Faces of Death (2026) has a 100 Gecs-inspired end credits song which intercuts its incomprehensibly machined vocals with monologue from Faces of Death (1978). It’s awesome, and I need that OST ASAP because I want to listen to it (at least) 100 more times.

…

And I’m starting at the end because I think it exemplifies what makes Faces of Death (2026) so much more interesting and worthwhile than it has any right to be.

Not that that’s a high bar. Honestly, it's hard to imagine a move more strategically cynical than acquiring the rights to and then rebooting Faces of Death, a “franchise” that is really more of a “branding exercise” for a particularly vicious set of movies that mix very-realistic-but-definitely-staged murders alongside actual footage of dead and dying people (sometimes with staged footage expanding real moments). At first, this was presented like a documentary but it's really just like the most fucked-up compilation video imaginable. 

And though that first film played in theaters, it was the VHS release in 1983 that really cemented its place in gorehound history. We know now what is and isn't real, but back then? It may as well have been an honest-to-goodness snuff film. 

Which… ew. Did I watch Cannibal Holocaust instead of going to Junior prom? Yes. Have I seen A Serbian Film twice? Sure have. Have I watched two of the three August Undergound films which are themselves faux-snuff? Yep! And I even liked one of them… kind of.

But I’ve never been interested in Faces of Death because I don’t want to see the real thing at all. I don't like real violence. And I never have. I don't watch boxing or MMA. I ignored the truck trying to get tourists on Koh Phagnan to come see a Real Muy Thai fight all fifty times it drove by me. Like… no.

Yet obviously there are people who do like real violence, who want to see the most horrible shit imaginable and giddily passed around a VHS then and probably pass around LiveLeak links now… or whatever horrible stuff makes it past the moderators/censors of the major platforms. A lot has changed in the last 48 years, and I guess the only way to even try to justify making a new Faces of Death movie is to explicitly reckon with those changes.

Which is exactly what it does. The film follows two people: Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), attention-seeking psychopath named who has begun posting recreations of sequences from the original film (tagged #fod2024 to give you a sense of how long they’ve been looking for a distributor) that show up in the queue of content moderator Margot (Barbie Ferreira), who initially thinks they’re fake but slowly realizes that they are quite real and tries to find and stop him. 

Just over 4 years ago, I wrote a short script called ConSan (short for Content Sanitation). It was inspired by the article “The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America” and centers on two content moderators having a semi-philosophical argument about whether to approve or reject a video in which the CEO of their company beats a man to death. The debate takes too long, flagging their conversation for corporate review… smash cut to another moderator logging in, seeing a video of them being buried alive, saying “Oh that's where they went,” and rejecting it while eating a potato chip. 

Bleak!

ConSan was not really about content moderation so much as corporate exploitation: It took place in a brightly colored room with couches that you’d quickly be flagged for using. One of the two moderators was being forced to work a double overnight because she missed an earlier shift after being hit by a car. Instead of checking fingerprints, the identification/clock-in takes a fingerprick of blood, which caused “An uproar for a week before everyone moved on.” These things are over-the-top, yes, but honestly: barely. 

What’s the difference between that little bit of physical pain and the real mental anguish that these people experience? At best, a content moderator will be desensitized to the most horrible shit in the world. And the rest become legitimately traumatized in ways that can completely upend their lives. 

It’s dehumanization on top of dehumanization.

Faces of Death director/co-writer Daniel Goldhaber (whose prior directorial/co-writing effort, How to Blow up a Pipeline, was my favorite film of 2022) briefly content-moderated for a friend’s social media start-up, which he was able to draw on… though this movie is also not about content moderation, because while he was doing the work he was struck by the fact that other than the CSAM (which is a pretty big “other than,” I’ll admit), he had seen all of these kinds of horrific images before. Not so concentrated, sure, but this isn’t new imagery.

So it makes sense that the first #fod2024 video is a pretty straightforward decapitation, reminiscent of the kind of thing you see on the news: who hasn’t seen one at this point?

Of course Margot lets it go as “Probably fake” and in general just isn’t so bothered by it. There are so many other horrible things around it, and a lot of those are actually really real, because the production figured it was easier to license a video of someone being hurt real bad than to recreate it (safely), and also it’s in keeping with the franchise roots, and also also it is much easier to make a point about the lengths people will go to receive attention online if you’re using actual examples of people going to great lengths to receive attention online!

(The logistics around this are a big part of why ConSan didn’t make it past the script.)

But amongst these real clips is another (fake) one that points to the censorious nature of the policies that moderators are asked to enact: an explanation of the proper administration of Narcan following an overdose. It’s literally life-saving information, more important than anything we have seen Margot allowed… yet after a few seconds she rejects it on the grounds of “Drug Use.” 

Infuriating. 

In particular because she clearly believes that she is doing good. She thinks her work is Important, in part because if someone else had been doing a better job previously, she would be able to go out in public. She wouldn’t be known as “Train Girl” because people wouldn’t have seen her sister get hit by a train while the two of them were filming by some tracks. Of course an event like that would drive someone to believe in the value of content moderation. But also: considering how everyone seems to recognize her, clearly that video went viral as fuck, and that’s good for business. When Arthur’s second video comes across Margot’s feed, doubt starts to creep in, but her boss says “Eh it’s probably fake so it’s probably fine and anyways it’s getting engagement, right, so give the people what they want.”

Infuriating.

And it’s weird to Ask for Attention about a movie Asking for Attention about The Attention Economy. This film is as subtle as three mannequins cracking your skull with hammers, and any critiques I might have about that critique are inevitably filtered through a deep desire to have people Engage With My Content or whatever, be that on this newsletter or in the eventual YouTube video. I am in competition with the actual Faces of Death (2026) and also Faces of Death (1978) and literally every single other thing. The Week I Review the YouTube channel died because I couldn’t play the game well enough. I wasn’t able to commit to vying for attention at scale. I hope that more people join this newsletter because I want to write for more people and I hope that those people enjoy what I write, but I dunno man… it’s tough out there. 

And so if you’ve got a specific kind of brain, you can see how someone might want to do a version of what Arthur is doing, because the trick isn’t just that he’s remaking the murders but for real – harkening back to this thing that some people kinda remember… it’s that he’s doing so underneath the audio from Faces of Death (1978): murder-syncing to the original track.

Like 99% of TikToks you’ve ever seen. 

And it inspires a whole host of remakes and parodies and etc. of its own, because that’s how the game is played. He knows that silently going live while showing his handiwork is exactly how you get people ravenously craving That Next Hit. And the victims are by-and-large people who you might kinda recognize: oh that’s that filmmaker… oh he’s on the local news… oh I saw her dance video where she was at the pool so that she could wear a revealing bathing suit without being flagged. If you think about it, he’s really the ultimate collab.

But Faces of Death doesn’t look quite as “good” as it needs to to fully sell this. I could easily go down some kind of weird rhetorical rabbit hole about “wanting to actually see actual-looking violence” but the simple fact is that a Faces of Death movie cannot look fake. It fails in its core mission the instant you stop thinking about what’s happening because that chopped up body looks silly as hell and wow the compositing on the smoke coming off the “acid” being poured over it is terrible. The horror needs to be horrible. And when it is, the movie is deeply affecting, but… like, when some guns go off later on? That shit’s weak as hell.

And I’m annoyed at how big of a problem it is, because I understand that it is ultimately a function of being a lower budget production: to safely blow a hole through that fence while someone was climbing it absolutely would have taken money they didn’t have… but if all you’re gonna do is put a lil puff of smoke and tiny mark, just don’t have guns. I know it’s hard to tell a story about violence in America without guns, but it doesn’t work and it makes the movie measurably worse.

(Not unrelated: The finale of The White Lotus Season 3 had a lot of problems, but the amateur-ass shootout at the end was really the biggest for me. It looked so bad.) 

Yet despite all that, there's still a lot to like and a lot to chew on. At times, it gave me Assassination Nation vibes (shame that Ferreira left Euphoria, though I understand why), which is canonically my favorite movie so 👍👍I think the two would actually make a pretty good double feature…

But the movie I would really pair it with is Pascal Plante’s (much more serious) Red Rooms, which I have thought about at least once a week since I saw it 56 weeks ago. It follows Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a model who is fixated on the trial of an alleged child killer who made the videos of those killings available for purchase on the internet… It’s extremely good and got under my skin in a way that very few movies ever have. And more importantly, it is coming at some some of the same ideas about the way we glorify violence and obsess over it and fuel it with attention, but from a totally different (and complementary) perspective. Like, it’s easy to imagine a Kelly-Anne-type fixation being pointed towards Arthur; indeed, we see the growing followership in the comments. 

What really binds them is their understanding of digital dynamics. My friend Garth called Red Rooms a top contender for “Best Movie About the Internet,” and I think Faces of Death should be in contention as well. I dunno if we’ve quite crossed the rubicon, but increasingly films are being made by people who grew up both connected and isolated by this technology: there are extended sequences where Margot uses Reddit to try to figure out what’s going on and who’s behind it. 

And it feels natural or even necessary. Like, how could you not directly reference Don’t Fuck with Cats in this context? Goldhaber and co-writer Isa Mazzei understood the assignment, as it were. They understood how to take this franchise – this branding exercise – and do something genuinely compelling with it. They did everything they could to justify the existence of this arguably unjustifiable production.

They came pretty dang close. 

Seven Point Five out of Ten