The Faculty

The teen film tends to open on a high school world that is already beyond any inciting incident: that is, the social order is already undesirable as the film begins (in this way, the genre that that teen movie most resembles may actually be the social problem film), and the protagonist(s) must fix what is already broken. Often via the device of the new student, the audience is introduced to a stratified class system that is eventually overthrown or undermined by prolonged contact between members of these contrived castes.

What remains when the teen movie ends is often what is considered a more natural and just order. Preconceptions are shattered, the jerk(s) gets their comeuppance, couples are united, and social mobility is unlocked. In Mean Girls, the so-called “Plastics” dominate the school’s rigid cliques, but by the end of the film the Plastics have moved elsewhere. There’s a new status quo in town, but as the ending of Mean Girls suggests, the cycle may be doomed to repeat: the film closes on a group of “Junior Plastics”, the next group of elitist “mean girls” to take up social space at the high school.

Mean Girls draws heavily on Michael Lehmann’s 1989 black comedy Heathers (written by Mean Girls helmer Mark Waters’ brother Daniel Waters). In fact, Mean Girls is really just a tamer version of Heathers, in which Veronica Sawyer famously tells her diary that her “teen angst bullshit has a body count” as she and her boyfriend fake the suicide of their classmates. The film ends on the suggestion that “the only place different social types can genuinely get along with each other is in heaven.” Just as Mean Girls is a less cynical riff on Heathers, Heathers is a kind of more cynical riff on The Breakfast Club (and 2017’s Tragedy Girls is a more cynical riff on Mean Girls). Teen films, like cliques, are strangely cyclical.

Most teen horror films, by contrast, are less concerned with group dynamics. Although it is common to read teen slashers, for example, in terms of social tropes — the punishment of promiscuity popularized by John Carpenter’s Halloween, for example — teens in slasher films are usually more preoccupied with staying alive than in crossing arbitrary social borders. Some teen horror, like Brian DePalma’s Carrie, recognizes the harshness of social boundaries and finds them inviolable, except by violence.

In some teen horror, particularly the slasher, the teens/victims are a disparate, post-Breakfast Club ensemble that exists in a harmonious balance of personality types. For example, in Wes Craven’s self-reflexive Scream (1996), written by Kevin Williamson, the teens in question occupy preconceived but harmonious tropes. Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods names these figures à la Breakfast Club — the whore, the athlete, the scholar, the fool, the virgin — and presents them as a ritual sacrifice that requires the (in the case of Cabin in the Woods, college-age) victims to be reshaped into the archetypes they represent, reminding viewers of the sheer contrivance of the boxes young people find themselves in.

“You see us as you want to see us – in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Correct? That’s the way we saw each other at 7:00 this morning. We were brainwashed.”

—The Breakfast Club

“I met you, all of you, and all of you were different from the others. You were lost and lonely, just like me. And I thought that maybe I could give you a taste of my world. A world without anger, without fear, without attitude. Where the underachiever goes home at night to parents who care. The jock can be smart, the ugly duckling beautiful, and the class wuss doesn’t have to live in terror. The new girl, well, the new girl she can just fit right in with anybody.”

—The Faculty

Even as its protagonists struggle to stay alive, social order and its disruption are key components of Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty, also written by Williamson. The Faculty is interested less with the plot tropes of horror, as Scream is, and more with a Breakfast Club-like examination of the social order and its discontents. The main characters are vastly different and, like The Breakfast Club, the disparate high school students are forced together, in this case by the revelation that the titular faculty have been replaced by body-snatching aliens who are subsequently replacing the students. Much like The Breakfast Club, it is an oppressive school system that brings the students face-to-face and forces them to overcome the barriers between them.

In both The Breakfast Club and The Faculty, disruption of the norm occurs as a result of prolonged social contact (again, this resembles the social problem picture, specifically those social problem pictures about privileged people overcoming their bigotry toward marginalized groups). Both films end with a supposedly new social order (at least for the main characters), but in both films the question is raised: how long will this new world order last?

In The Breakfast Club, the question is raised explicitly of what happens the next school day following their bonding session: will they be friends? In The Faculty, one of the film’s final moments brings us back down to Earth: despite the seismic social shifts among the group in question, we see a mirror image of the incident in which Casey, in the beginning of the film, was slammed crotch-first into a pole. Again, change seems more cyclical than progressive.

Fittingly, it’s the “new girl” Marybeth who introduces productive discord to the world of The Faculty, with a Scream-like twist: she’s actually the body-snatcher type alien who has begun taking over the school faculty and students. In a speech near the end of the film, Marybeth tells Casey she can fix the school’s social broken dynamics: “the jock can be smart, the ugly duckling beautiful, and the class wuss doesn’t have to live in terror.” The alien is full of utopian promises, as body snatchers usually are.

In perhaps the best iteration of the body snatcher story, the 1978 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Leonard Nimoy tells Donald Sutherland not to “be trapped by old concepts” as he prepares to assimilate Sutherland “into an untroubled world, free of anxiety, fear, hate” (no actor in history has ever made a better pod-person than Leonard Nimoy; somehow he’s both deeply chilling and very enticing). Little wonder that Williamson’s Faculty script draws on similarities between teen movies and body-snatching movies: the unified promise of a world free of the complications of human psychology, or at least free of the ways that humans tend to cling together in tight-knit, violently exclusive groups.

Ironically, Williamson apparently passed up the chance to direct The Faculty in order to direct Teaching Mrs. Tingle, a teen movie awash in the genre’s worst excesses with little of the spark of Scream or The Faculty. Like The Faculty, the monster in Teaching Mrs. Tingle is a member of the school faculty bent on destroying the future of an overachieving heroine; it’s a different kind of attempted identity destruction. There is little choice but to stick together; the faculty is always out to get the students.