To understand Daniel Goldhaber’s reboot of John Alan Schwartz’s “Faces of Death,” you first need to understand that the original wasn’t just a movie. It was an actual urban legend.
Children used to speak about “Faces of Death” in hushed tones, in corners of the playground, huddled in a circle, where we shared tales about rare and haunted media. It was here we first heard about the dead child’s ghost in “Three Men and a Baby,” and the extra whose corpse could allegedly be seen in the Enchanted Forest in “The Wizard of Oz.” Before creepypastas were invented, “Faces of Death” was the world’s most terrifying tagliatelle.
“Faces of Death” claimed to be a real life snuff video, a collection of documentary footage of executions and accidents, where everyone on camera actually died. It was an underground film, so those claims were rarely refuted. Most people didn’t even know about it. All the rest of us knew is it was “that” film in the video store, the one people only rented on a dare. A truly cursed object.
Years later, after the internet proliferated and urban legends like the ones above were debunked, “Faces of Death” lost a lot of its luster. Some of the footage was real, but it was documentary footage and newsreels. The most horrifying images were indeed faked for dramatic effect. To learn that “Faces of Death” wasn’t really a snuff film is a relief, but the loss of that rarest of artistic rarities — the thing we call “mystique” — was also palpable. What was once an urban legend is now, and always was, just another movie.
Daniel Goldhaber’s “Faces of Death” is partly about Schwartz’s original film, but it’s also about recreating that morbid mystique. A killer decides to remake “Faces of Death,” but for real this time, restaging the fake scenes with actual murder victims. These clips are so artfully filmed it’s hard to tell if they’re fake, and they soon develop a following on social media. This killer’s edgier remake takes advantage of that same bloodlust with which modern audiences gluttonously devour real-life humiliations, acts of violence and other atrocities online. The forbidden media of the past is, Goldhaber argues, the mainstream media of the 2020s.
The new “Faces of Death” stars Barbie Ferreira as Margot, who works as a content censor for a social media and video app which is, for legal reasons, not TikTok. Margot spends her day watching flagged videos, deciding which ones are suitable for public consumption and which are not. Violence usually stays on the platform. A video where someone explains how to use NARCAN, in the event of an overdose, is flagged and removed. The rampant hypocrisy of real-world platforms that monetize hatred, misery and suffering, while forcing creators to use childish euphemisms for serious, real world topics is on full display. And it’s the stuff of horror movies.
Margot has seen these new “Faces of Death” videos, and it takes her a while to make the connection — her roommate is a cult horror fan, and he conveniently owns a VHS copy — but she eventually risks her career to track down the murderer. She’s one of the most fascinating modern slasher heroes, driven by regret and shame, heroically compensating for her sins.
Dacre Montgomery plays the serial killer, Arthur, who thinks of himself as a real filmmaker. But he’s also extremely insecure, writing impassioned defenses of his own films under alternate accounts, all the while agonizing over how many question marks make his posts look desperate. (Three is too many, one isn’t enough; two question is the porridge that Goldilocks ate.)
Daniel Goldhaber has been one of the most exciting new filmmakers for so long that it’s probably time to call him one of the best of his generation. His debut “Cam” is a frightening supernatural horror film, but also that rare motion picture that takes sex work seriously, giving the entire work a sense of genuine insight and importance. His “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is an actual revolutionary work, the kind the heroes from “One Battle After Another” would watch for inspiration, and closer in spirit to “The Battle of Algiers” than the Oscar-winning film that actually name-checks “The Battle of Algiers.”
A horror reboot like “Faces of Death” might seem like it’s beneath a filmmaker with this much talent and potential, and to be fair, the film sometimes falls back on tired, obvious clichés. The introduction of a knife hidden in a tube of lipstick absolutely must be important later, and the villain absolutely must be atypically foolish for that set-up to pay off the way it does. But it’s still a slasher movie, so on some level Goldhaber is merely following the recipe. What’s important is what he adds to the stew, not what the store brand stock he uses as the base.
By making a film about how evil it would be to remake “Faces of Death,” and try to outdo it, Goldhaber recontextualizes the original, transforming it for a new audience, and honoring the morbid curiosity that was, more than anything else, “Faces of Death’s” most significant legacy. He lets his villain make the ill-conceived remake, while staring from afar with an austere, cinematic eye for day-to-day wickedness and an uncanny knack for Grand Guignol. There’s a Kubrickian particularity to cinematographer Isaac Bauman’s camerawork, which captures the villain’s artistic ambitions but never romanticizes them. There’s the movie Goldhaber is making, the movie Arthur is making, and a hero from the real world who’d rather have nothing to do with either, and gets dragged into their plans anyway.
On one hand, Goldhaber’s film is a terrifying, stark, oppressive horror film that outscares the other modern slashers. On the other it’s an intelligent treatise on the grim obsession we have with being obsessively grim. Either way you have to hand it to this new “Faces of Death.” When it’s scary, slashers don’t get much scarier.
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