Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei on Faces of Death

Barely a year passes without some beloved, or at least notorious, horror-movie series getting a new lease of life with a remake or legacy-sequel treatment. So, it’s not entirely surprising that a major Hollywood production company (Legendary, in this case) saw untapped potential in reviving the infamous Faces of Death brand of exploitation mockumentaries, kickstarted by director John Alan Schwartz in 1978. That original film took the form of a collection of gruesome demises from various sources, a large number of which were staged and faked for the film, though some was archival footage of real deaths and their aftermath.

Just don’t view the 2026 version of Faces of Death – now a narrative feature with actual characters and recognisable faces (Euphoria’s Barbie Ferreira, Stranger Things’ Dacre Montgomery, general pop culture’s Charli xcx) – as a remake, per se. “If you wanna see a remake of Faces of Death, go watch a dashcam compilation on YouTube,” director and co-writer Daniel Goldhaber tells me. “That’s the thesis of the film in some sense.

“I consider it an essay film,” he continues, “a movie that’s about where Faces of Death exists today. From a genre perspective, the film that I think exists closest to this movie is Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets." That low-budget 1968 feature, Bogdanovich's first, combined footage from the creaky Boris Karloff horror film The Terror with new footage of Karloff playing a fictionalised version of himself, and a parallel plot involving a serial killer. “[That film] remixes another [pre-existing] movie into a film about mass violence in media in America, in an attempt to get to a deeper truth about our relationship with violent images,” says Goldhaber.

In the new Faces of Death, a sadistic killer (Montgomery) murders victims in homemade recreations of the original’s most iconic scenes, uploading footage to a TikTok-like platform with the 1978 film’s narration, where it might slip through without trouble as a memetic remixing of special-effects wizardry. A young content moderator (Ferreira), haunted by her own viral-video tragedy, suspects the clips may be all too real.

Faces of Death is directed by Goldhaber (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and co-written with Isa Mazzei, his close collaborator on the 2018 tech horror Cam, in which an online sex worker has her identity stolen by a digital doppelgänger. Both movies are credited as 'A film by' the two of them.

“It’s engaging and grappling with some of the same core tenets of the original, but in a very different way,” Mazzei says of their new film. “I think it would actually be disingenuous to refer to it as an adaptation, remake or sequel. You can do it; a lot of people do! I feel weird saying that it is because I feel like that promise is something that we don’t actually deliver on. When we first pitched this back in 2019, we were very interested in delving into how violent imagery has evolved since the original [film], now that we have this digital plethora of violence in front of us every day.”

“One of the things we thought was interesting,” adds Goldhaber, “was the idea that the same impulse that is leading platforms like Meta, TikTok and Google to sell ad space on real-life snuff films is similar to the incentive that’s leading a [production] company like Legendary to wanna jack in to the algorithm and try to extract additional value from a property like Faces of Death. We thought, well, if we can make a movie that’s at least honest about that kind of incentive and impulse to go and do something like this, we can hold a mirror up to the reality of the fact that death has become big business for major media companies.”

Various external factors have led to Faces of Death, which was shot in 2023, coming out a few years later than originally intended. Among other things, it makes the tininess of Charli xcx’s supporting role a little funnier. “If we’d come out earlier, we’d have been her first movie,” Mazzei notes. But it's dated in other ways too, with no mention of the recent plague of generative-AI videos informing the screenplay. In some ways, though, the film was almost destined to feel like a time capsule of online life, basically immediately. “We’re big believers in movies that can confront the moment that we live in, in a universal capacity,” Goldhaber says. “But the moment that we live in culturally is changing incredibly rapidly. And I think it’s really interesting that a movie set in 2024 is, in some ways, such a period piece in 2026.”

Part of why Goldhaber and Mazzei's film works so well is that the zeitgeist-focused commentary is always intertwined with the two-pronged character study at the centre, rather than dominating it. This extends to which clips serial killer Arthur chooses to homage. “With his motivations for why he’s recreating these videos,” Mazzei says, “he would choose the ones that are most iconic, most beloved, most remembered, most horrifying. [In fact], we actually had walkouts during one of our test screenings and it was during the monkey scene. The [footage of the] original monkey scene, not our remake of the monkey scene!”

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Faces of Death has its UK premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival on 18 Aug as part of its Midnight Madness strand and is released later in the year by Signature Entertainment