The Thing & The Faculty

A few days ago on Twitter I was tweeting while watching The Faculty. That started up an interesting debate with Tyler Foster of DVD Talk and Trevor Schoenfeld of Schofizzy’s Movie Reviews. Trevor and me thought that The Faculty was a rather unique twist on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which the film actually addressed. However, Tyler thought that the film bared a close resemblance to Carpenter’s The Thing. Knowing my profound love for The Thing I didn’t really see it and I stuck to my ground that was until I got to a specific scene in The Faculty that was exactly like the infamous blood testing scene in The Thing. So, Mr. Foster was right to some degree! There was a hint of The Thing in The Faculty and here is my breakdown of the scene.

Aside from the obvious that they both are a result of an alien that takes over the human body, here the scenes start off with one of the main characters performing some kind of test to prove that the others aren’t’ infected. In The Thing, MacReady heats the end of a copper wire to poke the Petri dish full of blood. In The Faculty, Zeke proposes that the group sniff homemade drugs that have sodium to weed out the infected person. They both keep the audience in suspense and guessing who might be the infected person. Though The Thing does a better job of suspense while The Faculty just gives us an awkward sense of humor.

When the test is passed around, both films have a scare point… showing us the person who is really infected. In these scenes, they are the last person we would have suspected and right fully so however, in The Faculty Delilah is still human whereas Palmer is no longer human. The other funny thing I noticed that both films have is the infected person goes batshit insane. The Palmer-thing goes apeshit killing people and Delilah goes bizerk and destroys Zeke’s drug lab.

I also find it funny that both scenes have the infected person break out of the building they are in and further their crazy behavior. Only difference is: in The Faculty, another infected person driving a car picks up Delilah. In The Thing, the Palmer-thing is lit on fire and left to burn.

Now lets talk about the setting. In The Faculty, this scene takes place in Zeke’s garage whereas in The Thing… it takes place inside the lounge area. But lets breakdown Zeke’s garage. It’s filled with boxes, equipment, tubing and other typical storage looking things and bares an uncanny resemblance to the storage facility the research team found a near-frozen MacReady in. In other words, the garage looks just like a typical storage room you’d expect to find at Outpost 31. The garage is clustered and feels musty; perfectly attributing the claustrophobic rooms from The Thing. If it’s a coincidence; than what a coincidence.

I guess you can also say that each character is some sort of high school reincarnation of the research team at Outpost 31. Though the characters who ended up being infected seem to have switched. Below is how I see the matchup of each character.

Zeke = MacReady

Casey = Windows

Delilah = Garry

Stokely = Palmer

Marybeth = Nauls

Stan = Childs

The other similarity, as Tyler mentioned, is that in each movie the alien takes over the body in some way. Though in The Thing, it replicates the body and jumps from host to host singularly. In The Faculty, the alien parasite invades and controls the human body and can jump into multiple hosts. So this testing scene even further bares a resemblance to The Thing.

I still maintain the fact that The Faculty is more or less a direct homage to Invasion of the Body Snatchers though there is hints of The Thing scattered around. Either way you slice it, these two films are both very interesting interpretations of classic science fiction film and literature.

Aztec Vampires and the Titty Twister

For the longest time I had always wanted to talk about a certain subject of Dusk Till Dawn that I really liked and I didn’t want to bring up the over-the-top violence because than that would turn into a discussion about Quentin Tarantino, so I sought out some kind of inspiration. That was until Hellbound Heart from Twitter had this to say: “Talk about how it’s the 1st horror to conflate Aztec history with Western myth. (i.e. strip club backed onto pyramid)” I swear, her and I were on the same wavelength because at the end of the movie the camera pulls back from an amazing matte of the strip club that was build on top of an Aztec pyramid. I always though it was a cool little twist but I never thought there was a method behind the drawing… how wrong I was.

A lot of people who don’t know about the entire span of the Vampire myth will tell you that vampires first came around in the 1800s or when Bram Stoker wrote his infamous book entitled Dracula. However, some die-hard vampire fans will tell you that vampirism went as far back as the Middle Ages with Vlad Tepes or the Countess Elizabeth Bathory. But, those who are experts in vampire mythology and lore will tell you that vampirism first stared in about 5000 BC in early Mesopotamian cultures. This is where we start our history lesson about Aztecs and their vampiric beliefs.

The early South American cultures had several gods and myths that revolved around vampirism from the Chonchon of Peru and Chili or the Cihuateteo, which were the sprits of women who died in childbirth. The subject that I want to briefly discuss is a god-like monster called Camazotz. The monster was usually associated with night, death, and sacrifice and had the body of a human and the head of a bat. Soon the Zapotec tribes began forming cults around the monster god. People have suggested that the myth of the Camazotz was spawned from real life giant vampire bats called Desmodus Draculae in which there is are numerous fossilized evidence to support this claim. However, other people have suggested that the myth was inspired the Spectral Bat.

There is a specific legend that was first seen in the Mayan records about bat-like monsters that were encountered by the Mayan heroes known as Hunahpu and Xbaladque. According the writing, these two heroes had to spend a night in the ‘House of Bats’ while embarking on their quest through the underworld of Xibalba. The leader of these bat-like monsters was Camazotz, which is translated to “death bat”, and his call was similar to an eek.

Knowing this we can assume that Titty Twister in Dusk Till Dawn is some kind of reincarnation of the House of Bats, considering that there are bat-like humans that occupy the temple and midway into the movie there are bats surrounding the temple. In the myth, the heroic twins had to battle the bat-like humans and we can assume that those monsters were in fact vampires to some degree and in Dusk Till Dawn they are portrayed as more stylized monster. They still retain their human bodies but their facial features resemble that of an actual bat. Hell, we can even interpret the temple as one of the ‘meeting places’ for the Camazotz cult and that after a while Camazotz’s people inhabited the temple and lured truckers so that they could feed on them.

Going on what Hellbound Heart said, I do think it’s very interesting how Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriquez somehow took what was thought to have been a strictly Western or Eastern myth and blended into Aztec and Mayan history. I also find it very interesting that they used a strip club to lure unsuspecting truckers because strip clubs are always synonymous with North American tradition. I’ll even go as far to say that Dusk Till Dawn is a study in the male complex because why use a strip club to lead men into? It’s something that all men want and crave… sex. It’s universal. To be honest, I can go on and on about this but I have to cut it off somewhere. I think Dusk Till Dawn is not just some run-of-the-mill vampire movie but rather a melting pot of different cultures and the reason why I didn’t grasp it until now is because of its subtly. That’s what QT and Mr. Rodriguez are known for; the art of subtly.

Sources:
The Vampire Rave: Aztec Vampires