Shudder and IFC just dropped the trailer for Faces of Death. The meta horror remake of the notorious 1978 faux documentary hits theaters on April 10th. This is IFC’s widest release to date.
The film is rated R for basically everything. Strong bloody violence and gore and sexual content and nudity and language and drug use. You get it.
The Premise is Actually Timely
The remake follows a content moderator for a YouTube-like platform. Her job is filtering out violent content all day. She discovers a group re-enacting murders from the original 1978 film. The question becomes whether these killings are real or staged. In an age of deepfakes and misinformation that premise hits different.
Barbie Ferreira from Euphoria leads the cast. Dacre Montgomery from Stranger Things co-stars along with Josie Totah and Jermaine Fowler. Pop star Charli XCX also appears because apparently this needed a pop star.
Daniel Goldhaber directed this. He previously made Cam and How to Blow Up a Pipeline. He co-wrote the script with Isa Mazzei who also worked on Cam with him. Goldhaber said the original was one of the first viral video tapes. Now he’s updating that “is it real or not” premise for the internet age where nothing feels real anymore.
The 1978 Faces of Death purported to show real footage of people dying. Most of it was staged but that didn’t matter. The movie got banned in multiple countries and became a VHS era rite of passage. Every generation had that one friend with a bootleg copy.
We’re constantly questioning what we see online now. Deepfakes exist. AI-generated content floods everything. Misinformation spreads faster than truth. A content moderator discovering potentially real snuff films disguised as staged horror feels genuinely relevant.
Faces of Death opens in theaters and on Shudder on April 10th. This will either be brilliant or a complete disaster. Probably no middle ground.