{"id":245320,"date":"2026-03-31T17:08:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T17:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/245320\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T17:08:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T17:08:11","slug":"a-new-faces-of-death-feels-just-as-dangerous-heres-how-they-remade-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/245320\/","title":{"rendered":"A new ‘Faces of Death’ feels just as dangerous. Here’s how they remade it"},"content":{"rendered":"

p]:text-cms-story-body-color-text clearfix”> <\/p>\n

Maybe you saw it during an \u201980s sleepover. Or as part of a dare. Presented as a macabre mix tape of actual death caught on film and video, the original \u201cFaces of Death,\u201d first released in 1978, became a viral sensation in an era when that meant videotapes traded hand-to-hand.<\/p>\n

To be clear, the movie wasn\u2019t what it claimed to be, but a bizarre blend of staged scenes and found footage, which only heightened its notoriety as an unclean object. That it was banned in numerous countries only became part of its hook.<\/p>\n

All of which makes it not the most obvious remake-friendly IP. But a new \u201cFaces of Death\u201d puts a decidedly contemporary spin on the story while keeping its volatile sense of disorientation and danger. Director Daniel Goldhaber, among the most dynamic young American filmmakers and whose previous features \u2014 \u201cCam,\u201d an identity thriller set in the world of online cam-girls, and \u201cHow to Blow Up A Pipeline,\u201d<\/a> a heist caper about radical eco-activists \u2014 both have a furious sense of cultural engagement, makes for a seemingly unlikely choice for the project.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think \u2018Faces of Death\u2019 is inherently an extremely political object,\u201d says Goldhaber, 34, talking about the post-Vietnam context of the original faux-doc during a recent lunch in a West Hollywood cafe. \u201cEven if you look at the film itself, it deals explicitly in linking domestic violence to genocide. I think the movie actually has quite a lot on its mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goldhaber describes himself as someone who grew up on the internet. Originally from Boulder, Colo., he was kicked out of five schools while growing up before eventually attending Harvard.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething that I have been feeling since I was young is a sense of difficulty connecting in real life,\u201d he says. \u201cBut then a feeling that the way that I was connecting through this kind of mediated platform was also fundamentally disrupting my sense of self.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Barbie Ferreira and Dacre Montgomery in the movie \u201cFaces of Death.\u201d<\/p>\n

(IFC Films \/ Shudder)<\/p>\n

Bringing a new \u201cFaces of Death\u201d to the screen has been a long process. It was sometime in 2019 when Goldhaber and his frequent collaborator Isa Mazzei first worked up a pitch after being approached by executives at Legendary Entertainment about the project. The finished movie will finally have its world premiere on April 5 as part of the inaugural Beyond Chicago<\/a>, then play L.A.\u2019s Aero Theater on April 7 and the Overlook Film Festival, a horror connoisseur\u2019s mecca in New Orleans, on the 9th before being released nationwide in theaters on April 10 by IFC and Shudder.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you go back and watch the original, you\u2019re like, \u2018Oh, this isn\u2019t particularly good,\u2019\u201d says Goldhaber in a deep baritone with a quiet, steady confidence. \u201cThese aren\u2019t particularly convincing special makeup effects. We\u2019ve seen beheadings \u2014 we actually know what that looks like and this isn\u2019t quite believable anymore. And there\u2019s something very profound about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is it like living in a world in which you can see anything you want at any time that you want?\u201d he asks. \u201cWhat does it mean when the most cursed and terrifying piece of media that most people could name is now beamed into everybody\u2019s pocket 24 hours a day? And the largest tech companies in the world are extracting profit from it? That feels like a profoundly disturbing shift in our relationship to violence and media.\u201d<\/p>\n

Where the original film centered around a scientist-interlocuter (actually an actor, Michael Carr) guiding viewers through a tour of the grisly footage, the new film has a proper plot. A young woman in Louisiana, Margot (Barbie Ferreira<\/a>), who has isolated herself after a brush with internet infamy, is an online content moderator for a short-form video platform. Every day, she steeps herself in the worst imagery the internet has to offer. When she notices a series of videos that seem to be all too real, she comes to realize they are re-creating snuff scenes from the infamous \u201cFaces of Death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her unofficial investigation brings her to the attention of the unstable man behind the videos (a deeply unsettling Dacre Montgomery), who decides to make her his next victim, setting in motion a game of cat and mouse. Musician and actor Charli XCX also has a small role as one of Margot\u2019s co-workers with a far more blas\u00e9 attitude to what they do.<\/p>\n

In a video interview from her home in Los Angeles, actor Ferreira says while shooting \u201cFaces\u201d she was listening to a lot of true crime podcasts, watching violent online videos and had to actively protect her vocal cords. \u201cBeing a scream queen is not that easy,\u201d she says with a laugh.<\/p>\n

Once shooting was done, she says she decompressed by watching \u201cSpongeBob SquarePants\u201d and decidedly more wholesome fare, \u201cjust to make sure that the brain was cleared out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ferreira initially gained notoriety as an online personality with a popular Tumblr account before transitioning to modeling and then acting, most notably in the first two seasons of the series \u201cEuphoria.\u201d<\/a> She quickly connected with Goldhaber and Mazzei\u2019s script.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, the internet has always been this really incredible tool, because it\u2019s helped me for getting me everywhere that I am now,\u201d says Ferreira. \u201cBut it\u2019s also very dangerous. I have a lot of boundaries and lines around what I can do, for myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t regret how difficult the process has been,\u201d says Goldhaber. \u201cI think it\u2019s made for a cultural object that I hope is going to entertain people and scare them and also make them think.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Sila Shiloni \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n

Goldhaber and Mazzei briefly dated in high school in Boulder, where they both grew up.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a very cute story,\u201d admits Mazzei in a separate call from Los Angeles. \u201cWe\u2019ve had such an enduring friendship after being high school sweethearts. It\u2019s kind of nice.\u201d<\/p>\n

The pair would go on to collaborate on local theater productions and eventually films. \u201cFaces of Death\u201d is formally credited on-screen as \u201ca film by Isa Mazzei & Daniel Goldhaber.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe really wants to involve people to the level that they want to be involved,\u201d says Mazzei, co-writer and executive producer on \u201cFaces,\u201d of Goldhaber\u2019s ability to be inclusive. \u201cThere\u2019s definitely his vision. But any film is so collaborative that it\u2019s hard to parse out who actually came up with what. I think that people are drawn to working with Danny because he does make you better. He pushes you to find the best thing in yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mazzei adds, \u201cUnfortunately with the structure of the way credits work, there\u2019s no actual official way to say, \u2018Hey, we made this movie together\u2019 other than to share a film-by credit. But that\u2019s very much what it was. From the beginning, we came up with every step together, we cast it together, we did all of that together.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think he\u2019s the future,\u201d says Ferreira, quick to recognize Mazzei as well. \u201cThey have fresh eyes on the way that we think of contemporary cinema. I like the way that they think and I like the way that they present their art. And so I was really aligned with them immediately.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goldhaber recalls the summer in the early 2010s he spent as a content moderator for a fledgling internet company a \u201cfundamental point of inspiration.\u201d He learned then that people who post extreme content often flock to new sites and flood the system until they are shut out and eventually move on to somewhere else. Goldhaber saw content so disturbing that he prefers not to talk about it. \u201cI don\u2019t know if I want to say,\u201d he adds quietly. \u201cI mean, really upsetting stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of a sudden I\u2019m looking at really horrific images and at first you have nightmares \u2014 and at a certain point you kind of adjust,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I found that really disturbing. I also thought that it was an interesting prompt for a movie that could be a riff on \u2018Blow-Up,\u2019 \u2018Blow Out,\u2019 \u2018The Conversation,\u2019 these movies about somebody who finds something and then they can\u2019t stop digging into it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of the imagery seen by Ferreira\u2019s character is genuine content culled from online, carefully trimmed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe always knew that there would be real death in our movie,\u201d Goldhaber says. \u201cIt was extremely hard to get that content into a wide-release theatrical motion picture. It was one of the big struggles of this movie because I think it\u2019s one thing when you\u2019re watching this privately on your phone. It\u2019s another thing when it\u2019s being recontextualized as part of a communal experience in a theater. There\u2019s a much greater sense of moral peril to consuming that. And that was the exact provocation that we were interested in. There was always something dangerous about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goldhaber says the film was \u201c100% finished\u201d around June 2024, adding, \u201cI haven\u2019t seen the movie in two years.\u201d In the time since, he has been working on a number of other projects in development and has most recently been living in Berlin.<\/p>\n

As to the delay in the film\u2019s release, Goldhaber says, \u201cIt ultimately just took time to find a distributor that was willing to really stand behind what we\u2019re saying. And that\u2019s not always a partnership that can be formed quickly. It just took time.\u201d<\/p>\n

His prior movie \u201cHow to Blow Up a Pipeline\u201d originally premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022 and was released theatrically in 2023. Though it had strong reviews and an exciting young cast, it failed to catch on with broader audiences, only bringing in around $1 million at the box office.<\/p>\n

For Goldhaber, the response to \u201cPipeline\u201d became instructive for his work becoming less prescriptive. He points to Ari Aster\u2019s small-town social satire \u201cEddington\u201d<\/a> as a film that is reflective of its moment without being didactic.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not that I was saying, \u2018Hey, go blow up pipelines,\u2019 but [rather] really think about how you\u2019re engaging in this conversation,\u201d he says, \u201cthink about the kind of actual moral calculus of the world around you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Dacre Montgomery in the movie \u201cFaces of Death.\u201d<\/p>\n

(IFC Films \/ Shudder)<\/p>\n

Having worked hard to obtain an R rating, the \u201cFaces of Death\u201d team has more recently run into issues with the MPA regarding the imagery on its posters. Putting the experience of making \u201cFaces of Death\u201d in perspective, Goldhaber references Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s famous dictum that every film is a documentary of its own making.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think when you are making a film that is confronting one of the ultimate taboos in cinema, you\u2019re going to have a tough time,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I was a bit naive to think it would somehow be smoother. But I don\u2019t regret how difficult the process has been because I think it\u2019s made for a cultural object that I hope is going to entertain people and scare them and also make them think.\u201d<\/p>\n

And while many of today\u2019s filmmakers retreat into period pieces or fantasy because they do not want to show a world of smartphones and the way life is lived now, Goldhaber\u2019s \u201cFaces of Death\u201d confronts contemporary technology head on.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that people are choosing not to depict it,\u201d Goldhaber says of the relationship between modern movies and modern life. \u201cNow, every day we send GIFs, we send photos, we send videos, we send memes. It\u2019s a different way of communicating with one another. And I think it\u2019s incumbent on filmmakers to reflect the modes of language of the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem is that a lot of the filmmakers who have the most presence in the industry, the most power, did not grow up in that media environment,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd so as a result, they\u2019re making films that are fundamentally out of step with the current times.<\/p>\n

He points to Mark Fischbach\u2019s \u201cIron Lung,\u201d a low-budget self-distributed sci-fi horror film that earlier this year successfully transitioned an audience from YouTube to movie theaters as a point of inspiration and possible path forward.<\/p>\n

Goldhaber\u2019s reimagining of an ominous relic from an earlier era of media consumption may capture for audiences the sensation, for better or worse, of what life can be like in an ultra-connected world.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs much as Hollywood wants to tell the story to itself that it\u2019s dying or that theatrical is dying,\u201d says Goldhaber, \u201cthe problem is not that audiences don\u2019t want to go to the theater. The problem is that they are not getting movies that are really made for them, that reflect their lives the way Hollywood at its best has always reflected the world around it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fearlessly revisiting a project many thought shouldn\u2019t be touched, Goldhaber is pushing Hollywood toward an uncertain future \u2014 whether it wants to go there or not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"p]:text-cms-story-body-color-text clearfix”> Maybe you saw it during an \u201980s sleepover. Or as part of a dare. Presented as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":245321,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[109810,20675,109809,339,24089,1924,109807,2585,48,52,51,47,50,49,109808,4722,4287,1459,5050,8843,8074],"class_list":{"0":"post-245320","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-aero-theater","9":"tag-april","10":"tag-barbie-ferreira","11":"tag-death","12":"tag-faces","13":"tag-film","14":"tag-goldhaber","15":"tag-internet","16":"tag-la","17":"tag-la-headlines","18":"tag-la-news","19":"tag-los-angeles","20":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","21":"tag-los-angeles-news","22":"tag-mazzei","23":"tag-most-people","24":"tag-movie","25":"tag-part","26":"tag-video","27":"tag-way","28":"tag-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}