10 Questions We Still Have About The Faculty, 25 Years After It Released

While The Faculty turned 25 recently, the 1998 sci-fi horror movie has left a lot of questions unanswered. The Faculty was originally released on December 25, 1998. The sci-fi horror film followed a group of mismatched high school kids who were forced to team up and save their school from an invasion of alien body snatchers. As the title implies, the villains of the Robert Rodriguez movie were the school’s faculty, who spread the alien infection among the student body. However, Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s witty script eventually revealed that the faculty wasn’t the original source of the movie’s extraterrestrial threat.

In a twist that would rival some of the better Scream movies, The Faculty’s ending confirmed that the naive new transfer student, Marybeth, was the queen of the alien hive mind. The Faculty threw suspicion off Marybeth earlier, when the new girl sampled some of the rebellious drug dealer Zeke’s stash to prove she was human. However, Marybeth revealed that she never really snorted Zeke’s discount drugs before she knocked out the tough, troubled teen, leaving the nebbish Casey to step up and save the day. While this reveal was straightforward, questions about The Faculty linger.

10 How No One Knew Marybeth Was The Monster

Marybeth’s Evasion Of The Faculty’s Heroes Was Implausible

Casey successfully defeated Marybeth’s overgrown alien form during The Faculty’s ending, but it’s difficult to see how he and his classmates didn’t work out that she was the villain earlier in the story. After all, Marybeth was a new arrival whose introduction to the high school coincided with the beginning of the faculty’s aberrant behavior. Marybeth was a rare horror movie villain defeated by a teenager, so it didn’t make much sense that she outsmarted the entire gang of students before her downfall. In particular, Stokely and Casey, both of whom were familiar with sci-fi tropes, should have worked out her true nature.

9 How Zeke Got Away With Drug Dealing

Josh Hartnett’s Character Pulled Off Absurdly Ambitious Crimes

Josh Hartnett’s charismatic drug dealer Zeke is the sort of high school student who only exists in movies, not least because the actor was 20 when he played the part. However, even in the heightened world of The Faculty, it was hard to see how Zeke got away with selling drugs out of his car in full view of his teachers. Admittedly, it turned out that he was only selling caffeine powder to teens, but the school was still too strict for this. What made this particularly jarring was that Ms. Burke did eventually penalize him for selling drugs, but only after she was replaced by an alien interloper.

8 Whether Marybeth Was Right After All

The Villain’s Motive Was Surprisingly Reasonable

Burke’s extraterrestrial form might have dulled Zeke’s buzz, but the alien hive mind’s claim that they were improving the lives of the school’s inhabitants wasn’t entirely erroneous. Part of what made The Faculty an underrated ‘90s horror movie was its bleak depiction of high school as a hotbed of bullying, uncaring teachers, cheating, and disturbing behavior. The alien’s attempts to take over the school’s minds did seem to make things more harmonious, so Marybeth might have been right when she claimed the entire community would be better with her hive mind running things.

7 Why Marybeth Didn’t Attack Zeke

Marybeth’s Failure To Neutralize Zeke Earlier Seemed Unlikely

The innocent Marybeth and the brooding bad boy Zeke had mutual romantic chemistry, which should have made it easy for Marybeth to get Zeke alone and attack him. Furthermore, Zeke didn’t suspect her and barely even believed in the alien threat until it was spelled out for him by Mr. Furlong’s attack on the gang. As such, it’s hard to understand why Marybeth didn’t attack Zeke on his own earlier. He was the primary provider of the caffeine pills that were her only weakness, so she could have easily avoided her defeat in the finale by disarming him earlier.

6 Whether Casey’s Father Got His Comeuppance

The Hero’s Father Never Paid For Trying To Stop His Son

Casey’s uncaring father grounded him for trying to raise the alarm about the alien invasion but wasn’t seen again after his son successfully defeated the alien threat. Unlike the star-studded Buffy the Vampire Slayer and most other stories about teens battling existential threats, Casey succeeded in exposing the existence of aliens to the public in The Faculty’s ending. As such, it doesn’t make sense that his father never had to apologize for misjudging his son’s instincts.

5 Why Marybeth Gave Away Her Identity

The Villain Said Too Much Early In The Faculty

No one noticed it at the time, but Marybeth was the one to suggest that there may be an alien queen controlling the hive mind. That was the role she played, and knowing that there might be a queen at the center of everything eventually helped the teens defeat her. While Marybeth might have been trying to offset suspicion by joining the gang in their speculation, it is still not clear why she gave away her precise modus operandi in the process. It might have been pure hubris, but the decision cost her dearly in the end.

4 When Marybeth Infected Delilah

Marybeth Infecting Delilah Doesn’t Really Add Up

It could have been during the fracas in the biology lab, but it is not clear when exactly Marybeth managed to secretly infect Delilah. The Faculty is a rare horror movie with a final guy since Marybeth assimilates Delilah and Stan before neutralizing Zeke and Stokely by knocking them out. However, while it is obvious when Stan becomes infected, it is hard to tell when Marybeth had a chance to infect Delilah. By the time the group uses Zeke’s drugs, Delilah is already compromised, but she can’t have been infected for long, as she spent most of the preceding scenes helping Casey uncover the alien threat.

3 How A Faculty Sequel Would Have Worked

The Faculty Would Have Had A Hard Time Pulling Off A Follow-Up

The Faculty’s potential sequel would have been tough to justify since the ending saw Casey prove an attempted alien invasion happened. This means that the sequel’s setup would need to be completely unrelated, as everyone involved in the original story already knew aliens existed. As such, any follow-up would likely need a new setting and new heroes, which makes the prospect less compelling when The Faculty’s killer cast was a core component of the original cult movie’s success.

2 Whether The Faculty Is A Secret Cabin in the Woods Prequel

Cabin In The Woods Might Connect To The Faculty

Early in The Cabin in the Woods, two characters talk about how a few disastrous years saw their shadowy corporation almost fail to pull off a successful human sacrifice. Cabin in the Woods offers examples of these sacrifices, with each of them following the tropes of classic horror movies. A 1998 failure is said to be the fault of the “chem department” and, since this is the year The Faculty was released and chemistry is how the teens defeated the aliens, it seems like an obvious nod. As such, The Faculty could share a fictional universe with Cabin in the Woods, even though this is never canonically confirmed.

1 Why The Faculty Wasn’t A Bigger Hit

The Faculty’s title alone doesn’t explain how it became so underrated

The Faculty had legendary screenwriter Kevin Williamson, blockbuster director Robert Rodriguez, and a cast full of rising stars. However, Rodriguez blamed its boring title for the movie’s lackluster box office performance. While this might ring true, it doesn’t fully explain how a funny, scary, clever sci-fi horror with Hartnett, Clea DuVall, Elijah Wood, Jordana Brewster, and great supporting stars failed to be a major success. Unfortunately, The Faculty only made a minor impact upon release.