Horror Movies
Revisiting THE FACULTY: Shameless And Charming Teen Horror
The Faculty is entertainment in its purest form, shameless in its utter lack of pretension and therefore charming.
I have already confessed to my unfulfilled love for disaster cinema on the occasion of Armageddon, so it is time to admit to another weakness. Namely, I have a fondness for so-called teen horrors. In fact, sometimes even for teen cinema in general, but without exaggeration – I am not a masochist either, and no one will persuade me to sit through a marathon of the Twilight saga. The Faculty.
Horrors set on college campuses and in the labyrinths of high school corridors, on the other hand, I devour with passion. Paradoxically, I probably like them most for what should, logically speaking, be a flaw—absolute predictability. You can always count on recurring plot patterns and a familiar set of characters. The school beauty, obligatorily leading the cheerleading squad, dating the team captain in her spare time, an athletic star doomed to a sports scholarship as the only ticket to university.
The persecuted victim of fate who grows into a hero. A group of nerds. The sweet idiot, most often stuck like Velcro to the normal, well-adjusted, down-to-earth main heroine. The naughty rebel and the black-clad outsider. Completing the set is a dumb jokester smoking excessive amounts of weed. The same goes for the staff: the shouty coach, the strict (and often also dim-witted) principal, the suspicious janitor, one sensible teacher and, for contrast, one utterly hopeless one.
Sometimes all these elements coexist; sometimes only some of them appear, while the braver creators allow themselves to toy with convention and play with stereotypes.
Hence the staggering success of the Scream series, which launched a parade of more or less successful clones—a trend strongly visible in the late 1990s and around the turn of the century, later gradually fading, but still present to some extent.
As a representative of the generation that welcomed the first Scream at the very beginning of high school, that swooned over Pacey from Dawson’s Creek, I probably do have some nostalgic grounds for this harmless fondness.
The Faculty is an exceptionally agreeable representative of the genre in question. The idea is not particularly original—in essence, it is almost a literal transfer of the concept of Invasion of the Body Snatchers into a teen setting. A mysterious force from outer space gradually takes over the entire teaching staff and then strikes at the students, slowly turning them into ranks of Stepford Youth, completely stripped of identity and, incidentally, of other limitations, such as fear, longing, or hope.
The school loser, Casey – Elijah Wood, tripping over his own feet—suspects that the situation may be connected to an unknown organism he found on the school football field. The aliens share an obsessive fondness for water and an equally obsessive fear of an intoxicating drug produced at home by the rebellious outsider Zeke—Josh Hartnett, a man incapable of expressing any emotion with his face.
The opposition group also includes Stokely, labeled a militant lesbian; Stan, the team captain with ambitions beyond sports; his girlfriend Delilah, the school queen; and sweetly innocent Marybeth Louise Hutchinson, a new student with no sense of direction. In other words, all the appropriate patterns are preserved exactly as they should be.
The real beauty (both literal and figurative), however, director Robert Rodriguez gathered in the background, among the titular teaching staff. Admirers of Salma Hayek’s breathtaking beauty do have to be careful not to blink too much and thus miss her in the role of a sniffling nurse, but Famke Janssen treats us to a first-rate transformation of the take off the glasses and let your hair down variety. Robert Patrick (the shouty coach) is beyond doubt a standout, especially in scenes that deliberately reference Terminator 2 and the character of the T-1000.
The young cast does not deliver top-tier acting, the plot twists are visible from a mile away, and the screenplay is, in places… well, let us not be afraid of the word – simply stupid. But that does not change the fact that The Faculty is entertainment in its purest form, shameless in its utter lack of pretension and therefore charming.
The frantic scurrying of severed little fingers or the exceptionally mobile head of Famke Janssen (everything clearly inspired by Rodriguez’s cinematic fascinations) are scenes that simply cannot be missed. And two small treats during the end credits – without revealing too much, I will only say that they involve a bandage and a sash – are an extra finishing touch, a cheerful wink at the end. They can be regarded as a kind of sealing of the agreement between the director and the viewers: he had great fun making the film, they have great fun watching it, and neither side takes it overly seriously.
