When Faces of Death was originally released in 1978, the mere thought that you could watch actual people die was enough to sell the movie, even if it ended up being mostly faked (thus not a “true” snuff film). Flash-forward about 40 years or so, and your Mass Media Studies teacher can show you footage of R. Budd Dwyer’s suicide on LiveLeak; not even a few months after that, The Verge publishes an article detailing how Facebook moderators routinely watch such videos, if not worse. Violence is no longer limited to shock sites or bluntly named Reddit forums but a constant of social media, where algorithm changes can lead to horrid animal cruelty being blasted out to everyone’s feed before being deemed “not a problem.”
Director Daniel Goldhaber and co-writer Isa Mazzei are intimately familiar with the darker side of the Internet. Their 2018 debut, Cam, remains among the quintessential horror films of the Internet age, and with their reboot / remake / reimagining of Faces of Death, they bring the past into startling view of the present. It’s a film that recognizes there’s a little bit of a sicko in all of us, and there may be nothing we can do about it.
The tone is set almost immediately as Margot (Barbie Ferreira) clicks through videos to approve for a TikTok-like social network, green-lighting extremely graphic footage of a man being hit by a dump truck while flagging videos offering such disturbing content as How To Use Narcan or How To Put On Condoms. Although it’s a horrible job, she at least seems to want to take it seriously and do well—especially when she comes across a video of what appears to be a man being beheaded for real, accompanied by dry narration. She can’t be sure of its veracity, and neither can her boss; the video’s approval is an indictment of both the platforms that bend the rules for trends and those in charge who don’t want to rock the boat. These issues become large points of contention as more videos appear and Margot connects one of them to a missing person.
Much like Cam—which featured its heroine pulling out a taser before meeting a sketchy client—Faces of Death is smartly written. It’s the kind of movie crafted by people who clearly get frustrated when heroes don’t take the logical solution or fall into the same traps as the kitschy horror flicks Margot’s roommate watches. On top of a dedication to realism by way of Reddit threads, geolocation tracking, and public filming, Goldhaber and Mazzei take pains to draw out the ways Margot is limited: an NDA, past trauma from a video shoot gone bad, and her incompetent boss. They realistically depict how people on the Internet actually react: memes, speculation, and ultimately nothing happening because there are no bodies and it’s simply too much work to care. Besides, the videos are trending, and her boss tells her they have to “give the people what they want”—they aren’t the morality police.
That recurring line is brought into full focus through Dacre Montgomery’s Arthur, first glimpsed at a dead-end job at a cell-phone store, making good use of the customer database. In no time we learn that Arthur is the uploader, and he takes the creation of his content as seriously as the influencer he kidnaps; he even uses sockpuppets to argue with trolls in the comments. In these scenes, Faces of Death could have easily become another fearmongering tech story, but Goldhaber and Mazzei take a more nuanced, pessimistic view. Their ire is aimed squarely at the overarching systemic forces that have turned death and destruction into yet another form of “content,” something to speculate over and eagerly await. As Arthur puts it: “It’s the attention economy and, baby, business is booming.”
Most impressive is how Goldhaber and Mazzei manage to have their cake and eat it, giving viewers what they came to see while prodding at their motivations. Because isn’t there some sick part of us all that’s drawn to the taboo? The allure of snuff as a concept is the idea that it exists to begin with—that we can watch something horrible from the safety of our own home without having to get our hands dirty. Similarly, Goldhaber’s tense direction—aided by a vintage film-grain look and synth score—derives just as much suspense from a home invasion as it does unveiling the next recreated scene. There are real pleasures in the horror movie thrills that prevent it from becoming didactic or “scoldy,” yet the ideas never fade to the background.
Even as it follows a relative template, Faces of Death tends to swerve in unexpected ways, choosing to have Arthur be almost completely “normal”—the platonic ideal of a content creator—or throwing out dialogue like, “Hey, guys, I fucked a clown and I got BV” in the middle of a nerve-wracking scene. Faces of Death gives the people what they want while constantly probing the viewer as to why they want it, all the way through to an ending as bleak as the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Online platforms are doing their damnedest to reduce everything to “content,” where viewing atrocities is considered a moral good rather than an obscenity. Margot’s roommate isn’t wrong when he describes the original Faces of Death as the first viral video: all the protestations of it being a “documentary” or “exposing the truth” were just specious excuses to let people gawk at a freak show. Now everything is the freak show. Goldhaber and Mazzei’s grand achievement is acknowledging the seductive power it has and asking if this is what we really want to become.
Faces of Death opens in theaters on Friday, April 10.