By John Serba

By the early ’90s, the original 1978 mondo movie Faces of Death was enjoying its second go-round as a cult phenomenon, thanks to the proliferation of home video. I likely watched one of the regurgitated “sequels” or compilations making the rounds at the time, and even though I might’ve just plucked it off the Blockbuster shelf (memories: hazy!), it felt transgressive to be watching its odious melange of archival footage of real-life deaths and phony, staged murders being passed off as real. The new quasi-reboot of Faces of Death pretty much Screamifies the original, casting Euphoria’s Barbie Ferreira as a content moderator at an online video platform who pieces together one user’s homage to O.G. FoD fodder by recreating the fake kills with real people. It’s a clever-ish reimagining by way of How to Blow Up a Pipeline director Daniel Goldhaber, who has some assertions to make about the state of internet consumption here in the 2020s.

FACES OF DEATH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Click click click mouse mouse click. Margot Romero (Ferreira) is of course named Romero and she works at Kino, determining whether videos are kosher for online consumption. Of course, that’s subjective, but she seems to be following the decades-old notion that gross disturbing violence is OK but sex in most any form is not, and one assumes the corporation trained her to do so if The American Way hadn’t done so already. People getting beaten or horrifically injured? Click: allowed. Someone demonstrating how to put a condom on a banana? Click: flagged. Stupid and backwards, sure, but it rings more true than the infamous fake monkey-brains-for-dinner sequence in the old Faces of Death, and it stings.

This isn’t a vocation for the weak of stomach. Margot guts it out with the occasional upper and endures rapid-fire video ick for noble and deeply personal reasons: She’s Internet Famous for her “role” in a viral video in which her sister was obliterated by a train. She can’t even go to the corner grocery without being recognized by people who act more like 1978 FoD than 2026 FoD by being assholes in person instead of simply being assholes online. One day she’s click-mouse-mouse-clicking her way through the workday when a creepy video of mannequins beheading a person lands in the real/fake gray zone. She calls over her supervisor (Jermaine Fowler) who of course is reluctant to pull it: “DIY horror is trafficking right now!” he insists. And here it’s worth noting that all Kino employees sign nondisclosure agreements and will get their asses fired if they feel compelled to investigate a video on their own time. Diabolical? Yeah. But all too plausible.

Now we shift from New Orleans to the state where Florida Man lives. We meet toaster-waffle enthusiast and cell phone-store counterboy Arthur Spevak (Dacre Montgomery) as he stalks college-student influencer Sam (Josie Totah), who whines about how she might have to quit school because she’s so famous as she machine-guns duck-lipped selfies to share with her 230,000 followers and kicks back to feel the ping ping ping rush of likes flooding in. It’s quickly revealed – read: not a spoiler! – that Arthur has a thing for donning weird red contact lenses and a blank-faced mask to serially drug and kidnap semi-famous people, kennel them in his basement, then reenact all your favorite scenes from Faces of Death, which meta-exists in this meta-reality because Margot meta-finds the meta-VHS tape on her meta-roommate’s shelf and meta-pops it into the meta-VCR. She’s on to this psycho deviant lunatic, but it sure looks like she’ll have to face him alone, since her boss keeps saying shit like, “Do we look like the morality police?”  

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? There’s the obvious Scream influence and grindy ’70s/’80s fare Goldhaber lightly fetishizes (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, etc.), as well as the indirect invocation of taboo horror like Cannibal Holocaust and The Last House on the Left. But let’s dig a bit deeper and go more recent for the underrated 2021 creeper Censor, about a woman who works as a censor during the infamous 1980s Video Nasties phenomenon in England.  

Performance Worth Watching: The leads here are well-cast: Montgomery gives a truly hateful, dead-eyed performance as the killer (cue a couple of Buffalo Billisms), and Ferreira proves herself as a worthy scream-queeny final girl in the film’s waning moments.

Sex And Skin: Brief clips of internet sex clips viewed over Margot’s shoulder.

Our Take: “It’s an attention economy and business is booming!” sneers nasty videographer Arthur, blithely stating Faces of Death Twenty Twenty-Six’s hammer-to-cranium thematics. Goldhaber and co-scripter Isa Mazzei have a tendency to overstate the obvious, whereas I’d rather drop a reference to the monkey scene in Faces of Death Nineteen Seventy-Eight in the previous sentence without drawing too much attention to it. “The algorithm loves remakes. People love remakes,” the movie insists through the mouth of a character who’s far, far gone over the edge of sanity, and I’m not sure if this is a self-own on the movie’s part, or a modernized extension of Scream-style meta-commentary.

But the new film also nudges us deep into subtext pondering why and how people watch ugly stuff online, going so far as to suggest that it’s a catalyst for extreme mental illness – the only character we see compulsively scrolling through his reels is the guy who likes to play slasher-dress-up and torture humans in front of rolling cameras. Perhaps we’ve formed psychological calluses to depraved imagery; perhaps we’re more like Margot, who tells herself and others she’s not affected by it, but in reality is easily triggered. Where’s your line in the sand? Has it widened into a sprawling gray area? It’s the old idea where you know the line has been crossed when you see it, but can’t quite articulate the parameters. (It’s also worth noting that the film shot in 2023 and is set in 2024, prior to the proliferation of AI “slop,” a complication that suggests an idea for a sequel should anyone feel so inclined.)

The film also mines the unsettling feeling of online “engagement” warping basic notions of morality in real time, as comment sections and Reddit threads are quickly flooded with reactionary fodder and characters drink deep in the dopamine. Of course, the dopa gets a bit dopey as the film’s plotting loosens up in a third act that’s otherwise effectively suspenseful and increasingly histrionic in its gnarly bloodletting. Goldhaber is an assured craftsman, keenly aware of tone and tension, channeling the grimy visual palette of 20th-century exploitation films, although the ’80s-horror soundtrack homage is such a pastichey cliche these days. This Faces of Death is an extreme movie about extremity itself that stirs up oogy rumblings in the pit of the stomach, less with its splattery gore, more with ideas of societal decay.

Our Call: Careful on that slippery slope there, friends! STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.