How in the world does one remake Faces of Death?
There’s an easy answer, of course: simply find (or fabricate) a feature’s worth of grisly footage, shake in some portentous narration for a veneer of respectability, and wait for the rental dollars from deviants and rubberneckers to roll in. This is, more or less, how director John Alan Schwartz (working under the magnificent pseudonym “Conan Le Cilaire”) made the original film, a classic of the “mondo movie” subgenre of pseudo-documentary, enticing thrillseekers and video junkies with the promise of “real” deaths captured on film. Despite the fact that approximately 40 to 50% of the footage was plainly staged (the rest being repurposed stock footage, paparazzi crime scenes, and other gruesome ephemera), the film was one of the most notorious sleeper hits of the 1980s, making back more than 50 times its budget at the grindhouse box office and magnitudes more in the nascent home video market. This, combined with its low overhead and endlessly repeatable formula, led to six official “sequels” and countless knockoffs. Strictly speaking, Faces of Death has been remade several times over.
But how do you make a Faces of Death reboot that anyone will admit to seeing, or wanting to see? How do you feed a franchise renowned for its grody verisimilitude into a Horror Remake Industrial Complex built on slick, poppy filmmaking and so-hot-right-now stars? And, most confoundingly, how do you sell such a film to a generation of youngsters who take pride in their perceived ethical and moral clarity?
The answers to these questions come courtesy of Daniel Goldhaber, who seems to be vying for David Cronenberg’s mantel as chief adapter of the unadaptable (his last film, the excellent How to Blow Up a Pipeline, is a narrative thriller based on a radical instruction manual for direct action). Goldhaber’s Faces of Death refracts the original— or at least the idea of the original— through a postmodern funhouse mirror, extending the philosophical questions posed by the video nasty’s very existence to the similarly sticky (and even more lucrative) world of social media. While he doesn’t quite harness the original’s malevolent mystique (what could?), Goldhaber transforms his Faces into a clever and surprisingly relevant little technothriller.
Unlike the kinda-sorta documentary original, this Faces is a purely narrative affair*. Barbie Ferreira plays Margot Romero (har har), a content moderator for a TikTok-like social media platform called Kino. It’s one of those jobs you know has to exist, but maybe never thought through: all day long, Margot is tasked with viewing raunchy, violent, or otherwise disturbing videos which have been flagged by users as inappropriate, making split-second judgement calls as to whether they can remain on the platform (she approves a video of a man being dragged off by a bear with the note “appears to be alive”). Margot is, by necessity, jaded, but she comes across something that gives her pause: a series of videos recreating scenes from Faces of Death (complete with the original narration by the hilariously fake “Dr. Francis B. Gröss”), featuring mannequin killers but very real victims. Bound by her company’s NDA and general lack of concern for anything but the algorithm (“Support the trend!” her smarmy boss suggests while urging her to turn a blind eye), Margot takes it upon herself to track down the maker of the videos— and to figure out if these “Faces of Death” are, in fact, genuine.
In preparation for this review I watched the original Faces of Death, something I never quite worked up the nerve to do even in my teenage gorehound days. Perhaps inevitably, the film itself can’t quite measure up to the version which existed in my head back then; the fake segments are very fake indeed, and lessen the power of the clips of actual carnage. But this is-it-fake dynamic is crucial to the series’ queasy appeal. A reenactment of a Manson-style cannibal cult ritual is so campy and amateurish that you can’t help but laugh— making you feel all the more complicit when confronted with ten minutes of plainly authentic morgue footage moments later. The film then becomes a sort of high-stakes guessing game: you giggle at something you take as bogus, then feel like a terrible person when it turns out to be the genuine article.
It is this uneasiness, rather than the substance of Schwartz’s film itself, which Goldhaber harnesses for his finger-quotes “remake.” The sweded FoD clips are silly enough to be laughed off as fakes, but there’s something there which gives Margot pause. We recognize this feeling, even if we’ve never watched Faces of Death; it is the engine on which much of the internet currently runs. Ferreira, for her part, perfectly communicates the cocktail of revulsion, amusement, and boredom which keeps us all glued to the Infinite Scroll. The clips are stupid, and possibly evil, but she can’t quite look away.
With the possible exception of Jane Schoenbrun, no filmmaker working today has a savvier understanding than Goldhaber of how the modern internet works. In one of the most ingenious scenes, Margot takes to Reddit to solve the mystery, posting the clips with all available metadata and context she’s managed to glean so far (the replies, as Reddit comments tend to be, are both wildly contradictory and frequently horny). Meanwhile, in a De Palma splitscreen, we can see the killer monitoring the thread, triangulating Margot’s location via her IP address and dropping red herrings in the comments. It’s an encapsulation of the highs and lows of the online experience: you can harness the power of the hivemind to make honest-to-god breakthroughs, but you are always being watched— whether by serial killers or by fascist tech-broligarchs.
The film loses a bit of its momentum, at least as first, when it gets down to the business of being an actual horror movie. The killer, played by Dacre Montgomery (the Rob Lowe-looking kid from season 3 of Stranger Things), is straight out of the Thomas Harris playbook, selecting victims (on Kino, natch) before stalking them and locking them up in his murder dungeon. The premise, and the videos, are so outre that you want there to be a little bit more to it than that, but it all feels a bit by-the-numbers, without the spark of deranged imagination promised by the sizzle. But maybe that’s the point. Today’s psychopaths aren’t interesting enough to choreograph dances to Q Lazzarus or give themselves full-body William Blake tats; they’re probably, like Montgomery, mostly bland white guys obsessively refreshing their likes and retweets. This is the modern face of death— and it’s giving you the Gen-Z stare.
Which is maybe the film’s entire thesis. Goldhaber’s Faces of Death often feels more like a Zoomer-age update to the Scream formula than most of the actual recent Scream films, right down to the film-snob exposition character (in this case, Margot’s gay roommate with a treasure trove of vintage horror VHS tapes) and the killer’s third-act meta-monologue. “That’s the great thing about remakes,” Montgomery expounds when asked about his evil scheme, “If it’s a remake, you can get away with murder!” The same could be said about the film itself. On its face (no pun intended), it’s a perfectly serviceable, if minor, serial killer sickie. But by adopting the title and iconography of a finger-quotes “canon classic,” Goldhaber is given the freedom to cast a wry, subversive eye toward our contemporary relationship with media and the ways in which we’ve outsourced our moral consciences. Maybe remaking Faces of Death is easy after all; in a very real sense, we scroll through it every day.
* – That being said, I should warn the squeamish that several clips from the original film are included here. The most heavily sampled— the monkey brain feast and the police shootout— have been definitively debunked as fakes, but there are one or two clips, such as the eerie footage of a dead surfer washed up on the beach, which are almost certainly real. Proceed with all due caution.
Faces of Death
2026
dir. Daniel Goldhaber
98 min.
Opens Friday, 4/10 @ Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport and all local AMCs
