‘Faces of Death’ Review: One of the Most Notorious Horror Movies Ever Made Gets Smartly Resurrected for the Social Media Era
Why it matters: The film leverages the original's notoriety to critique how tech giants profit from the morbid attention generated by real-time atrocities.
- Daniel Goldhaber's new "Faces of Death" is a post-modern slasher that reflects on media consumption and our detached relationship to ubiquitous violence.
- John Alan Schwartz's original 1978 "Faces of Death" was a cheap, profitable faux-documentary that became an urban legend due to rumors of its authenticity, branded as a "cursed object."
- Goldhaber's film argues that while the original was "banned in 46 countries," the concept of profiting from morbid attention has become the world's most lucrative business model in the age of social media.
- The remake is less about slow-building jolts and more about the "queasy thrill of mapping fear onto an economy in which attention has become more valuable than life."
Daniel Goldhaber's new meta-horror film, also titled "Faces of Death," resurrects the notorious 1978 faux-documentary to critique modern media consumption and the desensitization to violence in the social media age. Unlike the original, which thrived on rumors of its authenticity, the remake explores how ubiquitous digital violence has flattened atrocities into mere digital wallpaper, making everything feel equally fake.
