WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Faces of Death (2026).
Every horror fan has seen their fair share of death scenes. A defining characteristic of the genre, we also all remember the first time we had to cover our eyes or frantically look away from the screen, convinced we’d pushed ourselves too far outside our comfort zones. For many Gen Xers and Elder Millennials, this rite of passage occurred while watching the 1978 film Faces of Death.
John Alan Schwartz’s faux documentary purports to demystify the so-called final transition with a series of death sequences presented in unflinching and authentic detail. Nearly fifty years later, the proliferation of social media has made us all unfortunately familiar with the real face of fatality through increasingly disturbing viral content, rendering the novelty of Schwartz’s film essentially moot. In a fictionalized reimagining, Daniel Goldhaber’s Faces of Death resuscitates this notorious franchise while exploring the reasons behind its controversial success and why we still can’t seem to look away.
Margot (Barbie Ferreira) is a content moderator for Kino, a thinly veiled approximation of TikTok, who has taken herself completely offline. Using a dumb phone and borrowing her roommate’s computer, she nonetheless spends her days reviewing videos flagged for offensive content. Mixed in with the drunken accidents and stoner inanity, she’s unnerved to see what appears to be a beheading carried out by mannequins.
Days later, a second video passes through her feed. A bound man is led to an electric chair by the same mannequins while a dulcet voice narrates the horrific action. Convinced this may be real, she reports the video to her supervisor, who dismisses it as DIY horror and advises her to pass it through.Those familiar with Schwartz’s film immediately recognize this disturbing scene, notable for its jailhouse framing and the distinctive tape covering the victim’s eyes. When a third video recreates the infamous monkey brains scene, Margot reaches out to an online community that refers her to the 1978 release.
Luckily, her roommate Ryan (Aaron Holliday) owns a copy — complete with its puffy, plastic VHS cover — and explains the movie’s strange appeal. After a surprisingly lucrative theatrical run, the original Faces of Death became a cult phenomenon mostly through the VHS rental market. A trailer for Goldhaber’s reboot describes the faux documentary as a generational rite of passage, while Ryan calls it the first viral video.
Faking the Face of Death
By modern standards, the original Faces of Death is surprisingly sedate. The film opens with close-up footage of cardiac surgery as the camera zooms in on a beating heart. From there, we’re introduced to pathologist Francis B. Gröss (Michael Carr), a self-proclaimed connoisseur of death. Gröss’ narratives archived footage of rotting human corpses before explaining a series of brutal animal murders (some fake and some unfortunately real). Next, he unpacks a variety of human fatalities from executions and police shootouts to tragic accidents and ritual killings.
To his credit, Schwartz — who released the film under two pseudonyms — has admitted to using special effects. Committed to the premise of demystifying the taboo topic, he purchased archive footage and outtakes from news teams and morgues. But watching this compilation proved not only to be immensely sad, but also narratively boring. With nothing to string the film together, it became an onslaught of tragedy porn. Schwartz decided to switch focus, adding Gröss’s commentary while staging each scene with actors and low-budget special effects. Hoping to retain verisimilitude, he and the crew pored over footage of actual fatalities, trying to replicate as much detail as possible.
The result is a surprisingly restrained tone. Schwartz resists salaciousness, and Gröss’ narration adds an almost clinical feel. Interspersed with footage of actual corpses — and one authentic skydiving death — it’s possible to believe that we are watching a series of real deadly incidents caught on film. In fact, some were so convincing that Faces of Death was decried as snuff, earning bans in several countries and a place on the UK’s infamous Video Nasties list.
What is a Snuff Film?
Experts believe the concept of real human death as entertainment dates back to Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1907 short story “A Good Film,” which follows a newsreel photojournalist who orchestrates and records a murder to spark public engagement. Decades later, poet, musician, and activist Ed Sanders would coin the term “snuff” in his 1971 book The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion.
Written in the wake of the shocking Tate-LaBianca murders in August of 1969, the meticulously researched tome chronicles the rise of cult leader Charles Manson and his “Family” of violent followers. One witness describes Family members filming homemade pornography, which culminates in a decapitation. However, no such footage has ever been found, and the book’s own witness admits to never actually watching the tape.
Nonetheless, this shocking revelation seems to have birthed a new urban legend. Rumors of murder videos began circulating, popularized by the 1976 release of Snuff. Filmed under the working title “Slaughter,” husband and wife team Michael and Roberta Findlay’s low-budget movie follows a cult leader named Satán (Enrique Larratelli, uncredited) and his female bikers who embark on a killing spree in South America. Shot, “where life is cheap,” the story plays out like a typical exploitation film until its jaw-dropping final scene. In lieu of credits, the camera reverses focus to capture the director brutally murdering one of the actresses, the crew scrambling to cover the bloody carnage.
The Appearance of Snuff
Of course, genre creators have always sought to make their films as persuasive as possible, some going to extreme lengths to fool audiences. The 1980 Italian exploitation film Cannibal Holocaust, which follows a group of doomed filmmakers slaughtered in the Amazon rainforest, was so convincing in its brutality that director Ruggero Deodato was charged with obscenity and forced to produce this cast — all alive and well — to avoid conviction.
Actor Charlie Sheen was reportedly so disturbed by a 45-minute dismemberment sequence in Hideshi Hino’s Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood that he called the FBI to report what he’d seen. A long-standing Hollywood legend claims that the 1959 biblical epic Ben-Hur contains real footage of a stuntman’s death in the story’s harrowing chariot race scene. And while a freak accident can be seen in the final release, the stuntman in question survived the incident. Similar rumors persist about the ultra-low-budget South American films Snake Feast and Gator Bait Ten, but they are to date unconfirmed.
While these titles certainly push the envelope, a true snuff film has yet to be found. Experts disagree on an exact definition, but our generally accepted understanding of snuff stems from the seminal 1994 text Killing for Culture: An Illustrated History of Death Film from Mondo to Snuff. Authors David Kerekes and David Slater describe the notorious media as “a human sacrifice (without the aid of special effects or other trickery) perpetuated for the medium of film and circulated amongst a jaded few for the purpose of entertainment.”
Most scholars exclude videos made by serial killers like Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, the Dnepropetrovsk maniacs, and Vester Lee Flanagan II because — while extremely upsetting — their videos were not created for the purpose of financial gain. They similarly do not include footage of natural disasters or footage of tragedies like the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Some argue that this is splitting hairs, and it’s definitely possible that real snuff films created in secrecy have simply not yet broken through public consciousness.
The Snuff of Legacy
With technological advancements and widespread access to evolving home video, we’re split on the ethics of watching death content. While some warn of exploitation, others note the power of witnessing atrocious acts. It’s true that it’s nearly impossible to downplay the effects of terrorism, gun violence, or police brutality when you see the carnage with your own eyes. However, each time a video featuring real fatality goes viral, it comes with dire warnings about the mental toll viewing such scenes can cause. In the wake of Luka Magnotta’s highly publicized crimes, viewers filmed reaction videos of themselves watching his recorded acts of depravity, many of which are disturbing in and of themselves.
Goldhaber’s new Faces of Death attempts to unpack our fascination with carnage caught on camera. The tagline, “we dare you,” nods to the phenomenon of adolescent horror fans challenging themselves to see how much of the original faux documentary — and its ignominious sequels — they can bear to watch. However, Schwartz’s original premise has merit.
For each viewer with a juvenile desire to see something taboo, another may seek to genuinely make peace with their own mortality or the recent loss of someone they love. However, we must ask ourselves if this enlightenment should come at the expense of privacy. Death represents the ultimate loss of autonomy, and there is no way to ask a corpse if they consent to having their final moments used as a source of entertainment, no matter the intent.
The Cost of Deadly Entertainment
We learn that Margot errs toward privacy. Flashbacks show that several years ago, she convinced her younger sister to shoot a dance video on busy train tracks, believing they would have time to get out of the way. We eventually learn that her sister slipped and was struck and killed by an oncoming train. The shocking event was caught on camera and later leaked by local police. (This disturbing backstory feels like an echo of a scene from the original Faces of Death in which a biker’s remains must be scooped off the street after a fatal collision with a massive truck.) Years later, she has become known around the world as Train Girl while her sister’s demise still circulates as a cautionary tale for reckless content creators.
In a blood-soaked climax, Margot manages to escape the killer, revealed to be an ostensibly mild-mannered computer tech named Arthur (Dacre Montgomery). While preparing to murder her in his next video, the amateur filmmaker reveals his obsession with Schwartz’s movie and a psychopathic desire to recreate each sequence using actual human victims.
Thanks to Margot’s online sleuthing, the public has taken notice of his videos, pushing them to viral status. Reactions vary from disbelieving fans excited for his next release to moralistic naysayers warning against fanning the flames of his content’s appeal. Arthur watches in amazement as comments and reactions flood his feed, knowing controversy means he has truly gone viral. Yet Margot’s own video will top his success.
Empowerment in the Face of Death
Hoping to save a pair of hostages, she seemingly walks into Arthur’s trap. Armed with Narcan and a knife disguised as a lipstick tube, she turns the tables on his attack and manages to savage him with the knife and a long, metal spike. Only then does she reveal the camera tucked in her bra. Margot has not only recorded Arthur’s candid confession, but also their bloody-soaked brawl. As the serial killer slowly dies, he comforts himself with the conclusion of Schwartz’s original film, flipping to the scene in which he describes a séance piercing the veil.
Meanwhile, Margot addresses the camera, chastising viewers for their disbelief. Throughout the film, she’s been fighting to get others to take her concerns about the videos seriously. Her manager encourages her to allow the flagged content, knowing notoriety will drive up engagement. After reporting her suspicions to authorities, Margot is met with flat disbelief and can scarcely find anyone to take her claims seriously enough to investigate.
Even worse, she overhears other officers eagerly anticipating the release of Arthur’s next video, openly speculating about their veracity. It seems the addition of a camera/screen has created a sense of detachment, and they no longer recognize the victims’ humanity or their duty to protect the public.
This seems to be Goldhaber’s overarching message: that normalizing death through social media leads to loss of humanity and detachment in the viewer. It is a persuasive argument. Not only do we see that Margot still suffers from becoming a viral main character, but she reminds us that her sister was a human being with friends and family who still grieve her loss. However, Margot ultimately finds comfort and peace in uploading a video of her deadly fight, which lingers on Arthur as he passes away.
After risking a heavy-handed morality play, Goldhaber’s Faces of Death becomes a nuanced exploration of fatality entertainment when our heroine ultimately achieves empowerment through the publication of her own video. Like the subject itself, there are no easy answers, and we’re left with a personal decision each viewer must ultimately make for themselves.