, none of these people would talk, even if faced with the end of the world. The quarterback would never quit the team to merit his own awful grades. The school genius probably wouldn’t be making a drug called “scat” in his garage. In the words of Johnny Cochran (sorta): Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about that—that does not make sense.

It may not make sense, but it’s necessary. If we’re going to have a redux of the blood testing scene from The Thing (1982), we need each of our main characters to have undergone some change recently. We need lonely, bullied goth Stokely (Clea DuVall) to be coming out of her shell; we need a new girl, Southern belle Marybeth (Laura Harris). We can even have their side interests be totally off-kilter and non-sensical (e.g., Stokely’s love of sci-fi manifesting as an obsession with Robert Heinlein novels). It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter because the cheesiness is guided by Rodriguez’s direction. He constantly uses shadows and quick cuts to produce a sense of panicked unease. His steady hand produces discrete scares too. So, for example, one brief jump scare featuring Elijah Wood on the football field actually works (I’ve never ever, over hundreds of horror movie viewings, seen a cheap scare like that work on my wife—yet this one did). He keeps the tone balanced. It would be easy for the film to shade into the quasi-comedy of Scream or Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992 for the movie, 1997-2003 for the show). Nothing about this plot is serious. But instead, he goes for thrills and chills, for entertainment. And he does it by keeping the pace brisk and the scares numerous. You’ll never be bored watching this movie. You can’t say that about most 90s teen horror.

The Faculty has its deeper dimensions. One could read the film as a fantasy of student solidarity against a failing school system, cut to the bone by budget slashing and filled with worn-down teachers (one of the first scenes is a faculty meeting in which the football team gets nearly the whole budgetary pie over grumbling protest, for example). One could even see in it a vain wish for a united student body, one in which years of bullying and social stratification don’t cause trauma and, at their worst, violence. But you don’t need to find that in this movie. It’s fun. It works even though it shouldn’t. That’s the miracle.