Before the internet, there were few movies that had as foreboding an aura as “Faces of Death.”
Without the benefit of a quick Google search, it was impossible to tell if what you were watching was real. “Faces of Death,” released theatrically in 1978 before becoming a home video staple, was marketed as a documentary and used bits of real-life footage — but was largely counterfeit – to create a collection of seemingly random scenes where people and animals are horribly mutilated or murdered. It was like a snuff film mix tape. Watching it (or watching the bits of it that you could stomach) felt legitimately wrong.
And while the movie’s claims that it was “banned in 46 countries” was a bit of hyperbolic hokum meant to stoke interest, it still did face a fair amount of pushback upon its release, based on both moral outrage and actual concerns around its content. “Faces of Death” was one of the “video nasties” outlawed in England (it was finally released in 2003, with some of the animal cruelty removed) and was refused classification in Australia (it finally arrived down under in 2007). Germany didn’t okay its release until 2022.
Now, that same controversy is visiting a new version of “Faces of Death,” which came out today.
Shot largely in 2023, with some pickups in 2024, this iteration, co-written and directed by Daniel Goldhaber, uses the original movie as a framework to interrogate our modern obsession with watching deeply problematic stuff on the internet. Additionally, it’s a really fun, scary horror movie — the kind of thing teenagers will buy a ticket to on a Friday night, making its protracted post-production phase and release even more baffling.
This is the story of the winding, setback-filled journey of a film that tried to bring a contemporary take to a cult classic horror film, only to somehow end up inheriting the baggage of the original, stalling its prospects for the big screen. It’s also a lesson in the perseverance required to bring a film to life, with the new “Faces of Death” taking more than a decade to produce.
Which begged the question: what was so scary about “Faces of Death” anyway?
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Producer Don Murphy, who has an encyclopedic pop culture knowledge and is familiar with hot-button projects (his first movie was Oliver Stone’s incendiary “Natural Born Killers”), first started pursuing the rights of “Faces of Death” after the arrival of one of the “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” remakes. He can’t remember which one. (“There’s been about 20 of them,” Murphy scoffed.) The remake was a hit and the hunt was on for similar horror projects based on familiar IP.
Murphy and his producing partner (and wife) Susan Montford came up with “Faces of Death.”
“We were like, it’s a good title and a good name. I don’t know what you do with it, but it’s cool. Let’s see if we can get it,” Murphy explained. The actual process of untangling the rights was “quite a journey,” Murphy said, because the filmmakers behind the original had lost the underlying rights to the property. Instead, the distributor owned it.
“But did they own the remake rights? And how do you get the remake rights to a documentary that’s not real in the first place. It became very convoluted,” Murphy said.
“It took a bit of time to get them all in order,” Montford said.
It ultimately took a year to figure out who owned the rights (Gorgon Video, a production and distribution company based in Spain and the United States). But once they secured the rights, there was immediate interest.
There was a genre division at Universal that was ready to make it. Murphy and Montford hired J.T. Petty, a screenwriter who made the effective horror western “The Burrowers” and a surprisingly effective direct-to-video sequel to Guillermo del Toro’s “Mimic,” to write the screenplay. This version was set at a murder convention, like an evil Comic-Con. (“It was a bit too ahead of its time in retrospect, but we really liked it,” said Montford.) Then it started to fall apart — Universal shuttered its genre division and “Faces of Death” returned to the liminal space between production and obscurity.
Over the next decade, Murphy and Montford would have to periodically reup their license to remake “Faces of Death.” Several studios committed and then backed out, all while maintaining Petty’s script. Murphy had been here before — when he was trying to get “Transformers” made, before it became one of Hollywood’s most successful franchises, he was asked repeatedly, How is that not a stupid toy movie?
They tinkered with the idea for the movie and considered turning the movie’s “pathologist” and narrator Francis B. Gröss (actually actor Michael Carr in the original) into a new genre icon. “We spent about six years trying to figure out how to turn Dr. Gröss into the new Freddy or the new Jason or the new Michael Myers,” said Murphy. “We designed costumes for him and everything,” said Montford.
Another idea had Gröss overseeing a secret compound in the middle of the desert where people would get killed and tortured. “We must have explored every possible variation of these subjects,” said Montford.
While working on another project at Legendary, an executive asked if they still had “Faces of Death.” Legendary, known for giant projects like the American “Godzilla” movies and the “Dune” movies, had a smaller horror division at the time. They too would remake “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” this time as a somewhat softer legacy sequel (it eventually sold to Netflix) and “Fresh,” a somewhat A24-ish cannibal movie on Hulu. At the time Murphy and Montford had lived with the property for 15 years. They wanted to actually make it.
Legendary agreed and heard pitches from every hot young horror filmmaker. Murphy and Montford wouldn’t name names, but they were thankful for the opportunity. “We got an education on everybody who was hot in horror,” said Murphy.
Goldhaber and his co-writer Isa Mazzei were among those heavy-hitters who pitched their take on “Faces of Death.” Murphy and Montford had been impressed by Goldhaber and Mazzei’s first film, “Cam,” which they felt was very much in the wheelhouse of “Faces of Death.”
As it turns out, Goldhaber and Mazzei had never heard of “Faces of Death” when they were approached by Legendary. “We were like, We have to figure out what ‘Faces of Death’ is,” said Goldhaber. When they looked it up they realized that they had, in fact, seen the film. Or at least pieces of it, when it had been scattered onto the internet and uploaded by sites like eBaum’s World.
“That felt like a really interesting place to start development from — where is ‘Faces of Death’ today? It’s online. Not only is it online but now it’s content that is served up by some of the largest corporations on the planet,” Goldhaber said. “That felt like a very fruitful place to kind of start.”
Goldhaber and Mazzei struggled with figuring out what social media platform the movie should take place on — Instagram? YouTube? — before Mazzei suggested TikTok. Goldhaber had never heard of TikTok. She explained it to him and he got onboard. When they started pitching they “had to explain TikTok to the people we were pitching to.” He had a similar problem when attempting to explain “Cam,” about a cam-girl who encounters a sinister doppelgänger.
Goldhaber had worked, for a summer, as a content moderator, and had already been thinking about that angle. They also wanted to probe at why anyone would remake “Faces of Death” in the first place. “It’s a strange IP to try and fictionalize and monetize and when you have a large private equity studio like Legendary making the movie, there is, in part, something in the film that’s trying to ask the question of, why financialize this IP to begin with?” said Goldhaber.
“The elevator pitch was a girl who has become an internet meme, who works in YouTube as a content supervisor, discovers that an INCEL is really recreating the ‘Faces of Death’ murders, and no one believes her, so she’s the only one that can stop him. Now he’s killing for clicks,” said Murphy.
Most gave good pitches but Goldhaber and Mazzei stood out.
“They were so clear and clever with the take that we decided to take a chance on them,” Montford said.
More complications followed — the pandemic hit, then Goldhaber and Mazzei went off to make “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” (premiered at Toronto in 2022, released by NEON in 2023). They started shooting the movie three days after “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” was released, with Barbie Ferreira as the content moderator, Dacre Montgomery as the serial killer and Charlie XCX as a disaffected coworker.
Then things got even more complex.
Legendary had distribution deals with several major studios, including Sony and Warner Bros., before eventually ending up at Paramount. “Legendary believes in the film but was surprised by the number of people who were like, It’s too dangerous, it’s too edgy, it’s too out there,” said Murphy. “We were like, Really? How dangerous could this film possibly be?”
As it turned out, pretty dangerous. A planned screening at the 2024 edition of the South by Southwest Film Festival was canceled three days before they were set to screen. Reshoots, meant to up the intensity of several sequences took place later that same year.
“At some point in time, when they actually realized what the movie was saying and doing, it became more challenging to get the film out into the world,” said Goldhaber. “We always wanted to make a really entertaining, commercial film. And I think the challenges behind the movie have to do with it being very difficult to bring, even if this movie has a link to the original ‘Faces of Death,’ an original provocative, dangerous movie and put it in theaters. That has always been a challenging proposition. I think it’s especially challenging these days.”
More time passed and the reputation of the new “Faces of Death” as a cursed object, just like the original, started to accumulate. Would this be something that skips release all together and would be passed around on the contemporary equivalent of glitchy VHS tapes — diced up and shared on social media platforms — with the movie too outré to be publicly shown?
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“There were studios in Hollywood that said that they thought the movie was reprehensible and morally depraved and they didn’t want to work on it,” said Goldhaber. “Major studios didn’t want to touch it.”
After they pulled out of South by Southwest, the idea that the movie was somehow troubled took root.
“They were afraid of it,” said Montford.
As the movie sat in limbo, Goldhaber became nervous.
“It was really hard to have the movie be 100% done and to have no control and no power over a process and be unsure if the movie ever would come out at all. We live in a world in which movies are made and memory-holed all the time,” Goldhaber said. He has a friend who “shot and finished an entire feature film and then A24 saw the movie, bought the film, fired everybody off of it and recast the whole thing and they’re reshooting it. And the original movie will never be seen.”
“Legendary had an investment they wanted to protect. They had done quite well making horror movies for a price and selling them to streaming. We had a really good experience with Legendary but I think at the end of the day, because they were moving distributors all the time, they had a goal for the movie that they never quite got,” said Murphy.
For Goldhaber, whose first two movies had limited budgets and small (but vocal) audiences, he saw “Faces of Death” as potentially something that could get more of his own stuff off the ground. But those dreams started to fade as the movie languished.
“It’s a title that’s great. And then realized, Oh, wait, the infamously banned movie was maybe not the most down-the-middle IP swing that I could have taken,” Goldhaber said.
Goldhaber thought of other recent horror hits that had survived purely by luck. “’Barbarian’ was inches away from dying multiple deaths multiple times. It could have just ended up on streaming. Same thing with ‘Smile.’ ‘Smile’ was a streaming movie that got saved,” said Goldhaber. “It’s tough, and this is something the movie’s about, because the algorithm loves remakes and there’s something really perverse about the fact that we’ve all indebted ourselves to a system of content delivery that’s trying to squeeze our nostalgia for every little inch of attention that it’s worth.”
Finally, IFC and Shudder saw the movie and, to Goldhaber, “immediately understood that the film was, first and foremost, a great piece of horror entertainment, that also had some interesting stuff on its mind. They understood what it had to offer in a way that I think, you know, not everybody could see.”
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Not that the long-awaited distribution pact quelled the controversy.
The first trailer for “Faces of Death” was released online and was immediately banned, supposedly for violating YouTube’s terms of service. Most assumed it was part of an elaborate marketing stunt, but Goldhaber confirms that it was banned for real. “There were a lot of conversations about preventing the teaser from getting banned from YouTube. There was a lot of strategy that went into trying to get something that would not be banned … and then it got banned anyway,” said Goldhaber.
A series of posters that included the little crossed out eye logo, like if you were trying to look at an image that had been deemed too inappropriate, were also pulled. You can see something blurry in the background of the posters, but they were a canny way of implying outrageousness without actually seeing anything.
“I don’t think people understand this but the censored posters were banned from theaters, not what was behind the censorship. The MPA (Motion Picture Association of America) said that you cannot put these in theaters,” Goldhaber said.
He pointed to other horror movie posters that are much more graphic.
“Maybe the MPA doesn’t so much like us drawing attention to the fact that they do actually allow violence in cinemas and that they don’t allow other forms of content,” Goldhaber said. “Maybe they don’t like the fact that we’re drawing attention to censorship in a cinematic space and they’re actually trying to keep that away from us.”
“We have sometimes felt like we couldn’t catch a break with the movie,” Montford said.
“Susan and I just kept looking at each other going, there’s surveillance footage of the Luigi guy shooting the insurance executive in the back in real life. I don’t know that we’re somehow worse than that, because we’re not even real,” said Murphy.
Murphy and Montford appreciated IFC’s willingness to push things to uncomfortable places with “Faces of Death.” “From the beginning, they took the attitude of, let’s go balls to the wall. Yeah, they’ll take it down. We’ll deal with it,” Murphy said.
The reaction to the posters and trailers is emblematic of the larger problem with the movie.
“Part of the issue with ‘Faces of Death’ in general. It’s like the movie is far less gruesome than a lot of mainstream horror, thriller, war movies, whatever, but it’s the context that’s actually trying to get you to think critically about the violence and to not just embrace it,” Goldhaber said. “I think that sets a lot of people on edge.”
Even after all of this – the endless squabbles and the unmoored distribution and everyone asking why? – Goldhaber said that he’s already looking at a potential sequel.
“We’ve actually thought about it,” said Goldhaber. “I’ve got some fun ideas. But they have to come to us and say, We want another one.”
Because the only thing scarier than a remake is a sequel.
