Marty McFly said it best in Back to the Future, “Guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet, but your kids are gonna love it.” It’s a shame when a film is seemingly too smart for its time. And it’s an even bigger shame when it’s still critically referred to as a “rip-off of other sci-fi thrillers.” In Variety’s review of The Faculty, critic Dennis Harvey gave an incredibly snarky review of what he calls “review-proof,” due to the fact that it is “self-aware genre trash.” To Harvey, Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Williamson “make a complete lack of socially redeeming value seem so much fun,” and that “The Faculty might well become a pulp classic.” In honor of The Faculty turning 25, I wanted to take a look back on this film. It’s a film that fills me with nostalgia, and I don’t think I’m alone in that boat. The themes behind this film are just as poignant today as they were then, so how does it hold? Why do so many people, me included, love this film? Or more importantly, why did it get looked over?

A Nearly Instant Cult Like Status

The Faculty debuted at number five at the box office upon its December 25, 1998 release. With a budget of $15 million, it made nearly all of that back on its opening weekend by making just over $11.5 million. By the end of its theatrical run, it grossed $40,283,321 worldwide. As Dennis Harvey predicted, The Faculty would go on to gain cult status, and even receive some beautiful designs from the cult horror clothing brand Studiohouse Designs! Before we get into the film, we must acknowledge both elephants in the room for this film (and that’s not a weight joke). 

There are two actors in this film who now, more than ever, might just be the nail in the coffin for The Faculty never receiving a remastered release. Even though both actors are in the film for a mere fraction of its runtime, they are prominently featured in their respective scenes. First, we have Harry Knowles, whose character finds himself being treated by Nurse Harper (Salma Hayek) in the teacher’s lounge. Knowles was the creator of Ain’t It Cool News and a co-founder of Fantastic Fest. After a few controversies that never seemed to go anywhere, it came to light that Knowles sexually assaulted a woman twice between 1999 and 2000. Some time later, the news broke that he had done the same to four other women. Knowles resigned from Ain’t It Cool News. Alamo Drafthouse and Fantastic Fest cut all ties with him. Secondly, sigh, we have Danny Masterson. Yeah, that Danny Masterson. The rapist scientologist who was just sentenced to 30 years to life for rape. Out of the hour and 44-minute runtime, they collectively take up about a minute and a half. 

Is The Faculty Self-Aware Genre Trash?

What about the positive aspects of the film? I probably should have saved that last paragraph for the end, huh? When Dennis Harvey refers to this film as self-aware genre trash, it doesn’t feel like he is coming at it from a positive angle. There’s an excellent piece from Sarah Vickery who outlined aspects of the syllabus from Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece’s class on Trash Cinema for the University of Wisconsin’s Film Studies Program. Vickery’s piece, which appears to be her summation of Szczepaniak-Gillece’s class, outlines that “Trash films push boundaries, in distasteful and important ways.” This feels like another example where Dennis Harvey is right, but not in the way he implied it. The Faculty does have a meaning, and it is self-aware. It acknowledges the meaning behind the story Kevin Williamson is trying to tell and packages it in a way that feels genuine and from the heart. Everyone who went to high school knows there is a social hierarchy that exists within the institution of schools, naturally. Films like The Faculty hide their messages in complex and meta stories to make the point feel more palatable. (Not saying The Faculty is an overall complex film, but it’s not as simple as many people would argue it is.)

There are a few underlying themes in The Faculty, but there’s a fairly obvious, while not too on the nose, theme behind the film. On the surface, it’s about the alienization and isolation that can come with being a teenager. It doesn’t matter what clique you may find yourself in high school, it’s easy to feel invisible. For instance, someone will look at the football team and say, well, they’re footballers, so they’re probably aggressive and not smart. We see this with Stan (Shawn Hatosy). Or how the lead cheerleader says it’s the social order that she dates the football team captain. Delilah’s (Jordana Brewster) character is fascinating. When dealing with other cheerleaders, she’s just another mean girl, but when she’s alone with Casey (Elijah Wood) for investigation work, she’s nice. She puts on a front to fulfill that status she thinks she’s supposed to, and she’s incredibly nice when doing something she cares about. Williamson’s script contains small, intricate moments that build everyone into fully realized tropes. What’s incredible about this is that even though Williamson brings these tropes to the surface, the film doesn’t feel tropey. Unlike Scream, The Faculty is meta to get a point across rather than using it as the film’s defining factor. 

Kevin Williamson’s script is full of fun call-and-responses that work well on a singular viewing and enhance repeat views tenfold. At the beginning of the film, Coach Willis (Robert Patrick) berates his football team and shouts at them, “Consider yourselves dead Friday night!” Friday is the night the Herrington Hornets football team goes up against their rival team. During the Harry Knowles teacher’s lounge scene, Professor Edward Furlong (Jon Stewart) makes a passing statement about how he should just put a pen in his eye. After the parasite overtakes the Professor and the students fight him, he is dispatched with a pen to the eye. Coach Willis sees Casey running at one point and after a conversation, Casey says, “I don’t think a person should run unless he’s being chased.” Casey is, indeed, chased at the end of the film. These are just a handful of examples of how fun and referential the film can be. 

A Killer Underrated Soundtrack Highlight The Faculty

We’ve come this far without discussing one incredibly important aspect of this film…THE SOUNDTRACK. The soundtrack for The Faculty is full of nothing but bangers. When you start a film with The Kids Aren’t All Right by The Offspring you’re automatically going to win me over. Plus you have bands like Soul Asylum, Stabbing Westward, Creed, Class of ’99, and Oasis. I don’t know if they understood the gravity of the soundtrack when they put it together, but it’s hands down one of the best soundtracks in a horror film. Full stop. We get a great reference to Kevin Williamson’s earlier point about how Stan wants to focus on his studies to get into a college on his own merit. When the Friday night football game starts, we get Another Brick in the Wall, part II by Class of ’99, with the line, “We don’t need no education.” It’s just one of those small things that shows Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Williamson had a complete realization from the beginning of what they wanted to tell. 

Stan’s character hits me hard every viewing. He is the team’s star player, and it’s pretty clear from the jump that his heart isn’t in it. The idea of wanting to get into a college because of your brain rather than brawn is noble. If he’s as good as they say he is then he would have been scouted by every D1 college out there. But the self-realization that he can’t ride on that pipe dream forever he decides to better himself in a different way. Delilah is completely taken aback by Stan telling her he is quitting the team. She was probably planning on dumping him based on her earlier quote about how people with a certain social status must date their respective other. By the end of the film, we see Stan watching the football team practice with his new girlfriend, Stokley (Clea DuVall) at his side. On an aside, there is a deeper issue in America with high school sports culture and overreliance on it. Some kids I’ve known from elementary school devote their lives to becoming the best football player they can, dedicating every spare minute of their time to it. They get to college on a sports scholarship, get injured, and then their scholarships are taken away. Everything you’ve worked for has gone up in smoke. Moving on. That’s my roundabout way of saying it’s impressive to see a character who has been enveloped in his social circle for as long as he has with this sort of agency about himself. 

One of the greatest elements of The Faculty is unquestionably the cast. We have pre-Lord of the Rings Elijah Wood, pre-Fast and the Furious Jordana Brewster (in her debut feature film), Usher in his debut feature film, Josh Hartnett with his crazy hair, Clea DuVall in all her glory, Robert Patrick, Piper Laurie, Bebe Neuwirth, the queen Famke Janssen, John Stewart (without gray hair), Salma Hayek, and Christopher McDonald! WHAT. A. CAST. While they’re great, my favorite inclusion in the cast is Jon Abrahams, and by proximity, Summer Phoenix. Jon Abrahams had a wicked decade from 1995 to 2005 when he appeared in Larry Clark’s Kids, Scary Movie, and House of Wax, to name a few. The inclusion of Abrahams and Phoenix, respectively titled “F*%# You” Boy and “F*%# You” Girl, is excellently used to visually tell the audience what’s happening to the students behind the scenes. When we first see them, they’re yelling at each other in the hallway, both physically assaulting each other. The second time we see them, Abrahams is completely chilled out, while Pheonix continues her barrage of physical assaults on him. By the final time we see them, they are both entirely taken by the parasite. If you watch closely during their second on-screen appearance, you notice Abrahams watches Marybeth Louise Hutchinson (Laura Harris) as she walks past him; this almost seems like a weird character choice, but it all makes sense once we find out Marybeth is the head parasite. 

Does The Faculty Hold Up After 25 Years?

How does the film hold up visually? Two factors are at play for this question. It all starts with practical effects. Robert Rodriguez cares deeply about practical effects. He pioneered a love and resurgence for low-budget filmmaking. His book Rebel Without a Crew, a book I read about 40 times in high school, proves he’s a champion of practical effects. As time went on through his career, Rodriguez kept his love for practical effects while working hard to make digital enhancements part of his routine. The Faculty does rely too heavily on CGI at certain points, but it doesn’t take away from the wonderful looking practicals. When Principal Drake (Bebe Neuwirth) gets stabbed through the hand with a pencil, it looks uncomfortably real. There’s a gross-out gag when Mrs. Brummel (Susan Willis) enters the shower while Stan is in there, and he unwittingly peels part of her scalp off—sinewy viscera peels as her scalp falls to the ground. A few shots of the creature’s final form are practical, while the overwhelming majority of creature shots are CGI and don’t look good. Practically, The Faculty holds up incredibly well. Digitally, not so much. However, that’s not a surprise, as quite a few reviews from when the film was released say the same thing. 

The Faculty does not reinvent the wheel, but calling it a rip-off is disingenuous. Rodriguez and Williamson repackage and repurpose ideas we’ve seen before in transformative ways from their original forms. This most notably comes as a repackaged testing scene from The Thing. The crew goes to Zeke’s (Josh Hartnett) house after escaping the high school to try and learn more about the alien creatures. Things quickly get tense when it’s questioned about whether or not one of them is infected. After noticing Zeke’s drug, scat, kills these creatures, they decide that each person has to take the drug. Again, this is another minute detail that adds to the overall craft behind this film. At one point, we learn that the parasites thrive off of water. Well, it just so happens the drug Zeke created is a diuretic, meaning it will completely kill the parasite (and possibly the host). It’s an incredibly tense scene, and chaos erupts when half of them are giggly and tweaking, while the other half are in a full-fledged argument about who will take the drug next. Look, it’s not better than the scene from The Thing, but it’s an amazing take on it. The moral of the story here? Drug dealers are the good guys. 

The Faculty is a nostalgic blast from the past that still holds up. Occasionally, you’ll run across a reference-heavy film from the ’80s or ’90s, and it feels wholly inaccessible if you don’t pick up on them. This film is not that. The Faculty is fun, poignant, and guaranteed to jack you up. Does it hold up? Mostly! Is it uncomfortable to know two bonafide creeps are in one of my favorite ’90s movies? Definitely.