{"id":374865,"date":"2026-04-11T18:13:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T18:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/374865\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T18:13:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T18:13:08","slug":"new-faces-of-death-a-fun-stab-at-grisly-state-of-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/374865\/","title":{"rendered":"New Faces of Death A Fun Stab At Grisly State Of Social Media"},"content":{"rendered":"

At a recent function someone\u2019s kid asked if I had seen the video of Charlie Kirk\u2019s death. Truthfully? Not a clip I\u2019ve sought out, but who even gets the choice<\/a>? Proliferation of snuff amongst even children illustrates how badly the worst of the web has breached containment. Grotesqueries have always traveled. 1978\u2019s Faces of Death is a good example. A \u201cmondo movie\u201d<\/a> composed of real and simulated fatalities, its infamy largely regulated to secret screenings, video nasty collections and file sharing sites. Now you barely need to scratch before stumbling upon media that bleeds. A new slasher film from Daniel Goldhaber, inspired by and sharing Faces of Death\u2019s name, stabs at the grisly state of social media though rarely gets as nasty.<\/p>\n

Margot Romero (Euphoria\u2019s Barbie Ferreira) is a content moderator for a new short-video platform. While flagging posts for sex and violence is drudgery, it\u2019s personal for Romero. Years prior a traumatic video of her went viral. She doesn\u2019t want a world where others have to suffer the same. When a series of clips featuring what appear to be staged executions begin catching heat, it\u2019s unclear if the ornately made reels are simulated or the legitimate article. Romero notices a pattern between the posts, missing persons and the original Faces of Death film, kicking off a campaign to discover who\u2019s behind these macabre movies, unknowingly putting herself in the killer\u2019s crosshairs.<\/p>\n

Faces of Death is occupying quite a few lanes. It\u2019s a cat and mouse chase, Dacre Montgomery\u2019s fidgety, particular killer would fit right in with Will Graham\u2019s casefiles. It\u2019s a social farce, Romero\u2019s constant horror comes in equal parts from the madman at large and the people surrounding her amused by all the bloodshed. Swerving between them, the film largely ends up a pop horror poking fun at social media, never quite as bleak as actually logging in to one<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Despite being set in a world where the mondo movies and fail compilations exist, there\u2019s never much cross-examination between the two. Original mondo cinema was exploitation barely masquerading as anthropology. There\u2019s definitely more to pick apart about the inherently exploitative nature of online content and the pervasive horrors that have spilled over since the LiveLeak era.<\/p>\n

The interests of the film are strictly on the phones, the kind of hypocrisy inherent in platforms that get to decide what horrors are beneficial and which drug safety tutorials are illicit. It\u2019s a world driven by clout, simple as, and like a wink from the screenwriters is a line that suggests the entire Faces of Death angle is mostly branding. Maybe something too curious would also be too depressing, but it is telling that the most I winced away was during footage from the original film. Plus I expected the gore game to go a lot bigger.<\/p>\n

Goldhaber\u2019s previous film was an adaptation of How To Blow Up A Pipeline, taking the controversial Verso Book and turning it into a less controversial popcorn thriller. The director seems interested in taking on challenging source materials more than doing anything challenging with them. Faces of Death isn\u2019t as rich, interesting or walloping as Pascal Plante\u2019s Red Rooms, but Ferreira\u2019s high energy and Montgomery\u2019s loathsome creep makes it easy to share Margot\u2019s determination to stop him. A fun slasher that constantly alludes to much scarier things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At a recent function someone\u2019s kid asked if I had seen the video of Charlie Kirk\u2019s death. Truthfully?…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":374866,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-374865","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}