YMMV / The Faculty

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Did Stokely actually pretend to be a lesbian? Perhaps Delilah just assumed she was because of her more butch appearance, started branding her as such and Stokely just went along with it to avoid everyone. In actuality, when Marybeth starts asking her about it, Stokely sounds annoyed when she says "I'm not a lesbian" - suggesting it's more of Delilah's lies.
• Anti-Climax Boss: The alien queen goes down rather easily with one jab in the eye from the drugs.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Judging by YouTube comments, Laura Harris' nude scene is probably the best-remembered scene of the film.
• Creepy Cute: Stokely is intentionally off-putting due to her abrasive personality, but she's soon revealed to have plenty of Hidden Depths, and being a science geek. Plus she's also quite Adorkable.
• Fair for Its Day: When Marybeth thinks Stokely is a lesbian, she still tries getting to know her and being her friend anyway, implying that wouldn't make a difference to her. The film still sports a number of attitudes typical of the '90s, but it's well-meant in this one.
• Genius Bonus: Early in the film, after being begged by Mrs. Olson for the (nonexistent) funds to put on a musical, Principal Drake suggests recycling the sets from Our Town to save money. As any theater geek (such as Drake's actress, two-time Tony winner Bebe Neuwirth) would know, Our Town doesn't use a set. This makes Drake seem even more callous and unconcerned about anything other than the football team — she either couldn't have been bothered to see her own school's theater production (the only way she wouldn't have known that fact), or she just told Mrs. Olson to fuck off.
• Harsher in Hindsight: One scene in this film involves a character shooting his high school principal in the face. This film was released four months before Columbine. Josh Hartnett would also star in "O", which has a similar climax and would get its release delayed for two years because of it.
• Heartwarming Moments: The genuine attraction between Stokely and Stan. The former is anti-social because she's deeply insecure and alienates people because she's afraid of being rejected. The latter is seen as just a meathead that's good for his athleticism and nothing else (and his girlfriend outright says they're together mainly for image). These two different people hit it off and form a real connection. The way Stokely giggles when she says "a D student?" is Adorkable and shows her letting someone in.
• Ham and Cheese: Bebe Neuwirth in the infamous scene of Drake being cornered by the teens. She's clearly having a blast as she says "you're all expelled!"
• He's Just Hiding: The end credits hint that Mr. Furlong and Principal Drake are still alive too, just with injuries from the possession. Since Ms. Burke is confirmed to still be alive even when her head got chopped off, it's plausible for them to have survived or the aliens to have reassembled their bodies before Casey kills Marybeth.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Seventeen years later, Elijah Wood would star in Cooties, in which he would once again be up against evil monsters at a school — only this time, instead of a student fighting alien-infested teachers, he'd be playing one of the teachers battling zombified students.
  • Clea DuVall talking about a possible government conspiracy. Fast forward to Heroes where she's an FBI agent investigating such a thing.
  • DuVall has also played a few lesbian roles in her career, most notably in But I'm a Cheerleader, where she's paired with an extremely girly character similar to Marybeth. And of course, DuVall later came out as a lesbian in real life.
  • From Casey: "Look, maybe The X-Files is right." Gillian Anderson (Scully) turned down an offer to play as Principal Drake, and Robert Patrick (Doggett) is the football coach. What's more, there's an episode where Doggett is Brainwashed and Crazy into almost attacking Scully, which is what happens with Coach Willis to Drake.
  • Here you have a movie about an alien invasion, where the aliens are water-themed creatures. A few years later, we have Signs, where the aliens are weak to water.
  • In The Cabin in the Woods, a deconstruction of the making of horror films, there's a complaint about a failure in 1998 due to a mistake by "the chem department". It's widely agreed by fans of that film that The Faculty was what they meant, since Everybody Lives due to the drugs defeating the aliens, and the Final Girl turns out to be the alien queen.
• Hollywood Homely:
  • Famke Janssen with unflattering hair, glasses, and clothes in Miss Burke's 'before' appearance. This is clearly so she can be revealed as Beautiful All Along once she's infected. Although uniquely, she goes back to the original look at the end (which is A-OK by Zeke).
  • The same goes for the other teachers — general consensus focuses mainly on Robert Patrick and Salma Hayek.
  • Arguably invoked by Delilah, who goes incognito by wearing glasses and baggier clothes.
  • Elijah Wood is dressed down with geeky clothes that he sheds by the finale, with gelled hair to signify Character Development.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Delilah is a brutally honest Alpha Bitch and pretty superficial at that. But it's later revealed that her father died years ago and her mother is an alcoholic. She appears to have redeemed herself at the end.
  • Zeke too is a major Jerkass, but his parents don't bother about him, and it's said his mother regularly leaves him to travel the world with various lovers.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Chris Stuckmann said the movie should be watched for the fact that Jon Stewart stars as a science teacher named Edward Furlong.
• Magnificent Bitch: Marybeth Louise Hutchinson is in fact the Hive Queen of a parasitic alien species who had to flee from her oceanic homeworld after a great calamity destroyed it. Taking the form of a New Transfer Student at a small town high school, Marybeth and her ilk infiltrate human society in order to implant all of them with their kind. Marybeth befriends the students Casey, Delilah, Stokely, Stan, and Zeke, even starting a romantic relationship with the last. Marybeth infects almost the entire school and a large part of the town with plans of spreading everywhere before the teenagers catch on, but she's able to fake a drug test designed to detect infectees and is able to keep her identity hidden right until she personally chooses to expose herself to the teenagers, earnestly trying to convince them that she can make all of them happy as a part of the alien colony.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • It's now become common practice to show Jon Stewart's death scene in this movie for stock footage relating to him. Sometimes, it's unrelated to what's being talked about.
  • This exchange, for being representative of kids (or people in general) who don't want to participate in PE or sports:
    Coach Willis: You're not much into sports.
    Casey: I don't think that a person should run unless he's being chased.
  • Coach Willis and Ms. Olsen's team-up is almost unanimously regarded as a lesson to never mess with the T-1000 and Carrie's mom.
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • This crossed with Moral Guardians. Some reviewers or concerned parents see this film as advocating chemical stimulants. It isn't, really, as the obvious negative effects are shown, and a lot of the complaints miss the scene where it's revealed that Zeke's stash is mainly made out of caffeine pills. However, it doesn't help that the one way to prove you're not infected, which is used many times in the film, is to snort a substance that looks and even behaves like cocaine.
  • Stokely has a similar fanbase to Alison Reynolds among people who identify with her look and cynical attitude, and hate the minor 'preppy' makeover she gets in the end — which consists of wearing a purple cardigan and less black makeup. And much like Alison, her look and attitude are all a pose. Stokely dresses like a goth, puts on a standoffish personality, and pretends she's a lesbian not because she doesn't care about appearances, but because she's extremely concerned about them, going out of her way to isolate herself and make people want to avoid her. Her abandoning that look and attitude is a sign of her no longer caring about what anyone thinks of her.
• Narm: The coach blowing his whistle when he chases the principal into a room at the beginning is supposed to be terrifying but comes off as over the top.
• Narm Charm: Laura Harris's Southern accent is rather ridiculous but still endearing. It's clearly meant to be fake in-universe, too.
• Retroactive Recognition: Many of this film's actors went on to greater stardom in film and television afterwards.
  • Famke Janssen, after first gaining Hollywood's notice in GoldenEye but before her Star-Making Role in the X-Men Film Series, has a supporting role as Miss Burke.
  • This is only Josh Hartnett's second role, after Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later.
  • Fans of The Daily Show might be amused to see Jon Stewart in an acting role, playing the science teacher Mr. Furlong. After joining The Daily Show the following year, Stewart largely retired from acting outside of voice work in animation and cameos as himself.
  • Jordana Brewster, who played Delilah, would have her Star-Making Role as Mia Toretto in The Fast and the Furious three years later.
  • Clea DuVall, who played Stokely, is probably best known now as Sofia from Carnivàle.
  • And last but not least, Elijah Wood, three years before The Lord of the Rings, playing the protagonist Casey. He was a minor child star in the '90s but nowhere near as famous as Frodo Baggins made him.
• Rewatch Bonus:
  • During the Mr. Furlong attack scene, Marybeth can be seen briefly helping Delilah behind the desk. This is clearly when she infects Delilah.
  • You'll note that we never see Marybeth snort the drugs. She only reappears after Delilah escapes.
  • Note that Marybeth is the first person to refer to the aliens as having a queen, and to use female pronouns when describing the aliens' leader.
• Signature Scene: The movie's most famous sequence is the one where the teens have to get high on Zeke's drugs to prove they're not infected. That or naked Marybeth.
• Spiritual Successor: Though the tropes are obviously Older Than They Think, to a late '90s teen audience it could basically be seen as Animorphs: The Movie, only with older leads and no superpowers (the last of which being pretty much what turns the story into a horror film). The aliens in the film are even shown to be slug-like creatures that live in water, and possess their hosts by entering through the ear.
• Squick: Nurse Harper blows her nose and very obviously says she has a cold, but is "saving my sick days for when I feel better".
• Stoic Woobie: Stan when you think about it. He's a great athlete, of course, but really resents being thought of as the Dumb Muscle, and none of his friends encourage him when he decides to change. It's also implied that he hates the Jerk Jock behaviour of his peers.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: The film is often panned as a ripoff of Scream (1996) due to Kevin Williamson writing it, the focus on teenagers, and meta references to other films. This ignores that they belong in different genres - Scream is a Slasher Movie and The Faculty is sci-fi.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Since Delilah is the first of the six to be infected, the movie kind of skips over what looks like a redemption arc. The sad home life is revealed beforehand, and the character does get Laser-Guided Karma at various points in the first act, but due to the Time Skip in the epilogue, she never apologises to the others for being a bully beforehand, and her taking a level in kindness is only implied. It's also not touched on, but some of the antagonistic behavior in the second act is because she's trying to keep Marybeth's cover.
• Unintentional Period Piece: One could potentially call this MTV's Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Between the soundtrack (including The Offspring and Layne Staley, who died in 2002), the actors (teen Elijah Wood, Clea Duvall, and Josh Hartnett), the lack of cell phones, the blocky computers, the writer Kevin Williamson, the Post Modern self-aware feel, and the scene where Zeke brings a gun to school and shoots the principal in the face (and is portrayed as a hero for doing that), this movie can easily be placed in the late '90s, especially before the Columbine massacre.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Stokely pretends to be a lesbian in order to alienate people. Acceptance of LGBT people increase in The New '10s, meaning that probably wouldn't fly today; she would be rather criticized for pretending to have a sexual orientation she doesn't have. While it's more likely that she was just assumed to be one because of her butch appearance, the true dissonance comes in where Delilah's casual homophobia is just treated as standard Jerkass behavior and not called out.
  • The scene where Zeke shoots the infected Principal Drake would also not fly in a post-Columbine society.
  • There's a Running Gag that a couple on the campus keep beating each other up, and it's shown that the boy has been taken over by the aliens when he won't fight his girlfriend back. With awareness of abusive girlfriends, this wouldn't likely be Played for Laughs today.
  • Zeke flirting with Ms. Burke and joking to sell her condoms is treated as just casually dickish rather than sexual harassment. From the opposite direction, Ms. Burke flirting with him after getting taken over by the aliens can also be more disturbing today, as is their implied hookup at the end.^note The last point is less glaring than one might think, though, since it's said that Zeke was held back and had to repeat his final year. As the epilogue is a year later, he's likely twenty. However, there is still an authority difference between them.
• The Woobie: Mrs. Brummel, the elderly teacher who ended up dying rather painfully because the parasite placed inside her wasn't able to take over due to her illness.

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