Faces of Death is a 2026 horror film directed by Daniel Goldhaber and starring Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, Josiah Totah, and Charli XCX. The film isn’t necessarily a remake as much as it is a reimagining of the 1978 fake snuff/horror film ‘Faces of Death’. For those of you who don’t know, ‘Faces of Death’ was basically the first piece of “viral shock content” long before the era of the Internet when it came out in 1978. It’s a highly controversial around 100-minute film that presents itself as a documentary with a pathologist narrator that examines death and different ways of dying, all while presenting short videos of people dying in new ways. The film mixed some real-life deaths in with a lot of staged and acted deaths and most everyone believed for a very long time that the entire film was real which led to it gaining an infamous attraction and popularity among people because we’re twisted as a species. The film was said to be “banned in most countries around the world” and hard to get your hands on, one of those movies you had to ask the video store clerk for in some sort of code and he’d go under the counter for it like it was some nasty porno or something. Which porno no, but nasty yes. Very much so.
In reality though, a lot of the more shocking sequences of the film were staged and done by actors, although there were still real deaths in the movie in the form of war footage, car accident footage, and suicides. Which still makes it a very dark and hard watch. I’ve honestly personally never seeked it out and I have no real desire to. I’m a horror fan, but I want to be thrilled and captivated by my entertainment in an entirely different way than that. I just know a lot about it because I am a horror fan and a film fan and it’s just one of those infamous kinds of films you hear about over time. Well, that and I did my homework for this blog. This remake however was much easier to stomach so I decided to give it a shot. The film focuses on a content moderator named Margot who works for this company Kino, that’s pretty much like this film’s version of TikTok, and her job is basically just to watch through all the content being posted on the platform and flag and remove anything that’s too harmful or nasty or wrong. It would be a terrible job man, and this movie does a pretty good job at depicting that. You’re seeing occasional rape and death and torture and whatever other wild, terrible nonsense these crazy bastards are posting on here and have to remove it and report it, but there’s nothing you can really do to help in that scenario and it’s not your job to either. It’s a job that would just weigh on you too heavy over time. I mean yeah, you’re seeing cute animal videos and other silly nonsense as well, but that’s not all you’re seeing, and when something else pops up that just makes it all the more shocking and it’s your job to flag it and take it down.
On the other side of things is Arthur, played by Billy from Stranger Things by the way so that was pretty funny, a cellphone store manager who has a very seedy hobby outside of work that involves tracking people down via their phones’ location and drugging and kidnapping them before using them as props in his recreations of scenes from ‘Faces of Death’, ultimately killing them. Unfortunately for Margot, she starts getting these videos fed to her at work. First a video of a man dying by electric chair and then one of someone being scalped and she raises a lot of concern over it, but her bosses tell her it seems fake and that people love making and consuming that horror content nowadays and that it was okay. Just them darn kids ya know? She doesn’t buy that though, so she doesn’t stop there and does her own investigating on the videos, going to different internet threads and asking sleuths if it was real or fake and it all came back as real. Meanwhile, Arthur is blowing up on the internet over these very well made, almost too well-made, recreation videos and unbeknownst to Margot already watching and tracking her every move. It’s a well set up movie and a pretty decent commentary on some of modern society and our desensitization to certain graphic content and wild shit because we’re just screen drunk all day scrolling and scrolling. Also, what we as a society and what corporations view as okay vs not okay for public consumption. There were times where Margot flagged and took down multiple posts that were actually of help because that’s what her job told her to do. One specific example being someone showing an example of how to give a person Narcan that she took down for illegal drug use.
Dacre Montgomery’s Arthur really did sort of steal the show for me though, I enjoyed his performance and he actually creeped me out some. Just the thought of someone being so tech savvy and having access to so many people’s data and locations at their job if they knew how to hack software and using it for very nefarious purposes is sort of bone-chilling and very scary to think about in this modern age. They tried to make him up to be a little too nerdy and awkward, like a bit of a weirdo at his job and stuff, but it’s like no. That guy’s too handsome. People wouldn’t see him as weird, they’d just call him “mysterious” and be interested, making it all the easier for him to drug them and kidnap them. Just being realistic man, Dacre’s a good looking fellow ya know? He was a real creepy evil son of a bitch in this though, but very smart and savvy as well. Even his speech and motive near the end was pretty good, for a psychotic villain that is, and again touched on people’s numbness to violence and desire for remakes. Barbie Ferreria led the show as Margot though and was ultimately the final girl and main character of the film. That poor girl was loaded with trauma, she herself became a bit of a video viral sensation for all the wrong reasons and that led to her desire to take the job she did and to try and take down this evil dude as well. It was really a 2-man show between them in this film for the most part. I mean there were other smaller parts in Arthur’s victims and Margot’s coworkers, one of which was Charli XCX, smoking a joint on the rooftop during work. I’d be up there bro, much better than watching those mind-numbing and potentially vile videos for hours on end and Charli seems like pretty cool company.
This movie isn’t going to be an award winner or anything, but rarely the movies I talk about on here are. I mean I’m pretty sure it was made in like 2023 actually and just held onto and not released until this year and it was very under the radar. However, it is a very quick and pretty easy watch, only 97 minutes. Again, a bit creepy and real feeling for the modern age, but it’s trying to do a commentary on our daily lives and desensitization from overconsumption. If it sounds like your sort of thing though, it’s available to watch on Shudder or AMC+ with a subscription or you can rent it somewhere as well.
