Few films take less time to contextualize than The Faculty: it was released 25 years ago, on Christmas Day 1998, in the United States (and a few weeks later, in January 1999) in Spain, but its opening seconds with the Dimension Films' logo and The Offspring's song The Kids Aren't Alright are already responsible for making the timing of their production very clear to any viewer who ignores it. Two years earlier, Scream: Keep an Eye On Who's Calling had ushered in a successful commercial trend for teen horror films, straight from Dimension Films, the division dedicated to the genre within Harvey and Bob Weinstein's former studio , Miramax, dedicated. Just as Scream was soon turned into a trilogy, in the months following the release of Wes Craven's classic, the entire industry greenlit virtually any project that involved the filleting of teenagers by the murderer or supernatural being of the day , especially when they bore the signature of the architect of it all, screenwriter Kevin Williamson.
Looking for ways to exploit the vein, the studio revisited a scrapped draft in the early 1990s that envisioned a variation on the plot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), in which aliens infiltrate a community by stealing the identities of their neighbors usurp, but conveniently set in a high school. Dimension Films hired Scream screenwriter Williamson to write the final script and gave the direction to one of the label's explorers of the decade, Robert Rodriguez, who had, after all, just produced another terrible film. Monsters hidden beneath human carcasses, From Dusk Till Dawn (1996). “Look, we need you to do this right now because the teen movie thing could be over in a year!” the studio asked Rodriguez, as the filmmaker said in an interview with Digital Trends last May at the premiere of his film Hypnotic and the Quarter Century, completed by The Faculty.
“The Faculty” chronicles the unlikely alliance between a group of teenagers who have little to do with each other and some aliens who have taken control of the teaching staff.
“Until a few years ago, I had never heard people talk so enthusiastically about the Faculty,” the director admitted in the interview, a sign of renewed engagement with a work that was received rather coolly at the time. Since the film was scheduled to be released during the holidays and was intended to have as much impact as “Scream” and “Scream 2” (1997) on the previous two Christmas days, the film did well at the US box office – it played for the The $15 million it cost brought in $40 million – but it was in no way comparable to Ghostface's adventures. One of the aspiring actresses who made up the cast, Jordana Brewster, recently spoke wryly in Collider about the high expectations she had for The Faculty compared to those she had for another title she was working on at the time was involved: “I thought it was full throttle [2001] “It would be a little movie about cars, a fun summer project, but The Faculty would be a bomb.”
With an advertising campaign also supported by a collaboration between Tommy Hilfiger and the film's cast (which, in addition to Brewster, included the likes of Josh Harnett, Elijah Wood, Clea DuVall and the rapper Usher), the commercial disappointment was compounded by an unfavorable critical response Recording. In the New York Times, journalist Lawrence Van Gelder ventured the title of his review: “The Faculty: Without the Possibility of Lasting.” However, in 2013, an MTV article asked: “Has the Faculty Managed to Endure 15 Years Later?” The author, Vadim Rizov, emphasized the film's purely temporary identity, a time capsule that not only began with “The Offspring” and ended to the rhythm of “Oasis,” but also a massacre in a high school just a few months before The school murders located at Columbine High School made such a concept taboo for studio executives in April 1999. Although its violence, Rizov emphasized, had more to do with the comic exaggerations of juvenile products like the Ramones musical Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979) than with any realistic ambition.
Elijah Wood, Clea DuVall, Shawn Hatosy, Josh Hartnett and Laura Harris in a scene from “The Faculty.” Archive photos (Getty Images)
The system turns us into slaves
“There are some loose verses in Rodriguez's filmography. “For example, he does not sign the script, which is very rare for him because he always wants to have absolute control over his films,” said Noelia Gregorio Fernández, international doctor of North American studies at the Franklin Institute of the University of Alcalá de Henares, an author, tells ICON . from the book A Look at Chicano Cinema: Robert Rodriguez in the Transnational Age (2020). Dr. Gregorio connects The Faculty with Open Until Dawn and the subsequent Planet Terror (2007) “through the theme of the grotesque, the mixture of the beautiful and the ugly.” “It is one of the constants of his cinema. Salma Hayek's character in Dusk Till Dawn is a paradigmatic example: an exuberant woman who suddenly turns into a vampire. “In “The Faculty” it happens to the actress Famke Janssen, who also seems to lose her inhibitions with the monstrosity,” he explains.
In his research, Gregorio argues how Rodriguez managed to deviate Latino representation from the parameters of commercial Hollywood cinema, both in his stories and in the composition of his cast, before the emergence of as wide a critical consciousness as in recent years the studios saw a market niche in this sector of the public. “Although The Faculty is not a film that makes a specific allusion to Latinism, it is quite important for 1998 to show two actresses of Brazilian and Mexican origin, respectively, like Jordana Brewster and Salma Hayek, without their characters being stereotypical,” he says . “Now I think of Jenna Ortega or Melissa Barrera, who were exactly the protagonists of the last two Scream films. But that wasn’t common at all in nineties teen horror.”
Shawn Hatosy, Clea DuVall, Josh Hartnett and Elijah Wood at a premiere party for “The Faculty” in New York in November 1998. Penske Media (Penske Media via Getty Images)
Defined by actress Clea DuVall as a cross between “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “The Breakfast Club” (1985), “The Faculty” chronicles the unlikely alliance between a group of teenagers who have little to do with each other – a nerd, a secretly brilliant thug who makes and distributes drugs, the high school magazine journalist, a former football player who disowns the team, a goth girl and another who recently moved – in front of some aliens, who have taken control of the teachers. With a lot of dark humor and full of homages to The Thing (1982) by John Carpenter, including a parody of the scene in which the protagonists have to undergo a test (here taking drugs) to find out who is lying and who is an alien ” The Faculty, with its celebration of difference and its satire of the education system, is practically an epitome of the high school film subgenre: in the plot, the school authorities literally try to codify, homogenize and turn them into “slaves” without brains “to transform” for the majority of students.
Although the young actors did not make the leap to fame they had hoped for, their moment was not long in coming. Josh Harnett, who did a horror double with “Halloween H20” in 1998, became a teen idol three years later thanks to Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down. Jordana Brewster would find a perfect retirement solution in Fast and Furious, the little car movie from which she expected nothing: including this first episode, she has already appeared in six parts of the Fast & Furious saga as Mia Toretto, Vin's sister Diesel's character. Clea DuVall went on to have a solid career in independent film (she appeared in “Girl, Interrupted” and the lesbian classic “But I'm A Cheerleader” just a year later). And Elijah Wood would be informed during this shoot by journalist Harry Knowles, thanks to his cameo appearance in The Faculty, that his friend Peter Jackson was looking for actors with a similar profile to himself to cast The Lord of the Rings.
Elijah Wood in The Faculty. Archive photos (Getty Images)
Although the teen horror bubble burst in the 2000s, giving way to other movements like torture porn, nostalgia for this cinema has breathed new life into titles that many believed were meant to be consumed and self-destructed. In addition to the trend towards progressive defense of “The Faculty”, the Scream saga also returned with new commercial strength and the shooting of the sixth part of “Final Destination” (2000) is expected soon. Even on a more anecdotal level, Filmin co-founder and editorial director Jaume Ripoll tweeted shock about this in the summer of 2022 I know what you did last summer (1997) was the most watched film on the platform on a day when other great classics of greater reputation and prestige were added to the catalog. For Robert Rodriguez, the turn of the millennium was the best commercial phase of his career. Currently integrated into the ecosystem of the Star Wars franchise, the filmmaker has made several sequels to his hits in recent years, which could soon be joined by “The Faculty” with the original cast, as he revealed in a recent interview.
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