‘Faces of Death’ Set the Bar for Hardcore Horror. It’s Baaack.

What to Watch

April Streaming Picks

‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’

‘The Drama’

‘The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson’

‘DJ Ahmet’

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.

Supported by

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

‘Faces of Death’ Set the Bar for Hardcore Horror. It’s Baaack.

A remake of the cult horror movie raises questions about the approach to viewing disturbing videos in a new era.

Listen

· 7:43 min

Share full article

Dacre Montgomery in the new “Faces of Death,” directed by Daniel Goldhaber.

Credit...

Independent Film Company/Shudder

By

Marc Tracy

April 8, 2026,

5:00 a.m. ET

See more of our coverage in your search results.

Encuentra más de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de búsqueda.

Add The New York Times on Google

Agrega The New York Times en Google

A few years ago, producers approached the filmmakers Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei with an idea. They had secured the rights to “Faces of Death,” the 1978 cult horror movie that even some of the most hard-core fans of the genre have been wary of watching. In it, a deadpan narrator named Dr. Frances B. Gröss (ha, ha) guides the viewer through a series of gruesome, “real” depictions of animals and humans shuffling off their mortal coils. The producers wanted to know if Goldhaber and Mazzei were interested in making a new “Faces of Death” for a new moment.

The first thing the pair did was watch the original for the first time. “I realized, ‘Oh, I’ve seen parts of this already,’” Mazzei, 35, said in a video interview. As a millennial who spent her formative years immersed in early iterations of social media, she had seen isolated clips from the film around the web.

Goldhaber, 34, and Mazzei were already mulling a project about living online. His experience as a content moderator for friends’ fly-by-night social media start-up in the 2010s showed him a venue in which digital expression and human nature elevated snuff videos and pornography.

The duo had made

“Cam” (2018)

, a mystery about a sex worker on a webcam site, and would next release

“How to Blow Up a Pipeline” (2023)

, which told the story of young environmental activists carrying out the act of the title. (Goldhaber directed; Mazzei was the screenwriter on “Cam” and a producer on “Pipeline.”) Both films embedded polemical social commentary within hardy commercial genres — the thriller and the heist movie.

Might the deep things they wanted to say about the internet — about the attention economy and its perverse incentives, about the bending and burning of shared facts — fit into a new take on a decades-old, decidedly low-fi simulated snuff film?

Image

Barbie Ferreira plays a content moderator in the new film.

Credit...

Independent Film Company/Shudder

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and

log into

your Times account, or

subscribe

for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?

Log in

.

Want all of The Times?

Subscribe

.

Related Content

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT