Faces of Death
Writers: Isa Mazzei, Daniel Goldhaber
Director: Daniel Goldhaber
Cast: Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, Josie Totah, Aaron Holliday, Jermaine Fowler, Charli XCX
You can't remake Faces of Death. I mean, you can, but trying to recapture anything like the sinister aura hanging over John Alan Schwartz's 1978 cult classic feels like a futile exercise. If you were around for the early days of VHS and Video Nasties, or the days of file sharing when every graphic video on LimeWire claimed to be a "Faces of Death" excerpt, or even the rise of boutique physical media studios remastering and boosting the darkest genre films ever made, you know the spell that film casts, and you know it's unrepeatable.
How do you remake Faces of Death? You don't, and fortunately the 2026 re-imaginging, directed by Daniel Goldhaber and co-written by Isa Mazzei and Goldhaber, doesn't try. At least, not in the way you might think. This could have been an empty exercise in graphic violence for the sake of graphic violence, a gore fest paying tribute to one of the most infamous gore fests in movie history, and while it might have entertained, it would have rung hollow. Instead, we get an ambitious, fast-paced game of cat-and-mouse packed with big ideas, and while it doesn't always work, it feels like something fresh and frightening, and that's not just a relief but a delight.
Margot (Barbie Ferreira) is a content moderator with a dark past. Years earlier, she lost her sister in an accident while they made a viral video together, and ever since then she's been completely unplugged for the internet, save for the time she spends at work, watching offensive, graphic, and violent videos and placing warnings and bans on behalf of a TikTok-like video sharing social platform. She's good at her job, she's liked by her coworkers, and she loves her roommate Ryan (Aaron Holliday). But something's wrong.
Lately, Margot's been seeing a series of videos all following the same format: An apparent, elaborately staged murder posted by a mysterious user, always set to the same droning, haunting voiceover. Though her bosses are convinced they're simply staged bite-sized horror, Margot digs deeper, until she stumbles upon Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), a serial killer whose death scenes are re-enactments of the original Faces of Death film, scene by scene. And if Margot has any hope of stopping him, she's either going to have to convince someone that this insane scheme is genuine, or she's going to have to do it herself.
So, while the film itself isn't remaking Faces of Death, one of the characters within the film is, adding a metafictional layer to a film that was already positioned to be a social commentary on our appetite for violence. The original Faces of Death film walks a fine line between exploitation and apparently genuine exploration of our morbid fascinations, but Goldhaber and Mazzie's film takes those fascinations as a given. Of course, in the age of streaming on our phones and flooding our brains with short videos of every possible configuration, we have nurtured our own morbidity, and with our willingness to slow down (metaphorically and literally speaking) and look at car crashes. After all, a car crash is just a tap away on your phone at all times if you want it, which only complicates things for Margot when she starts to suspect these murders are more than just a content creator seeking infamy.
Fittingly, this kind of exploration also lays bare some issues with the film, which happen to mirror the issues with the original Faces of Death. After all, we're still watching this movie, aren't we? We're seeing ourselves, as horror fans, in the faces of those around Margot who find graphic videos, if not entertaining, then at least a part of life in the internet age. The original film was something you had to find, something lurking in the darker corners of video stores or flea markets or, eventually, on file-sharing sites where, if you got lucky, you actually found the real thing and not just some gross news clip. Now we often have to actively hide from this kind of content if we want to avoid it as adults plugged into a Wifi signal 24 hours a day, and the 2026 Faces of Death never quite reckons with that. Some of that is a simple lack of time to unpack it all, but watching the film strain against its premise to impart a lot of meaning in just 100 minutes, you can't help but feel like some of these ideas could have been considered a bit more deeply, or simply scrapped altogether.
Issues with the thematic explorations aside, though, Faces of Death works best when it's a two-hander psychological thriller, pitting Margot against Arthur and vice versa. Ferreira is wonderful in the leading role, emphasizing Margot's fragility as someone with PTSD over past traumas while also never letting go of her inherent fight and spirit. Montgomery, as her opposite, is suitably slimy and menacing, a perfect foil for Margot's seemingly boundless energy and obsession. Together they will this film to work even when it stumbles, and when combined with Goldhaber's direction and Mazzei's smart staging, it's very hard to look away.
Faces of Death will never achieve the infamy of its predecessor, or the strange cursed aura which has surrounded it for nearly five decades, so it simply doesn't try. Instead, it becomes a youthful, unrelenting thriller, packed with memorable gore, exploring what it means when we try to recreate that infamy, and what it does to our souls along the way. It's a film worth any horror fan's time, even if you've never so much as glimpsed the original.
Faces of Death is now playing in theaters.
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