“Faces of Death” Review: A Smart Remake of One of the Most Notorious Horror Films Ever, Reimagined for the Social Media Age
According to CinemaDrame News Agency, Daniel Goldhaber has updated a cursed videotape for an era in which we all carry “snuff films” (real killings) in our pockets.
It is rather unfortunate that the “Scream” franchise has lost its vitality everywhere except at the box office, because Daniel Goldhaber’s meta-cinematic “Faces of Death” is sharp enough to take down this self-repeating idol on its own. Far uglier and more purposeful than Paramount’s money-making machine, the film reflects on media consumption, the “rules” of the game, and our fractured relationship with the pervasive imagery of violence. Goldhaber exhumes one of the most infamous horror films in history to shudder at the banality that real-death videos have acquired in the age of social media. This is a postmodern slasher—smart, entertaining, and deeply unsettling—that understands it cannot produce anything scarier than what people scroll through on their phones every day.
Consider the difference in context in 1978, when the original “Faces of Death,” directed by John Alan Schwartz, was released. That film—revered in Goldhaber’s new work as the “first viral video”—was a cheap but highly profitable mockumentary in which a pathologist named Francis B. Gross narrated a series of staged executions. At the time, rumors spread that everything was real, and the film became a kind of “cursed object.” Today, every teenager in America walks into school with a portal in their pocket that allows—or encourages—them to witness the world’s crimes in real time, all while a handful of tech giants profit from that morbid attention.
Goldhaber’s “Faces of Death” is tense when it wants to be, but this reimagining derives its unease less from jump scares and more from the disturbing thrill of mapping fear onto an economy where “attention” has become more valuable than “life” itself. Margo, played by Barbie Ferreira (star of “Euphoria”), is still grappling with the trauma and shock of her sister’s death in a viral video when she lands a new job as a content moderator for a TikTok-like video app called “Kino.” Her role is to review an endless stream of reported posts. While company policy requires her to remove any sexual content, the opposite is true for violence: Margo is only allowed to take down the most graphic clips if she can definitively prove they are “real.”
Opposite her is Arthur (played by Dacre Montgomery of “Stranger Things”), a mobile shop employee who uses company data to track and abduct influencers, then murders them in videos that recreate the killings from the original “Faces of Death.” The killer uses the artificial effects of the old film as a cover for the reality of his crimes.
The film’s conceptual horror is rooted in the sinister nature of a system where the moral value of collective viewing is outsourced to corporations whose profits depend on denying any moral value to that very act of spectatorship. The slogan “Give people what they want” is shared equally by app executives and serial killers.
While some aspects of the film falter slightly in terms of logic, and a cameo by Charli XCX feels somewhat disconnected from the main narrative, “Faces of Death” is a work that clearly understands the urgency of critiquing our video ecosystem in the age of AI dominance. As one character says in the film: “Remakes let you get away with murder.” The film suggests that escaping punishment for murder is the easy part—the hard part is making people care that others are being killed.
Grade: B+
Independent Film Company will release “Faces of Death” in theaters on Friday, April 10, 2026.
