The Faculty

About The Faculty

The Faculty is a 1998 horror/science-fiction film, written by Kevin Williamson and directed by Robert Rodríguez. The film stars Elijah Wood, Jordana Brewster, Clea DuVall, Laura Harris, Usher, Josh Hartnett and Shawn Hatosy.

The Faculty is about a fictional high school, Herrington High School (said to be located somewhere 'in the middle of Ohio'), at which the faculty and staff become taken over by alien parasites. In turn, the faculty then infects the students with the organism. A rag-tag group of six students resists, including: Zeke Tyler (Josh Hartnett), a loner and genius repeating his Senior year because he didn't care about graduating, whose parents travel constantly so as to 'get away from their big bastard mistake,' and who sells, among other illegal items, a cocaine-like drug of his own creation to his fellow students; Stan Rosado (Shawn Hatosy), a jock who decides his Senior year to quit the football team and focus on his academics; Stan's girlfriend Delilah Profit (Jordana Brewster), a popular, yet vindictive girl who is the editor in chief of the student paper; Casey Connor (Elijah Wood), an outcast picked on by the students at Norhtern Schoals, who has a crush on Delilah, and who is intelligent and a photographer for the school newspaper; Stokely 'Stokes' Mitchell (Clea DuVall), a female outcast and literary buff who claims to be a lesbian in order to prove her independence from people, and has a crush on Stan; and Marybeth Louise Hutchinson (Laura Harris), the new girl at school, claiming to have come from Atlanta to live with relatives because her parents had died in a car crash, and who has a crush on Zeke.

The aliens who take over the school do so by injecting a parasitic organism into the ear, which takes over the brain and creates what appears to be a different version of the person- one that desires to spread the parasite as much as it can. The faculty sends the entire student body to the nurse, Rosa Harper (Salma Hayek) for ear inspections, where they are taken over by the parasite. Before this, however, Casey has figured out their plot (he and Delilah are hiding in the teacher's lounge closet when they first see the nurse attacked by Coach Willis (Robert Patrick) and Mrs. Olson (Piper Laurie) and then taken over by the parasite), and he warns Delilah, Stokely- turning to her to seek information on fictional examples of invasions such as The Body Snatchers- and Stan. Joined by Zeke and Marybeth, who overhear them talking of aliens in the science lab, they are all convinced of Casey's theory when Mr. Furlong (Jon Stewart), the science teacher, enters the room and attempts to infect them with the alien. Zeke pulls out a pen filled with his drug, and jams it into Furlong's eye, which then dries out the alien inside of him, as the drug is a diuretic and the aliens require water to cope with life on Earth; an older teacher made a poor host as she lacked the necessary water for the alien to exist.