You’re 14 years old, it’s late on a Saturday night, and you’re staying over at a friend’s house. As the evening grows late somebody — an older sibling, perhaps, or the daredevil of the group — asks, “Want to see something really messed up?”
For nearly five decades, this has been how “Faces of Death” has been shared. Originally released in 1978, the film is a pseudo-documentary that purports to show real footage of people and animals dying. “Faces of Death” falls into a category of films that’s come to be known as “mondo.” The films are usually fake documentaries, showcasing extreme, boundary-pushing content, produced for cheap.
The 1978 original became a classic of independent video stores, its box art enough to make any curious teenager interested. For some, the film and its sequels became the ultimate achievement in horror super-fandom. For others, each was a regrettable way to spend a Saturday evening. Now, 48 years later, “Faces of Death” is getting a remake, one for the digital age, and the always-online generation.
Brian “Horrorwitz” Horwitz still remembers the first (and only) time he rented “Faces of Death.” He was 16 years old in the early 1980s and had just gotten his driver’s license. He drove with a friend to a video store and rented the now-infamous film on Betamax.
“I was going to this little video store in Colesville, [Maryland]. … This was before Blockbuster or Erol’s, or any of those chain things,” Horwitz said. The store didn’t have a massive selection, he said, but it did divide its offerings into different sections: “You would go in there with your friends, and you would rent whatever looked appealing. … There was ‘Faces of Death,’ sitting on the shelf.”
Horwitz’s parents were out of town that day, so he and a friend ended up renting the movie and ordering a pizza. “I mean, it’s incredible that they even rented this thing to me,” he said.
That viewing was so shocking it left Horwitz unsettled and contemplating vegetarianism. “I was so put off I literally didn’t eat meat for several weeks after watching the film,” he said. The 1978 original, which centers on the fictional Dr. Francis Gröss as he shows clips of “the many faces of death,” is made up of stock footage of meat processing, intercut with medical footage and dramatizations of deaths by suicide, electrocution and drowning. There are also some shots of dead bodies and footage from the Holocaust. Watched today, “Faces of Death” feels more like an extreme and upsetting PBS documentary than a mainstream horror movie.
In the years since that night, Horwitz has become a reseller of difficult-to-find physical media including VHS tapes, DVD-R and vinyl records through his site, Trash Palace. For Horwitz, the staying power of “Faces” is tied intrinsically to its history as a video-store classic.
“If it hadn’t been for the home video market, we wouldn’t even be talking about this movie, and this new one wouldn’t even exist,” he said. “It was really just because of the home video rental market.”
Modern filmmaker Alex Ross Perry agrees.
“There’s no question that that’s true. It has one of the best titles … and it always had a great poster.” Perry points to the film’s distributor upon its rerelease in the 1990s, Gorgon Video, as a stamp of approval for film fans looking for envelope-pushing horror. “It sort of straddles that line in cult mythmaking between access and illicit. … This isn’t like some guy Xeroxing things at his house. This is a real company with a real logo and a real distribution network. But the stuff they put out seemed incredibly dodgy in a really appealing way.”
Perry’s latest documentary, “Videoheaven,” tracks the rise and fall of the American video store through its presence on-screen.
Perry, who worked at the iconic Kim’s Video while attending film school at New York University, doesn’t remember the exact day he first watched “Faces,” but he has some guesses.
“I think it was one of those things that was just passed around. Even if you didn’t have access to it, you by osmosis felt like it was around, just as an object,” he said. “I had a friend … who was very into mondo films. I think the early ones that we all wanted to watch … were ‘Faces of Death,’ certainly, ‘Mondo Cane,’ ‘Killing of America.’”
The new “Faces” is directed and co-written by Daniel Goldhaber. He and co-writer and producer Isa Mazzei updated the original’s tone and style for a modern audience, setting it in the world of viral videos and online violence. Goldhaber and Mazzei previously worked together on 2018’s “Cam” and 2022’s “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” both films whose story, style and tone are deeply rooted in the present day.
“I remember in middle school, in high school, there were viral videos that people would whisper about,” Mazzei said. “They’d kind of be like, ‘Oh, my God, did you see that?’ And, you know, we’d pull each other into the computer lab and try to get around the safety controls.”
She added: “This fascination with watching death is very much a part of human nature. I think that it was not surprising to me at all that this tape had had kind of the life that it had in the ’70s, because I felt like that’s how our generation talked about death, too. It was just, for us, online, not on a VHS.”
The film stars Barbie Ferreira (“Euphoria,” “Nope”) as a content moderator at a website similar to TikTok. “I grew up in the time when LimeWire was a big thing. … I don’t think ‘Faces of Death’ actually crossed my desk, but I was familiar with mondo films and the era of shock-value horror,” she said. While prepping for the role, Ferreira went back and watched the 1978 version.
“I just thought it was like an incredible gore tape,” she said. “… It’s a fascinating era of film, when people were really doing that and trying to be as crazy as possible.”
Dacre Montgomery (“Stranger Things,” “Dead Man’s Wire”) plays the film’s antagonist. His character is fixated on the original film, re-creating its kills to try to build an online audience. To Montgomery, the remake feels powerful as a “comment on studios — like, movie studios are a part of the kind of sick cycle.”
Goldhaber says his conception is centered on “a serial killer who realizes that he can hijack the algorithm to turn himself into a famous viral figure because ‘Faces of Death’ holds nostalgic appeal. And I think there’s a reflection there on the remake ecosystem in general. Which is that these are large corporations trying to hijack our attention span to squeeze us for dollars.”
Because just like that night at the sleepover, we’re appalled, but we can’t look away.
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