2026’s rewind on Faces of Death is suspiciously good at being a twisted little freakshow
Courtesy IFC
Each of us can pinpoint the scar on our brain where we clicked that first link—where we saw that first thing online that we realized immediately was real, and perhaps exactly what we expected to find when we clicked, but that no amount of regret could ever erase. For a wide swath of Millennials, I feel safe in assuming that many of us share the memory of an early, blurry but real beheading video. Friends have described the one they saw to me down to specific details, and I can do the same in return. For generations under us, god only knows what this moment was for them, and I’m sure it shares none of the trauma monoculture of ours, because boy howdy were your options much less limited by this point. But defining these specific “I Shouldn’t Have Watched That” rubicon-crossing moments is, again, that moment before hand when you clicked a link to see it, and that link was probably labeled to tell you exactly what you would be seeing. You had an idea of what you were going to see, and you chose to see it, and the reality therein was going to rewire you on a subatomic level to how you saw the world moving forward.
I see this moment as functionally indistinguishable from a history of the pre-internet era of finding the true horror and grotesquerie of mankind. You rewind only slightly further back and there we are, at the perfect era for 1978’s Faces of Death. The banned, underground flick, directed by John Alan Schwartz, played out as exactly the promise of the title: a long series of sequences where the audience was watching actual human death, captured on film. Or, at least in part, as the reality of that film (and many sequels) was that these were staged sequences blended with strange archival footage. Even the parts of it that are “fake” are, in their own way, a deep workman’s dedication to plunging the depth of other previous, errant fractions of people documenting the gore of the world.
This is all to say that, even when it comes down to the finding and clicking of a link, or going back so far as to require plumbing the depths of a university’s science department archives, there used to exist some level of work (or at least choice) required to encounter visceral violence in a controlled environment, especially for the purpose of entertainment. Obviously, anyone can witness a car crash or be in the vicinity of gunfire, or currently live in a warzone where atrocities could occur at any moment. But the idea that someone in the course of their natural day could, on a whim, make the choice to seek out video violence and that this work would require actual effort—this is almost nostalgic in 2026.
There is a scroll on my phone, on nearly a dozen apps, and with or without my thumb, I can simply be fed an unending series of atrocities and unspeakable horrors, and this technology exists in the hands and hearts of everyone I know. Awash in a flood of real, ongoing international captures of terrorism, ethnic cleansing, police brutality, crime, and sheer human rage, the potential pool of poison was already overflowing. You add in the invaluable work of those who create content designed to blend into this as ‘real’ alongside the infinite shitflood of artificial intelligence-generated slop, and you have a perfect vehicle for an areality designed to unravel us all.
Again, to look back to a time when a VHS tape called Faces of Death would be a hush-hush forbidden item, passed among circles of friends, but more often simply spoken of in abstract concept, feels retro.
So with the announcement for a 2026 “reboot” of Faces of Death, our film critic crew was pretty skeptical about how or why the world needed such a thing—or if we’d simply run completely out of IP to remake and repackage. With no small amount of delight, a creative team that tackled this managed to make a horror comedy that is heavily invested in having conversations about what digital violence has wrought, and uses the launching pad of a familiar nightmare name to get there.
Director/co-writer Daniel Goldhaber and co-writer/producer Isa Mazzei are well-equipped to explore the eerie space where online content becomes something more convincingly illicit than just a viral video. They previously made the excellent internet-based psychological thriller Cam, about a camgirl who encounters an online doppelganger; as well as the less online (but very reality-inspired) political thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
Faces of Death (2026) follows Margot Romero (Barbie Ferreira) who works as a moderator at a popular social media platform, where she is responsible for filtering out offensive or violent content. She brings a passion to her work, due to the direct effect of a viral video clip on her own life, and tries to instill this dedication into her co-workers. When videos begin crossing her feed that seem both too real and somehow equally meticulously shot and staged, she goes looking for answers. Erstwhile, there is indeed a serial killer (Dacre Montgomery) who is kidnapping folks who traffic in fame, and killing them for clicks—each setup borrowing with a heavy tip of the hat toward the old 1978 Faces of Death VHS.
Also Charli XCX is briefly here. It has no impact on either direction on the film, but it is an important detail to include.
Courtesy IFC
FoD26 traffics in some of the same waters as last year’s American Sweatshop, which keeps its darkness contained to the emotional strain of working in social media moderation and the toll the entire endeavor is taking on the human soul. FoD breaks from the workplace near our midpoint and instead sprawls into SAW traps serial killer monologues, which it does masterfully. While the slasher fine side of this is a solid B-flick, the ridiculous dedication to sprawling content creation is what puts this over the top. Draped across the flick is an unending scroll of clips that, frankly, must’ve taken more work to film, edit, and make visually distinct than the bulk of the actual movie. There’s an added layer of terror here that Goldhaber/Mazzei capture, when their take on the trap of attention economy veers so far into believability that the viewer starts to wonder…. maybe they’re almost too good at this? And what could serve the Faces of Death legacy more than that?
As a bonus for KC folk, the score features work by Gavin Brivik—who we’ve profiled several times at The Pitch, including a recent piece highlighting his work on The Pitt and including some information on his contributions to this video nasty’s soundtrack:
This is high energy, distorted hyperpop with artists like Cecile Believe, who’s a vocalist in Sophie’s albums, and Umru, who’s produced for Charli XCX. The score is so weird and crazy, I can’t believe I got away with it. I also got to bring in my former UMKC professor, Paul Rudy, to work on it, and (KC-based musician and How to Blow Up a Pipeline collaborator) Morgan Greenwood to work on it.
The film Faces of Death is available on VOD now, and is well worth a watch if you think you have the stomach for it.
