The Faculty

The Faculty (1998) is about the teachers at a high school being taken over. A school in Ohio. The staff start behaving oddly: someone who never drank water is drinking constantly, someone bad tempered is unusually calm, nobody gets ill. Six students notice, and although they dislike each other they have to act together. The six are chosen from school types: the athlete, the popular girl, the outcast, the new arrival, the clever boy who deals drugs, the photographer. The cleverest thing is that the characters know the genre. To work out what is happening they turn to science fiction novels and refer directly to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Then they find a rule and test each other against it. That test is the most tense scene: six people at a table and no way to tell who is human. Kevin Williamson wrote the screenplay, using the same method here as in Scream. Robert Rodriguez directed. The cast is full of the young actors of the period: Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Clea DuVall, Jordana Brewster and Usher. Among the teachers are Famke Janssen, Robert Patrick, Salma Hayek and Jon Stewart. The soundtrack comes from the late nineties alternative scene. The effects sit between eras; some are practical and some are early digital. It runs 104 minutes. Good for: nineties horror, teen films, and genre hybrids. Less good for: the last section turns ordinary and the characters stay close to type.