Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty (released in theaters on Dec. 25, 1998) is a knowingly trashy, sharply self-aware mash-up of teen movie and body‑snatcher sci‑fi, drenching a familiar high school hierarchy in paranoia and alien goo. Working from a script by Kevin Williamson, it plays like The Breakfast Club spliced with Invasion of the Body Snatchers, filtered through late‑’90s alt‑rock and snark.
The plot unfolds at Herrington High, an ordinary Midwestern school where the teachers look exhausted, the football team is everything, and the students fall neatly into cliques.
That normality fractures when a strange, slug-like organism appears on campus and the faculty start behaving… better. Too calm. Too intense.
After a violent locker‑room encounter, outcast Casey (Elijah Wood) and goth loner Stokely (Clea DuVall) suspect something inhuman is taking over the adults.
Their reluctant allies are an unlikely cross‑section of stereotypes: drug‑dealing slacker Zeke (Josh Hartnett), preppy cheerleader Delilah (Jordana Brewster), sensitive jock Stan (Shawn Hatosy), and new girl Marybeth (Laura Harris).
As teachers, from meek Ms. Burke (Famke Janssen) to icy principal Drake (Bebe Neuwirth), to drill‑sergeant coach Willis (Robert Patrick), begin to act like pod people, the kids realize the parasites are infecting the whole town.
Armed with homemade drugs and attitude, they hole up, test each other for infection, and try to identify and destroy the alien “queen” before humanity is subsumed.
Rodriguez keeps the pacing brisk and the tone playful, staging set pieces in locker rooms, labs, and football fields with a mix of practical gore and late‑’90s CGI that now reads as endearingly clunky.
The film has fun weaponizing the faculty: Patrick’s coach becomes a grinning predator, Janssen’s mousy teacher turns lethal and liberated, and Jon Stewart’s science teacher gets one of the movie’s more gleefully grotesque encounters.
Hartnett anchors the ensemble as the too‑cool screw‑up with a hidden intellect, while DuVall and Harris give the film an emotional spine that rises above the in-jokes.
Usher, Piper Laurie, Christopher McDonald and Salma Hayek round out the cast.
Josh Hartnett in The Faculty (Photo/Miramax Films)
Reception for The Faculty
The Faculty grossed $11.6 million on its opening weekend, finishing fifth at the box office.
The film would gross $63.2 million worldwide.
Legacy
The Faculty has evolved from modest genre exercise to cult favorite, cherished as a time capsule of ’90s teen horror alongside Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Its blend of meta‑humor, social satire, and creature-feature thrills anticipated later “high school plus genre” hybrids, even if it never reached the same critical stature. The film stands as a scrappy, entertaining reminder that sometimes the scariest thing about growing up is realizing the adults really aren’t themselves—and maybe never were.
