Here is a thing that happened: the marketing campaign for the Faces of Death remake has been deemed too disturbing to display in public.
The posters. Not the film. The posters advertising the film. Cannot go up. Too much. The official artwork has been flagged as sensitive content, the trailers keep getting pulled from platforms before enough people have watched them, and Fangoria ran a subscriber cover for the film that they openly acknowledged could not be shown on newsstands or social media without safeguards — calling it, with barely contained delight, a “secret handshake” for the people already subscribed.
The Faces of Death remake is doing the one thing a Faces of Death remake absolutely needed to do, which is make its marketing campaign indistinguishable from the original film’s entire identity. We are three weeks from release and the conversation is already “is this real or is this a stunt?” which is, and I want to be precise here, the exact conversation the 1978 original started and never fully resolved.
These people are not messing around.
A Brief History of the Most Infamous VHS in Any Horror Fan’s Childhood
If you grew up in a house with a video store membership and slightly inattentive parents, you know the Faces of Death VHS box. You might not have watched it. You might have only touched it once, quickly, the way you’d touch something you weren’t sure was alive. But you knew it was there, on a shelf somewhere between the action movies and the foreign films, and its existence changed the atmosphere of the rental section it occupied.
The original 1978 film was a mondo documentary, or presented itself as one, in which a pathologist narrated footage of human and animal deaths from sources around the world. The marketing claimed it was banned in 46 countries, which was an exaggeration deployed with the confidence of a franchise that had already figured out that the line between “banned” and “enormously popular” was thinner than anyone wanted to admit. Some of the footage was real, sourced from news stations and medical archives. Most of it was staged. The film was good enough at blurring that line that entire generations of horror fans watched it and genuinely weren’t sure which was which.
The film spawned sequels. It was added to the UK’s video nasty list. It was refused classification in Australia. A mathematics teacher in California showed it to his class in 1985 and the school district was sued. The Faces of Death franchise managed, across its entire run, to cause exactly the kind of cultural disruption it advertised, which is more than most horror franchises can claim.
What the Remake Is Actually Doing
Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei are directing and writing, which is the casting choice that makes this project make sense. Their 2018 film Cam , about a camgirl who discovers a doppelganger has taken over her account, is a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and one of the more genuinely unsettling explorations of identity and the internet that the genre has produced. Goldhaber followed it with How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which is a 95% on RT. This is a filmmaker with a very specific interest in what technology does to the line between performance and reality, which is precisely the question Faces of Death has always been asking.
Barbie Ferreira stars as a content moderator for a major video platform who discovers what appear to be reenactments of murders from the original Faces of Death. The question she has to answer, and the question the film is asking the audience alongside her, is whether what she’s watching is fiction or happening in real time. In 1978, that question required some effort to construct. In 2026, where AI can generate convincing footage of anything and the algorithm serves you progressively darker content until you aren’t sure what you’ve been looking at or how you got there, the question is ambient. It’s already in the air before the movie starts.
The cast also includes Dacre Montgomery, Josie Totah, Jermaine Fowler, Aaron Holliday, and Charli XCX, who apparently looked at her current cultural moment, everywhere, inescapable, the year’s defining pop presence, and thought: yes, now is the time to appear in a movie about snuff films. Correct.
The Marketing Is the Movie’s First Scene
This is the part that I find genuinely interesting from a craft standpoint, so bear with me for a moment while I have a brief thought.
The original Faces of Death worked because its marketing was indistinguishable from its content. The VHS box was disturbing. The premise was disturbing. The claim that it was banned in dozens of countries was disturbing. You hadn’t watched a single frame, and it had already done something to you.
What Goldhaber and Mazzei have engineered here ,whether deliberately or by necessity, is a marketing campaign that operates the same way. The posters can’t go up publicly. The trailers keep disappearing. The Fangoria cover is behind a content warning. You’re already navigating access restrictions before you’ve bought a ticket, which is exactly what the film is going to be about. A woman hitting content moderation walls while trying to determine what she’s actually looking at.
The movie is about the architecture of restricted access. The campaign is an exercise in restricted access. Either this is the most coherent piece of film marketing in recent memory or it is a series of coincidences that landed perfectly. Either way, it is working, and April 10th feels further away than it should.
Should You Be Excited
Yes. Conditionally. With the acknowledgment that Faces of Death carries a specific legacy that cuts in multiple directions and not all of them are comfortable. The original film included real footage of real deaths and the line between transgressive art and exploitation of actual human suffering is a line the franchise has always sat directly on top of, deliberately, and refused to move off.
Whether Goldhaber’s version handles that with the intelligence his previous work suggests it will, or whether it slips into the kind of nihilistic shock-for-shock’s-sake territory the original sometimes inhabited, is genuinely unknown. What is known is that the people making it have thought seriously about these questions before, that the cast is good, that the premise is sharply constructed for the current moment, and that the campaign has already demonstrated they understand what they’re doing.
April 10th. Theaters and Shudder. You weren’t supposed to see this. You already have.