{"id":515435,"date":"2026-04-06T07:09:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T07:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/515435\/"},"modified":"2026-04-06T07:09:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T07:09:07","slug":"taps-the-appetite-for-horror-thats-real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/515435\/","title":{"rendered":"Taps the Appetite for Horror That’s ‘Real’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn the 1970s, when horror movies started to get more and more extreme, it wasn\u2019t just the blood and the savagery that increased. So did the sensation that you were seeing something \u201creal\u201d \u2014 not mere \u201chorror-movie violence\u201d but violence as it really was, in all its existential terror. It was Hitchcock\u2019s \u201cPsycho,\u201d in 1960, that sounded the original slasher chord of that era, but the event that truly ignited the reality-horror revolution was the Manson murders. They set off such a gruesome shock wave in the culture that they turned into a kind of movie of the mind, a psychotic nightmare made flesh. The slasher films of the \u201970s channeled the Manson mystique \u2014\u00a0notably \u201cThe Texas Chain Saw Massacre,\u201d<\/a> which presented itself as a true story and served up its spectacle of slaughter with a documentary grittiness.<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter a while, all of this began to feed an addiction on the part of the audience. Having gorged on films like \u201cTexas Chain Saw\u201d and \u201cThe Last House on the Left,\u201d horror fans wanted a higher high, a bloodier bloodbath. They wanted a horror movie so extreme that it could touch reality itself. Inevitably, what horror fans \u2014 or at least some of them \u2014 began to crave was actual horror. They wanted to witness, right there on film, the kinds of unspeakable crimes that even the most extreme horror movies merely staged.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 1978, the mondo horror exploitation film \u201cFaces of Death<\/a>\u201d came along to feed that appetite. It presented itself as a documentary (and, in fact, contained snippets of documentary footage); it implied that you were watching actual scenes of human beings and animals being tortured and killed. The truth? \u201cFaces of Death\u201d was almost entirely a fake. The \u201creal\u201d murders it depicted were staged movie murders presented in grimy nonfiction drag. But the film tapped into something. It grossed $35 million internationally (an impressive sum for 1978), and it went on to become a major cult curio of the VHS era. In a way, it was ahead of its time. It presaged the hunger for seeing the forbidden with your own eyes that is now fed on a daily basis by the Internet. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe new \u201cFaces of Death\u201d feels, at times, like it could have come right out of the grindhouse \u201970s. But it\u2019s not a remake or another fake documentary. It\u2019s a halfway clever retro slasher movie that, as directed and co-written by Daniel Goldhaber (\u201cHow to Blow Up a Pipeline\u201d), actually has something on its mind. It\u2019s a B-movie meditation on the original \u201cFaces of Death,\u201d featuring a mad killer who is restaging \u2014 and posting online \u2014 a series of murders and executions from the earlier film.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut he\u2019s doing it with a meta media consciousness, turning homicide into the ultimate clickbait. He\u2019s saying, \u201cAdmit it! This is what you want.\u201d And when you consider the kinds of things that people now spend their time seeking out online, you can\u2019t say that he\u2019s wrong. \u201cFaces of Death\u201d was made for the era in which Hillary Clinton, in her Congressional deposition on the Epstein files, was actually asked about Frazzledrip, the urban legend of a video file (it was found, at least according to the legend, on Anthony Weiner\u2019s laptop) that depicts\u2026well, I\u2019m not even going to say. Look up the legend yourself (but you probably already have).<\/p>\n

\n\tMargot (Barbie Ferreira<\/a>), the heroine of \u201cFaces of Death,\u201d is a shy Zoomer who works as a content moderator for a platform called Kino that is, among other things, a viral shopping mall of transgressive video. Her job is to separate the real from the fake, the just-forbidden-enough-to-be-titillating from the too-taboo-to-post, and to flag content that goes over the line (though given what doesn\u2019t go over the line, it\u2019s a little hard to tell what the criteria is). Margot is played by Barbie Ferreira, the gifted actor from \u201cEuphoria\u201d and \u201cBob Trevino Likes It,\u201d<\/a> who brings the character a winsome insecurity that makes her more distinctive than the usual final girl.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe main reason that Margot is so skittish is she\u2019s still reeling from a slice of video infamy in her own past: She was part of a train-track stunt in which her sister was killed, right on camera. And this has lent Margot a debased sort of celebrity. She likes to hide away in her corporate cubicle, where lately, on the job, she\u2019s been seeing underground videos of ritualized death (a gruesome electrocution; a man with his head through a table being beaten by hammers \u2014 and then his brains get eaten) that look real but might be fake. Are they connected? It\u2019s through her roommate, the queer horror buff Ryan (Aaron Holliday, who\u2019s like the second coming of Taylor Negron), that she discovers the original \u201cFaces of Death,\u201d and learns that the murders she\u2019s been seeing are copycat versions of the ones in that film.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWe know the new murders are real, because we\u2019ve been following the stealth moves of the killer, Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), who kidnaps third-rate celebrities \u2014 an obnoxious influencer (Josie Totah), a local news anchor (Kurt Yue) \u2014 and places them in cages in the basement of his faux-grand cookie-cutter Florida suburban home, where they\u2019ll wait their turn to be featured in one of his viral snuff films. Dacre Montgomery has an aristocratic baby face, and his Arthur is good at putting on personalities: the geek, the righteous neighbor who\u2019s been trespassed. He wears an eerie white death mask when he\u2019s doing the kidnapping, and a stocking mask when he\u2019s doing the killing. But he\u2019s most interesting when he makes a speech about the taboo-video industrial complex. He explains that the Internet loves him; that gun manufacturers love him (because people want to protect their homes); that the government loves him (because more paranoia means more control). To use the film\u2019s invocation of an old clich\u00e9, he\u2019s \u201cgiving the people what they want.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat a sicko like Arthur isn\u2019t just a serial killer \u2014 he\u2019s part of the new anything-goes attention economy! \u2014 is a notion that\u2019s provocative in a facile way. Yet that\u2019s part of what gives \u201cFaces of Death\u201d the interesting texture of an old grindhouse movie; they often had ideas too. \u201cFaces of Death\u201d is \u201cambitious\u201d trash, with the courage of its own gaudy thematic grandiloquence. (It\u2019s the only movie I\u2019ve seen where the publicity material contains a folder of \u201cCensored Posters,\u201d for that transgressive marketing effect.) The whole allure of staring death in the face on film wasn\u2019t born in the \u201970s, of course. It goes all the way back to movies like \u201cFrankenstein\u201d and \u201cThe Mummy.\u201d But \u201cFaces of Death\u201d taps into a creepy 21st-century voyeurism: the pornography of death. That\u2019s what the 1978 \u201cFaces of Death\u201d was really about \u2014 our desire to glimpse something so forbidden that it felt uncanny. We call it horror, but that word, in a way, is misplaced. What we\u2019re really looking for is awe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the 1970s, when horror movies started to get more and more extreme, it wasn\u2019t just the blood…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":515436,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[148140,96,148142,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-515435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-barbie-ferreira","tag-entertainment","tag-faces-of-death","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/515436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}