I know we’re supposed to be cynical about i.p. and remakes and what not, but I am a child of Freddy, so to my mind franchising has always been one of the elements of horror. It doesn’t have to be the main one, it could be low on the totem pole, like beatboxing in hip hop. But it’s always gonna have some appeal to me when they do it right.

Is FACES OF DEATH even horror, though? I guess it is now. The 2026 film of that title is one of the more inventive brand refreshes, or whatever you want to call it. It’s not exactly a remake of the most notorious title in home video history, because the original purported to be a documentary, a sort of video essay/mondo film by pathologist Francis B. Gröss (actor Michael Carr). He narrates a collection of gruesome videos involving death: an alligator attack, a police shootout, a corpse washed up on a beach, an execution, people eating monkey brains, fun stuff like that.

Like any child in the ‘80s I heard legends of FACES OF DEATH and took everybody’s word for it that it was the real deal. Then in high school I took part in this group, not a debate club, mostly a social activity, but we got together to discuss/argue different topics, for example whether or not executions should be televised. It’s one of those insane questions people used to pretend was important to consider. Would it be a deterrent to criminals? Would it jolt society into rethinking capital punishment? And somebody said well, if we’re going to consider it then we should really understand what it means. So we watched the electric chair scene from FACES OF DEATH.

Unfortunately I was probly no good for discussing the issue at hand, because I was kind of shocked to see the scene and realize that it was fake. I remember trying to convince everybody that real footage wouldn’t have that many camera set ups, and did you notice they change angles right before the eyes pop because they had to set up the FX and etc.

Some years later I finally watched the whole FACES OF DEATH (part 1 anyway) when I reviewed Dark Sky’s 30th Anniversary dvd for The Ain’t It Cool News. It was actually a good experience, because the extras were really interesting and very candid about the fact that, though there’s plenty of upsetting stock footage of surgery and seal clubbing and stuff, all the most famous scenes are staged. It’s funny that they managed to convince so many people it was actual snuff, to the extent that it still has a reputation as one of the top scumbag videos of all time. (Oh shit, I hope they never make an official BUMFIGHTS horror movie.)

So how do you make a new FACES OF DEATH? Director Daniel Goldhaber (who did the excellent HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE) and co-writer Isa Mazzei (who wrote Goldhaber’s first movie CAM, loosely based on her own experiences) chose to do it not as a mockumentary, but a slasher movie that acknowledges the original as existing and inspiring a series of murders, much like THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN (2014). One of the ironies here is that the original has become kinda campy and only known to horror nerds. Who needs Gorgon Video when we have smartphones, and even regular people have seen police killings and terrorist beheadings by accident on their timeline. The omnipresence and continued fascination with this sort of gruesome footage is the primary theme of FACES OF DEATH (2026), which had a small theatrical release and is currently on Shudder.

Our protagonist Margot (Barbie Ferreira, NOPE) works as a content moderator for a TikTok-like video platform called Kino. She sits at a desk all day rapidly clicking through reported videos, deciding whether to remove them or not. Her boss Josh (Jermaine Fowler, STING, EENIE MEANIE, NIGHT PATROL) likes her and thinks she’s on the way to a promotion. She takes the job much more seriously than co-workers including Gabby (oh, I guess that’s Charli XCX) because, we will eventually learn, she got her sister killed recording a dangerous video that got leaked and went viral. People still recognize her as “the girl from that train video.” She thinks she can find some redemption by preventing other people from seeing this type of shit.

I have no idea how much or how little this resembles the actual process of content moderation. Seems like kind of a small operation. But I read that Goldhaber was inspired by a summer job doing this for a social media startup, so I assume it’s not too far off. The scenes of Margot on the job are really effective at exploring this contemporary theme of social media desensitization while evoking the old school scummy feeling of FACES OF DEATH 1978. It’s just this barrage of ghastly imagery in quick, messy bites. I know some of it is staged, some of it isn’t, just like the original. But it’s enough to make you pity and worry about someone having to watch this kind of stuff as their job.

Margot is okay with it, even though she can’t understand why her best friend and roommate Ryan (Aaron Holliday, COCAINE BEAR) loves gore movies. The trouble comes when she notices similarities between a couple of videos and starts worrying that they’re real snuff films. They come from different accounts but they use the narration from FACES OF DEATH and re-enact some of its scenes using a tied up person and some mannequins. Margot doesn’t know the reference, but the style is distinctive. After okaying one (satanic cult) as “likely fake” she wonders enough about the electric chair (“not real?”) to show it to Josh. She thinks they’re “stylized” to pass for fake but might actually be real. He dismisses her concerns.

That’s another good irony, right? A guy making real snuff films that people think are fake, based on a fake snuff film that people thought was real. Though she’s strictly forbidden to, Margot begins researching the videos outside of work, feeling a responsibility to stop this guy. There are definitely bits I found hard to swallow, but they’re overwhelmed by the performances, the ideas and the little details. I like that Ryan’s movie shelf is a goofy mix of mediocre bullshit from RANSOM to SWORDFISH to ENTRAPMENT to two copies of INDEPENDENCE DAY not even next to each other. I like that the killer’s blu-ray collection isn’t stereotypical sicko shit – the ones I could make out were SNATCH, GLADIATOR and DEJAVU. Another small but interesting part of the movie (in line with Goldhaber and Mazzei’s previous work) is that even noble Margot is oblivious to her work being harmful – she casually removes Narcan and condom PSAs for drug and sex content. (The Narcan one stars Mazzei herself.)

The murders are being committed by a masked slasher using a blank white mask and incorporating the X of tape over the “convict”’s eyes in the electric chair scene as iconography. Thankfully, unlike so many slashers in the decades since SCREAM it’s not a whodunit, it’s the MANIAC style of horror where we have to spend uncomfortable time with the killer. We’re intimate enough with Arthur Spevak (Dacre Montgomery, POWER RANGERS, ELVIS) to tell he’s a creep while he passes as a regular guy to the people around him.

It’s only 12 minutes in when we’re introduced to him working at a phone store, scrolling Kino. He recognizes a young influencer as a customer, finds her in the store database and stalks her. Samantha (Josie Totah, SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING) is taking selfies in the locker room at the swimming pool when she hears her own voice from a phone taped to the wall and gets snatched by Arthur in his creepo mask. Throughout the movie we see him taking on different voices and personas in public, but the real him is the guy we see with his phone, getting angry at women and screaming.

It becomes a battle between these two variations on terminally online lifestyles. Margot uses Google, Reddit crowdsourcing and stolen backdoor Kino data to find Arthur; Arthur uses similar methods to track and lure her until they collide IRL. There’s some dark humor, like Samantha’s confusion when Margot frees her from a basement cage but doesn’t want to make a run for it because she needs “evidence.” Or Arthur’s cartoonish performance-within-a-performance, taking on a nerd voice to convince the cops to drag her away when she leads them to his door. But at the same time I think it’s genuinely creepy, this guy working in broad daylight unnoticed, pulling a Ted Bundy move to get close to a local news anchor (Kurt Yue, JUROR #2), shooting at his victims as they try to climb out of his yard. It made me think of that movie EDEN, this idea of horrific shit going on right under people’s noses and they don’t notice because they’re not looking for it.

I don’t want to raise expectations too high, I don’t think most people will have their socks knocked off by FACES OF DEATH. But I think it’s a good balance of effective horror, interesting ideas, and slightly off-kilter touches. The sort of thing I hope for from the makers of HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE dipping into franchise horror. I look forward to whatever else Goldhaber & Mazzei (who I read somewhere is pretty much an uncredited co-director) want to do next.

P.S. I don’t know if he was hands-on or if he was just smart about getting the rights to this (like with TRANSFORMERS), but I noticed one of the producers was Don Murphy (NATURAL BORN KILLERS, DOUBLE DRAGON). A name I haven’t heard in a while.