Teenage Anxiety and Paranoia in ‘The Faculty’
Kevin Williamson made a name for himself right out of the gate after writing Scream. That script led not only to writing Scream 2, released barely a year later, but also writing I Know What You Did Last Summer, a teen slasher based loosely on the young adult novel by Lois Duncan, resulting in a movie that is very much the Friday the 13th to Scream’s Halloween. As a screenwriter, he was the golden boy of teen horror in the late 1990s. More than that, he was a golden boy in general, as the success of Scream allowed him to launch his television passion project, Dawson’s Creek, which was of course also a monumental hit.
That post-Scream success both for Williamson and the teen horror boom led to a brilliant, if simplistic, idea: What if he could simultaneously revitalize and satirize science fiction the same way he had done for slashers in Scream? The answer to that question is, of course, The Faculty. This film was an early teenage obsession of mine, I’ll admit. There was a period of time in the seventh grade where I would watch this movie every single day, and there is absolutely no other movie I could say that about.
The Faculty revolves around an ensemble cast of outsiders, misfits, athletes and high school royalty who begin to discover that something has happened to the teachers, and it is beginning to happen to the students. It turns out that an alien invasion has started in their suburban Ohio neighborhood, and it has taken root in the high school. It’s happening right under the nose of humanity at large, where nobody would notice except this unlikely band of students who catch on. The plot is, in short, The Breakfast Club meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it is done with such a superb, fully-formed, post-modern edge. It is impossibly charming.
There is something genius about setting a body snatcher story inside of a high school. The defining trope of those movies is that you have to notice changes in behavior, that people always begin to think and act differently. Teenagers do that from week to week. Everything is rooted in insecurity and how to hide that amongst your peers. That’s the beauty of the concept. How do you search for those red flags that reveal the alien in an environment where everyone is presenting a false face?
Every character is initially presented as a stereotype that is dismantled within minutes of meeting them. Casey, the nerd, is surprisingly steadfast and brave. Stokely, the goth uses her rumored lesbianism as a cover because she wants others to avoid her so that nobody ever gets too close. She secretly crushes on the quarterback, Stan, who plans to quit the team because he’s sick of his free ride. He wants to take his studies seriously, to prove to himself that he can earn his education without it being handed to him. Stan’s girlfriend, Delilah, the head cheerleader and much-too-serious editor of the school paper seems to have no layers beneath her shallow and vicious exterior, except that she may seem to reciprocate Casey’s presumably unrequited crush on her.
Marybeth, the innocent Southern Belle new girl, can’t help but make eyes at Zeke, the dangerous rebel repeating his senior year. Zeke is, perhaps, the most interesting character of all. He’s got both a hard edge and a softness to him in every single scene. Unlike the others, Zeke notes freely that he is a “contradiction.” And he is, because he demonstrates a genius-level intellect for a supposed burnout. The only difference between Zeke and the others is that he never really hides any part of himself. He displays his contradictions proudly and openly, at all times. I’m not sure anyone other than Josh Hartnett could have provided that antisocial sensitivity that Zeke carries through each and every scene.
It is remarkably easy to root for this cast of characters. Even though the film is self-contained and works much better in this format than it ever could as a television series, you can’t help but want to follow these characters on a weekly basis. Part of that is due to the extremely effective, simple trick of flashing each of the main character’s names on screen as they are introduced. This easily relates to the viewer how important they are, and feels in many ways like the opening credits of a ’90s TV show. The contradictions and the re-examinations of these high school stereotypes are also baked into the film’s sci-fi premise.
As Stokely notes, the characters in stories like Invasion of the Body Snatchers lost all personality. That’s not what’s happening in their school. These alien parasites cause drastic changes in personality, which makes identifying them that much harder. It is an extremely high school metaphor in the best and least subtle way possible, where the anxieties of identity can make for a genuine target on a person’s back.
Paranoia is key to The Faculty in the same way that it is for any classic “pod people” kind of movie. The true benefit in this movie’s case, is that it allows Williamson to weave a very similar guessing game as Scream, and form an almost identical structure that’s actually refreshing given the wildly different genre and subject matter. The group of students, once they know the truth, determine that they must uncover the identity of the Queen alien. To kill the Queen would, in theory, return everyone to normal. Out of that is spun a web of potential leads and red herrings.
It is, in essence, no different from the search for Ghostface, except this time there is no police presence or any adult help to aid in the solving of this mystery. This “Queen Bee” element of the plot allows for an almost perfect marriage of classic science fiction and modern teen horror tropes. That is how The Faculty is best defined. It is a love-letter to sci-fi horror with an anarchistic teen spirit, using the inherent themes of each to examine the other.
This movie also boasts an incredibly stacked cast, not just on the teen side, but within the faculty itself. Robert Patrick shines as the hard-ass coach who turned into a smiling, understanding, presumably gentle authority figure overnight — a much creepier change than a simple loss of personality. Though just as alien and ruthless, his coach is the opposite of his iconic T-1000 from Terminator 2 in many ways. Then we’ve also got Bebe Neuwerth, Piper Laurie, Daniel Von Bargan, Salma Hayek and even Jon Stewart.
The latter half of the ’90s was defined by a slew of teen horror titles, often derided as imitators of Scream because they followed so closely in its wake. It would be a shame to dismiss The Faculty on those grounds, because it explores totally different territory than Williamson explored in Scream. Far from an imitator, it is absolutely one of the best teen genre films of the decade.
