Editorials
‘The Faculty’ Was Released 18 Years Ago Today
December isn’t a popular time for horror films. There have been exceptions, with a handful of successful horror films being released in a typically family-friendly (or awards bait-y) month, but they are few and far between. It’s even less likely for a horror film to be released on Christmas Day, but every now and then a studio will take a gamble hoping that counter-programming will work in its favor and make a film a box office success. A situation like this happened 18 years ago with the Robert Rodriguez-directed and Kevin Williamson-penned alien invasion film The Faculty. Released on Christmas Day in 1998, The Faculty went on to become a box office success for Dimension Films, earning back more than two times its production budget.
Self-aware horror films were all the rage in the late 90s thanks to the success of Scream in 1996. I foolishly left The Faculty off of my recent article about that very subject so I’m using this one to make amends for that mistake. After Scream, Kevin Williamson was more popular than ever in Hollywood. Many horror films tried to emulate his style of writing to mixed results. Bob and Harvey Weinstein knew that Williamson was something special, so they used him every chance they had when films under the Dimension label went into production. The Faculty was written by David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel, but they were unable to find any buyers for their screenplay. Once Scream was released to critical and commercial success, they quickly found a buyer in the Weinsteins and the film was rushed into production.
Unfortunately for Wechter and Kimmel, the Weinsteins brought in Williamson to re-write their script. The overall story was kept in tact, but Williamson re-wrote much of the dialogue and even added characters to make it more trendy and thus more of a box office draw. Wechter and Kimmel managed to snag story credits, but Williamson earned the screenwriting credit. He filled the film with his trademark nods to other popular science fiction and horror films like The Terminator franchise (the protagonist’s last name is Connor, Jon Stewart’s character is named Edward Furlong and Robert Patrick himself plays one of the teachers), The Thing (Famke Janssen’s severed head with tentacles and the scene in which the core group of teenagers all snort drugs to prove they are all human) and even Williamson’s own Scream (the kids are all well-versed in the science fiction genre and what usually goes down in alien invasion scenarios). Even the film’s poster features the floating heads that were so prevalent in the ’90s. Throw in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club and you’ve got The Faculty.
Williamson’s script is smarter than your average ’90s genre offering, but it is not without its flaws. There is the weird homophobia issue surrounding Clea DuVall’s Stokely. The character tells people she is a lesbian so they will leave her alone, but later reveals that she is straight since she has a secret crush on Shaun Hatosy’s Stan (the film treats this revelation with a sense of approval, and watching it today it just doesn’t sit right with me). Many of the students seem to fear her because of her supposed homosexuality. This is particularly baffling considering Williamson is gay as well, but it could be argued that he was simply trying to replicate what he viewed teenagers’ treatment of homosexuals in 1998, but it still a bit crass.
The film does run into Williamson Syndrome of thinking it is more clever than it is (but to be fair, it is really clever). The queen alien’s reveal is the most egregious example of this. After spending the majority of the film’s runtime trying to figure out who the queen alien is, the remaining humans discover it to be none other than Marybeth Louise Hutchinson (Laura Harris), the newest girl in school. It doesn’t provide much for shock value, but The Faculty more than makes up for its lack of narrative surprises with a thrilling climax set in the abandoned school.
The Weinstein brothers originally wanted Williamson to direct the film, but he opted out of it so that he could direct Teaching Mrs. Tingle, which he also wrote. They then turned to Robert Rodriguez, fresh off of his hip genre mash-up From Dusk Till Dawn. This proved to be a wise decision, as Rodriguez brought his own brand of offbeat directing style (and tons of fun) to the film.
For casting the film, Rodriguez was able to bring in a talented young cast. Most of the teenage actors were unknowns at the time (save for Elijah Wood, who was a popular child actor thanks to films like Forever Young, The Ice Storm and The Good Son). Josh Hartnett filmed The Faculty simultaneously with Halloween: H20 (his acting debut) so he wasn’t a huge draw at the time. The rest of the teenagers are rounded out by DuVall (who, let’s face it, is amazing in everything she’s in), The Fast and the Furious franchise’s Jordana Brewster and Dead Like Me‘s Harris. Hell, even Usher Raymond has a role as one of the teens who is infected early on.
The big draw of the film is its titular teaching staff. To play all of the teachers, Rodriguez gathered a considerable amount of talent. Veteran actress Piper Laurie (Carrie) played the meek drama teacher. Broadway and TV starlet Bebe Neuwirth was cast as the tough-as-nails principal. Robert Rodriguez favorite Salma Hayek (From Dusk Till Dawn, Desperado) portrays the school nurse. Patrick and Jon Stewart play the football coach and the science teacher, respectively. Finally, Famke Janssen (best known for her villainess with a particular set of orgasmic skills in GoldenEye) was cast as the shy English teacher. Each member of the faculty gets their own moment to shine, but it is arguably Janssen who hits the jackpot with the scene in which her character verbally abuses Hartnett’s Zeke, and their later confrontation that results in the aforementioned severed head with tentacles.
Made for a production budget of $15 million, The Faculty opened in the number 5 spot over the 1998 Christmas weekend behind Patch Adams and Stepmom (both in their opening weekends), and You’ve Got Mail and The Prince of Egypt (both in their second weekends). It earned a moderate $11.6 million. While it never climbed in the weekend rankings, it only dropped 35.7% in its second weekend, a very small drop for a horror film. It’s total domestic gross was a healthy $40.2 million, making it a box office success for Dimension Films.
The Faculty actually has a special place in my heart for two different reasons. One, it was the first R-rated movie I ever saw (and the subject of my very first article for Bloody Disgusting two years ago). I was in fifth grade (10 or 11 years old) and in a rare occurrence my mom spent the day out of the house, so my dad let me watch a VHS copy of the film that he had rented from Blockbuster the night before. At the time, it was the greatest experience of my life. Two, it was when I first started to realize I was gay. How is that? I thought Elijah Wood was the cutest thing ever (he still is, by the way). So yeah, The Faculty played a significant role in my burgeoning sexuality.
For some reason The Faculty doesn’t seem to be remembered as fondly as other films of its time (though it does have a perfectly average 54% Rotten Tomatoes score, showing that some critics were won over by its charms). This may be because it is seen as one of Scream‘s endless imitators, but the fact that Williamson also wrote it must stand for something, shouldn’t it? It is not a perfect film, but it’s one of the smarter and more entertaining genre efforts of the ’90s even if, as mentioned above, it’s not quite as smart as it thinks it is.
Do you have any fond memories of The Faculty? What are your thoughts on the film? Let us know in the comments below!
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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