‘Faces of Death’ Depicts Realistic Snuff. That’s Not the Most Disturbing Thing About It
“If you go bring Faces of death in the modern era,” explains director Daniel Goldhaber, “at a certain level you have to deal with the fact that Faces of death is everywhere.
John Alan Schwartz’s 1978 low-budget exploitation horror film Faces of death was unleashed on the world. Less of a film than a feature, the film presents itself as a documentary in which a pathologist (played by an actor) shares his collection of (mostly fake) snuff images with the public. Despite the contrivance of its most gruesome scenes, the film became an underground phenomenon on VHS, attracting legions of horror enthusiasts eager to test their mettle with what they believed to be images of real torture, violence and murder.
Nearly 50 years later, real snuff is everywhere, and Goldhaber and co-writer Isa Mazzei – the duo share a “film by” credits – have a new angle on this scuzzy classic. Their rebooted Faces of death is a horror thriller starring Barbie Ferreira as Margot, a content moderator for a TikTok-like social video app, who discovers what she believes to be a serial killer uploading videos of real-life murders modeled on scenes from the original film.
Goldhaber drew inspiration in part from his brief experience as a content moderator for a social media startup. “It would immediately be colonized by the snuff sellers and the child pornography people,” Goldhaber recalls. “I was just camping on the feed, playing whack-a-mole with the horrible stuff that was being uploaded.”
This same type of content is now “present on my feed every day,” he says. These images – from images of Gaza to the killings of activists in Minneapolis – cannot help but shape people’s minds and politics.
Mazzei tells WIRED that his first experience with violent images was of the 9/11 jumpers. “I was very young, like in elementary school, and I remember seeing these people jumping from the World Trade Center and thinking, ‘How can I see a person jumping to their death right now?’ » » She remembers that the situation only got worse from there. “Beheadings, suicides, Rotten.com. There’s been this escalation,” she says, “that has reached a point now that when I open Instagram or TikTok, I’m offered this content without even having to search for it.”
Much of it, Goldhaber notes, comes down to the introduction of the infinite scroll. Snuff content is particularly potent fodder for social media platforms. “The algorithm knows that I’m going to look at it for four milliseconds longer than I’m going to look at happy content,” adds Mazzei. “My nervous system has to react to it a little longer before I can possibly move away.”
Deeply political filmmakers: they have already made a horror film with cam girls Cam and the incendiary eco-thriller How to blow up a pipeline—Goldhaber and Mazzei saw Faces of death as an opportunity to explore the effect of the proliferation of snuff on society. Mazzei and Paris Peterson, who contributed to the research, were responsible for finding and authorizing the brief real-life flashes of graphic news and social media footage that appear throughout the film into the social media scrolls. Looking through the images for hours and hours, the two would sometimes stop and stare blankly at each other for a moment. “What I noticed was not that it stopped affecting me, but rather that I got used to feeling traumatized every day. We’re all kind of living with this new baseline of anxiety and alienation and stress that we all say is normal now.”
