Times have changed. No longer will you need to get an underground VHS copy of the cult movie Faces of Death at your video store; with a subscription to Shudder, starting next month you can just stream it at home with a click of a button.
The 1978 shocker was “banned in 46 countries” according to the tagline. It became a part of the UK’s video nasty movement and wasn’t available to watch in that country until 25 years later.
Because of the graphic nature of the film, people had questions about the authenticity of its subject matter. The first Faces of Death was an aggregation of clips that were supposedly of real people facing gory, real-life confrontations of mortality.
A decade ago iHorror ran an interview with Michael R. Felsher, who creates bonus content and special features for DVDs. He gave away a lot of secrets in that article. He said in his research for Faces of Death he met the movie’s director, Conan Le Cilaire (not his real name).
He uncovered some interesting facts about Faces of Death and how genuine the death scenes are.
“There’s a scene in the movie where a woman jumps, commits suicide from a building, she just jumps and hits the pavement,” he said at the time. “Part of that is real—her jumping is real. But then the rushing up to the body lying on the ground is fake. So they would take and augment existing footage to make the creative narrative around it, and also sometimes to enhance the gore and shock aspect of it.”
Real or not, the movie caught on and it spawned several sequels. Although the subsequent films inspired curiosity, none of them were as culturally significant cinematically as the original.
A meta-style reboot is currently in the works starring Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, and Charli XCX. IMDb says the new film follows, “A woman, employed as a website content moderator, comes across a series of violent videos reproducing death scenes from a film.”
Now a new generation can judge how gullible Gen Xers were when they first saw this film. It hits Shudder on August 1.