Spoilers for The Cabin in the Woods
The Faculty is the one time in 1998 when the American team failed. The main characters don't die and a stoner saves the day...- To clarify: in the mythos of The Cabin in the Woods, there are five people who each fit a "part" in the Human Sacrifice, but part of the failure of the sacrifice in this movie is that the Controllers mis-classify each of the sacrifices. This is what they ultimately ended up doing in The Cabin in the Woods as well. Just look at each of the main characters:
- The queen bee Delilah is the Whore in the sacrificial ritual. According to the ritual, the Whore must be sacrificed first, and Delilah is the first of the main characters to become infected. She also dumped Stan for a completely superficial reason (head cheerleaders date football captains, not "academic wannabes"), further cementing her place in this role. Finally, unlike Stokely, Delilah plays her good looks to the hilt. But she is also very academically-minded herself, serving on the school newspaper as well as the cheer squad, and so she is only an imperfect fit.
- The star quarterback Stan is the Athlete. However, he quits the team to focus on improving his grades, and he doesn't display the alpha-male Jerk Jock tendencies that would be expected of the Athlete. His teammate Gabe, who takes over as team captain in his stead, fits the role better, but he's a fairly minor character.
- The science geek Casey is the Scholar. He discovers the parasite and makes most of the logical deductions in the movie, and he's also mercilessly teased. But he also becomes the last survivor of the five instead of Stokely, the Virgin, and as the coach notices, he's also quite physically fit.
- The drug dealer Zeke is the Fool, a lazy loner who's repeated senior year at least once. However, he's actually quite intelligent (after all, he created and sells his own methamphetamine-esque drug), and he uses this supply to sniff out who is infected and who isn't.
- The loner Stokely is the Virgin — i.e. the Final Girl. It's not known whether or not she's actually a virgin, though the fact that she pretends to be a lesbian to avoid attention implies that she is, and she proves to be very resilient over the course of the movie. Furthermore, the "Queen" of the parasites never actually goes out of her way to infect Stokely (emphasizing the point that the Virgin must be the Final Girl), instead going out of her way to befriend her, possibly as a way to set up The Reveal for later on and facilitate another instance of psychological pain for Stokely (like Stan blatantly showing her the fact that he's infected). However, Stokely doesn't actually become that close of a friend to the "Queen", and winds up getting infected anyway (leaving Casey as the Final Boy), cementing the failure of this sacrifice.]]
- Also, Everybody Lives. Those who were infected go back to normal after the "Queen" is killed.
- Finally, the previous American failure was the fault of the Chem department... and in The Faculty, it's Zeke's drugs that are used to kill the aliens! Another case of the Fool's supply not being properly monitored...
- The MO used in the Cabin in the Woods simply doesn't fit this film at all. The sacrifices are, by definition, supposed to die in order for the the ritual to work. The method of 'infection via alien parasite' doesn't even do anything but mildly dehydrate the host, much less KILL them to provide a sacrifice.
- That's correct. One of the teachers died because her body was too old to handle the parasite. The only other deaths are the principal (who died twice, first by being stabbed to death and the killed as a decoy) and Zeke's pet mouse (who was killed as a part of an experiment). Any other potential deaths were subverted (such as one teach being beheaded and then having her head reattached, the other getting Zeke's drug in the eye, only to reveal he survived with his injuries via the credits). And people also fail to forget one important detail about The Faculty that the Cabin in The Woods is suggesting the opposite of: it's not a horror movie. It's a sci-fi thriller. Every version of the sacrifice shown in Cabin in the Woods is shown to be some variation of horror movies. A bulk of the monsters featured in the film are more stereotypical horror movie archetypes instead of feature other genres (even though Reavers from Firefly are featured as one of the "monsters" and are from a sci-fi show, they are strictly the only horror element of said show, which is more sci-fi western than anything else, and is only an Easter Egg of fans of the Whedonverse). Even a giant Spider comes from 1950s style horror movies that often featured creatures created as a nuclear mutatnt (Godzilla is also such a creature), but those movies are strictly horror by design even with it's minor sci-fi elements. The Faculty is more sci-fi thriller than it is a horror movie.
- Seeing as how the Ancient Ones are a kind of audience stand in, it could be seen as them trying to change up the formula to entertain them, something that happens frequently.
