And while the movie\u2019s claims that it was \u201cbanned in 46 countries\u201d was a bit of hyperbolic hokum meant to stoke interest, it still did face a fair amount of pushback upon its release, based on both moral outrage and actual concerns around its content. \u201cFaces of Death\u201d was one of the \u201cvideo nasties\u201d outlawed in England (it was finally released in 2003, with some of the animal cruelty removed) and was refused classification in Australia (it finally arrived down under in 2007). Germany didn\u2019t okay its release until 2022<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, that same controversy is visiting a new version of \u201cFaces of Death,\u201d which came out today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shot largely in 2023, with some pickups in 2024, this iteration, co-written and directed by Daniel Goldhaber, uses the original movie as a framework to interrogate our modern obsession with watching deeply problematic stuff on the internet. Additionally, it\u2019s a really fun, scary horror movie \u2014 the kind of thing teenagers will buy a ticket to on a Friday night, making its protracted post-production phase and release even more baffling.<\/p>\n\n\n This is the story of the winding, setback-filled journey of a film that tried to bring a contemporary take to a cult classic horror film, only to somehow end up inheriting the baggage of the original, stalling its prospects for the big screen. It’s also a lesson in the perseverance required to bring a film to life, with the new “Faces of Death” taking more than a decade to produce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which begged the question: what was so scary about \u201cFaces of Death\u201d anyway?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022\u2022\u2022<\/p>\n\n\n\n Producer Don Murphy, who has an encyclopedic pop culture knowledge and is familiar with hot-button projects (his first movie was Oliver Stone\u2019s incendiary \u201cNatural Born Killers\u201d), first started pursuing the rights of \u201cFaces of Death\u201d after the arrival of one of the \u201cTexas Chain Saw Massacre\u201d remakes. He can\u2019t remember which one. (\u201cThere\u2019s been about 20 of them,\u201d Murphy scoffed.) The remake was a hit and the hunt was on for similar horror projects based on familiar IP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Murphy and his producing partner (and wife) Susan Montford came up with \u201cFaces of Death.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe were like, it\u2019s a good title and a good name. I don\u2019t know what you do with it, but it\u2019s cool. Let\u2019s see if we can get it,\u201d Murphy explained. The actual process of untangling the rights was \u201cquite a journey,\u201d Murphy said, because the filmmakers behind the original had lost the underlying rights to the property. Instead, the distributor owned it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBut did they own the remake rights? And how do you get the remake rights to a documentary that\u2019s not real in the first place. It became very convoluted,\u201d Murphy said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt took a bit of time to get them all in order,\u201d Montford said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It ultimately took a year to figure out who owned the rights (Gorgon Video, a production and distribution company based in Spain and the United States). But once they secured the rights, there was immediate interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was a genre division at Universal that was ready to make it. Murphy and Montford hired J.T. Petty, a screenwriter who made the effective horror western \u201cThe Burrowers\u201d and a surprisingly effective direct-to-video sequel to Guillermo del Toro\u2019s \u201cMimic,\u201d to write the screenplay. This version was set at a murder convention, like an evil Comic-Con. (\u201cIt was a bit too ahead of its time in retrospect, but we really liked it,\u201d said Montford.) Then it started to fall apart \u2014 Universal shuttered its genre division and \u201cFaces of Death\u201d returned to the liminal space between production and obscurity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the next decade, Murphy and Montford would have to periodically reup their license to remake \u201cFaces of Death.\u201d Several studios committed and then backed out, all while maintaining Petty\u2019s script. Murphy had been here before \u2014 when he was trying to get \u201cTransformers\u201d made, before it became one of Hollywood\u2019s most successful franchises, he was asked repeatedly, How is that not a stupid toy movie<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n They tinkered with the idea for the movie and considered turning the movie\u2019s \u201cpathologist\u201d and narrator Francis B. Gr\u00f6ss (actually actor Michael Carr in the original) into a new genre icon. \u201cWe spent about six years trying to figure out how to turn Dr. Gr\u00f6ss into the new Freddy or the new Jason or the new Michael Myers,\u201d said Murphy. \u201cWe designed costumes for him and everything,\u201d said Montford.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another idea had Gr\u00f6ss overseeing a secret compound in the middle of the desert where people would get killed and tortured. \u201cWe must have explored every possible variation of these subjects,\u201d said Montford.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While working on another project at Legendary, an executive asked if they still had \u201cFaces of Death.\u201d Legendary, known for giant projects like the American \u201cGodzilla\u201d movies and the \u201cDune\u201d movies, had a smaller horror division at the time. They too would remake \u201cThe Texas Chainsaw Massacre,\u201d this time as a somewhat softer legacy sequel (it eventually sold to Netflix) and \u201cFresh,\u201d a somewhat A24-ish cannibal movie on Hulu. At the time Murphy and Montford had lived with the property for 15 years. They wanted to actually m<\/em>ake it<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n Legendary agreed and heard pitches from every hot young horror filmmaker. Murphy and Montford wouldn\u2019t name names, but they were thankful for the opportunity. \u201cWe got an education on everybody who was hot in horror,\u201d said Murphy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Goldhaber and his co-writer Isa Mazzei were among those heavy-hitters who pitched their take on \u201cFaces of Death.\u201d Murphy and Montford had been impressed by Goldhaber and Mazzei\u2019s first film, \u201cCam,\u201d which they felt was very much in the wheelhouse of \u201cFaces of Death.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As it turns out, Goldhaber and Mazzei had never heard of “Faces of Death” when they were approached by Legendary. \u201cWe were like, We have to figure out what \u2018Faces of Death\u2019 is<\/em>,\u201d said Goldhaber. When they looked it up they realized that they had, in fact, seen the film. Or at least pieces of it, when it had been scattered onto the internet and uploaded by sites like eBaum\u2019s World.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat felt like a really interesting place to start development from \u2014 where is \u2018Faces of Death\u2019 today? It’s online. Not only is it online but now it’s content that is served up by some of the largest corporations on the planet,\u201d Goldhaber said. \u201cThat felt like a very fruitful place to kind of start.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Goldhaber and Mazzei struggled with figuring out what social media platform the movie should take place on \u2014 Instagram? YouTube? \u2014 before Mazzei suggested TikTok. Goldhaber had never heard of TikTok. She explained it to him and he got onboard. When they started pitching they \u201chad to explain TikTok to the people we were pitching to.\u201d He had a similar problem when attempting to explain \u201cCam,\u201d about a cam-girl who encounters a sinister doppelg\u00e4nger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Goldhaber had worked, for a summer, as a content moderator, and had already been thinking about that angle. They also wanted to probe at why anyone would remake \u201cFaces of Death\u201d in the first place. \u201cIt\u2019s a strange IP to try and fictionalize and monetize and when you have a large private equity studio like Legendary making the movie, there is, in part, something in the film that\u2019s trying to ask the question of, why financialize this IP to begin with?<\/em>\u201d said Goldhaber.<\/p>\n\n\n \u201cThe elevator pitch was a girl who has become an internet meme, who works in YouTube as a content supervisor, discovers that an INCEL is really recreating the \u2018Faces of Death\u2019 murders, and no one believes her, so she’s the only one that can stop him. Now he’s killing for clicks,\u201d said Murphy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most gave good pitches but Goldhaber and Mazzei stood out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThey were so clear and clever with the take that we decided to take a chance on them,\u201d Montford said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More complications followed \u2014 the pandemic hit, then Goldhaber and Mazzei went off to make \u201cHow to Blow Up a Pipeline\u201d (premiered at Toronto in 2022, released by NEON in 2023). They started shooting the movie three days after \u201cHow to Blow Up a Pipeline\u201d was released, with Barbie Ferreira as the content moderator, Dacre Montgomery as the serial killer and Charlie XCX as a disaffected coworker. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Then things got even more complex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Legendary had distribution deals with several major studios, including Sony and Warner Bros., before eventually ending up at Paramount. \u201cLegendary believes in the film but was surprised by the number of people who were like, It\u2019s too dangerous, it\u2019s too edgy, it\u2019s too out there<\/em>,\u201d said Murphy. \u201cWe were like, Really? How dangerous could this film possibly be<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As it turned out, pretty dangerous. A planned screening at the 2024 edition of the South by Southwest Film Festival was canceled three days before they were set to screen. Reshoots, meant to up the intensity of several sequences took place later that same year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAt some point in time, when they actually realized what the movie was saying and doing, it became more challenging to get the film out into the world,\u201d said Goldhaber. \u201cWe always wanted to make a really entertaining, commercial film. And I think the challenges behind the movie have to do with it being very difficult to bring, even if this movie has a link to the original \u2018Faces of Death,\u2019 an original provocative, dangerous movie and put it in theaters. That has always been a challenging proposition. I think it’s especially challenging these days.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n More time passed and the reputation of the new \u201cFaces of Death\u201d as a cursed object, just like the original, started to accumulate. Would this be something that skips release all together and would be passed around on the contemporary equivalent of glitchy VHS tapes \u2014 diced up and shared on social media platforms \u2014 with the movie too outr\u00e9 to be publicly shown?<\/p>\n\n\n ***<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere were studios in Hollywood that said that they thought the movie was reprehensible and morally depraved and they didn\u2019t want to work on it,\u201d said Goldhaber. \u201cMajor studios didn’t want to touch it.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n After they pulled out of South by Southwest, the idea that the movie was somehow troubled<\/em> took root.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThey were afraid of it,\u201d said Montford.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the movie sat in limbo, Goldhaber became nervous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was really hard to have the movie be 100% done and to have no control and no power over a process and be unsure if the movie ever would come out at all. We live in a world in which movies are made and memory-holed all the time,\u201d Goldhaber said. He has a friend who \u201cshot and finished an entire feature film and then A24 saw the movie, bought the film, fired everybody off of it and recast the whole thing and they\u2019re reshooting it. And the original movie will never be seen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLegendary had an investment they wanted to protect. They had done quite well making horror movies for a price and selling them to streaming. We had a really good experience with Legendary but I think at the end of the day, because they were moving distributors all the time, they had a goal for the movie that they never quite got,\u201d said Murphy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For Goldhaber, whose first two movies had limited budgets and small (but vocal) audiences, he saw \u201cFaces of Death\u201d as potentially something that could get more of his own stuff off the ground. But those dreams started to fade as the movie languished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt’s a title that’s great. And then realized, Oh, wait, the infamously banned movie was maybe not the most down-the-middle IP swing that I could have taken<\/em>,\u201d Goldhaber said.<\/p>\n\n\n Goldhaber thought of other recent horror hits that had survived purely by luck. \u201c\u2019Barbarian\u2019 was inches away from dying multiple deaths multiple times. It could have just ended up on streaming. Same thing with \u2018Smile.\u2019 \u2018Smile\u2019 was a streaming movie that got saved,\u201d said Goldhaber. \u201cIt\u2019s tough, and this is something the movie\u2019s about, because the algorithm loves remakes and there\u2019s something really perverse about the fact that we\u2019ve all indebted ourselves to a system of content delivery that\u2019s trying to squeeze our nostalgia for every little inch of attention that it\u2019s worth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, IFC and Shudder saw the movie and, to Goldhaber, \u201cimmediately understood that the film was, first and foremost, a great piece of horror entertainment, that also had some interesting stuff on its mind. They understood what it had to offer in a way that I think, you know, not everybody could see.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n ***<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not that the long-awaited distribution pact quelled the controversy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first trailer for \u201cFaces of Death\u201d was released online and <\/strong>was immediately banned, supposedly for violating YouTube’s terms of service. Most assumed it was part of an elaborate marketing stunt, but Goldhaber confirms that it was banned for real. \u201cThere were a lot of conversations about preventing the teaser from getting banned from YouTube. There was a lot of strategy that went into trying to get something that would not be banned \u2026 and then it got banned anyway,\u201d said Goldhaber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A series of posters that included the little crossed out eye logo, like if you were trying to look at an image that had been deemed too inappropriate, were also pulled. You can see something blurry in the background of the posters, but they were a canny way of implying outrageousness without actually seeing<\/em> anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI don’t think people understand this but the censored posters were banned from theaters, not what was behind the censorship. The MPA (Motion Picture Association of America) said that you cannot put these in theaters,\u201d Goldhaber said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He pointed to other horror movie posters that are much more graphic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMaybe the MPA doesn\u2019t so much like us drawing attention to the fact that they do actually allow violence in cinemas and that they don\u2019t allow other forms of content,” Goldhaber said. “Maybe they don\u2019t like the fact that we\u2019re drawing attention to censorship in a cinematic space and they\u2019re actually trying to keep that away from us.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe have sometimes felt like we couldn\u2019t catch a break with the movie,\u201d Montford said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSusan and I just kept looking at each other going, there\u2019s surveillance footage of the Luigi guy shooting the insurance executive in the back in real life. I don\u2019t know that we\u2019re somehow worse than that, because we\u2019re not even real,\u201d said Murphy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Murphy and Montford appreciated IFC\u2019s willingness to push things to uncomfortable places with \u201cFaces of Death.\u201d \u201cFrom the beginning, they took the attitude of, let\u2019s go balls to the wall<\/em>. Yeah, they\u2019ll take it down. We\u2019ll deal with it,\u201d Murphy said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reaction to the posters and trailers is emblematic of the larger problem with the movie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPart of the issue with \u2018Faces of Death\u2019 in general. It\u2019s like the movie is far less gruesome than a lot of mainstream horror, thriller, war movies, whatever, but it\u2019s the context that\u2019s actually trying to get you to think critically about the violence and to not just embrace it,\u201d Goldhaber said. \u201cI think that sets a lot of people on edge.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even after all of this \u2013 the endless squabbles and the unmoored distribution and everyone asking why<\/em>? \u2013 Goldhaber said that he\u2019s already looking at a potential sequel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019ve actually thought about it,” said Goldhaber. “I\u2019ve got some fun ideas. But they have to come to us and say, We want another on<\/em>e.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Because the only thing scarier than a remake<\/em> is a sequel<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"Are](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thewrap.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/040726-James-Cameron-Avatar-v2.gif?fit=300%2C169&ssl=1\"){kind=avatar}
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