“If you’re going to bring Faces of Death into the modern era,” says director Daniel Goldhaber, “on some level, you have to contend with the fact that Faces of Death is everywhere.”
In 1978, John Alan Schwartz’s low-budget, exploitation horror movie Faces of Death was unleashed upon the world. Less a movie than a feature-length clip reel, the film presents itself as a documentary in which a pathologist (played by an actor) shares his collection of snuff footage (mostly fake) with the audience. Despite the fakery involved in its most gruesome scenes, the film became an underground phenomenon on VHS, attracting legions of horror buffs eager to test their mettle with what they thought was footage of the real torture, violence, and murder.
Nearly 50 years on, real snuff is everywhere, and Goldhaber and co-writer Isa Mazzei—the duo share a “film by” credit—have a new angle on the scuzzy classic. Their rebooted Faces of Death is a straight-ahead horror thriller starring Barbie Ferreira as Margot, a content moderator for a TikTok-like social video app who discovers what she believes is a serial killer uploading videos of real killings modeled on scenes from the original movie.
Goldhaber was partly inspired by his brief experience as a content moderator for a social media startup. “It would immediately become colonized by the snuff guys and the child porn people,” Goldhaber recalls. “I was just camping on the feed, playing whack-a-mole with the horrible stuff that was being uploaded.”
That same type of content is now “on my feed every day,” he says. These images—from footage from Gaza to the killings of activists in Minneapolis—can’t help but shape people’s minds and politics.
Mazzei tells WIRED her earliest experience with violent imagery was the 9/11 jumpers. “I was very young, like elementary school, and I remember seeing those people jump out of the World Trade Center and thinking, ‘How am I watching a person jump to their death right now?’” She recalls it only getting worse from there. “Beheadings, suicides, Rotten.com. There was this escalation,” she says, “which has reached a point now that when I open Instagram or TikTok, I’m being served this content without even having to seek it out.”
A lot of it, Goldhaber notes, boils down to the introduction of the infinite scroll. Snuff content is particularly strong fodder for social media platforms. “The algorithm knows that I’m going to watch it for four milliseconds longer than I’m going to watch happy content,” Mazzei adds. “My nervous system has to react to it a bit longer before I could possibly scroll away.”
Deeply political filmmakers—the pair previously made cam-girl horror film Cam and the incendiary eco-thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline—Goldhaber and Mazzei saw Faces of Death as an opportunity to explore the effect the proliferation of snuff is having on society. Mazzei and Paris Peterson, who helped with research, were responsible for finding and licensing the real, brief flashes of graphic news and social media footage that appear throughout the film in social media scrolls. While wading through the images for hours and hours, the two would sometimes stop and just stare at each other vacantly for a while. “What I noticed was not that it stopped affecting me but rather that I became used to feeling traumatized every single day. We’re all kind of living with this new baseline of anxiety and alienation and sense of stress that we all just say is normal now.”
Real images of death are nothing new. Early war photography acted as a social intervention, for the first time showing the public the true horrors of combat. “The important difference is that content was curated by people,” Mazzei says, pointing out that human beings were involved every step of the way when publishing a photo in the newspaper. “Now, there are bots scraping content, remixing content, writing unhinged captions for content, and then throwing it into feeds just to see who will engage with it.”
And many do engage with it, to the delight of Silicon Valley executives. “Every time there’s a mass shooting and everybody gets on their phones and is gobbling up each step of the incident, Facebook is selling ads on that,” Goldhaber says. “I don’t want to know how much money social media companies made off the Charlie Kirk killing,” he adds with a sigh. It’s not clear whether social media companies directly profited from videos of Kirk’s killing, but the interest around his death fueled a spike in follows for the deceased right-wing commentator and resulted in related merch being advertised.
As Margot attempts to hunt down and expose the creator of the chilling videos—a killer named Arthur, played menacingly by a terrific Dacre Montgomery—she too succumbs to the infinite regress of social media content creation and consumption.
“Arthur is a classic black-pilled troll,” Goldhaber says. “He recognizes that the system is broken, that the system is fucked up, and he is more than willing to exploit that system in a way that furthers his own end of gaining attention, while also exploiting the idea that the system is a lie.”
“Give the people what they want,” is Arthur’s social-media-inspired mantra.
What Margot wants is to make a difference, to help make the internet a better place. “Ultimately, her journey is this disillusionment with the system,” Mazzei says, “and the real realization that this job that she thought was putting her in a position of power was actually kind of a smoke screen.”
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