The Faculty
When the teachers at a sleepy Ohio high school start acting strange, six student misfits figure out the faculty is being taken over by alien parasites — Invasion of the Body Snatchers relocated to sixth period. The cast is absurdly stacked: Elijah Wood and Josh Hartnett versus a teachers' lounge containing Robert Patrick, Salma Hayek, Famke Janssen, and, yes, Jon Stewart.
The Faculty came out of the post-Scream gold rush. After Kevin Williamson's slasher script rewrote the genre in 1996, Miramax's Dimension label picked up a body-snatchers-in-high-school story by David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel and brought Williamson in to rewrite it; Robert Rodriguez took the director's chair while Williamson went off to direct Teaching Mrs. Tingle. Released December 25, 1998 — alien-invasion horror as Christmas counter-programming — it dropped the paranoia of Invasion of the Body Snatchers into Herrington High in Ohio, where a clique-spanning group of misfits realizes the teachers are no longer themselves.
The casting is the movie's enduring flex. The students: Elijah Wood, Josh Hartnett, Jordana Brewster, Clea DuVall, Laura Harris, and Shawn Hatosy, with Usher Raymond as the school's football star. The infected faculty: Robert Patrick as the coach (trading on every ounce of his T-1000 menace), Salma Hayek as the school nurse, Famke Janssen, Bebe Neuwirth, Piper Laurie — and Jon Stewart — just weeks away from taking over The Daily Show — as a science teacher with a very bad day. Made for $15 million, it grossed $63.2 million worldwide ($40.3 million domestic); reviews were middling (58% on Rotten Tomatoes, a "B" CinemaScore), and in the moment it read as neither hit nor miss.
Then video-store shelves and cable rotation did their work. The film's mix of teen-movie vernacular and gooey invasion horror rewarded repeat viewing, and it aged into a genuine cult favorite — the movie a generation remembers from sleepovers, scanning their own teachers for signs on Monday morning.
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