Odds are, if you were born before 1990, someone passed along the beaten-up VHS copy of 1978’s Faces of Death. You probably had to sneak it into the house and wait for your parents to go out or fall asleep before you could watch it. Then, it probably scarred you for life, after all, it was billed as real! Well, the reboot has just dropped the teaser trailer that will likely never be shown in public due to its violence and gore.
Legendary Entertainment finally confirmed that this reimagining of the infamous “faux-snuff” cult classic will hit theaters this April. If you’re a horror fan, you know the original was the ultimate “forbidden fruit” of the VHS era. And it sounds like this new version is ready to traumatize a whole new generation.
A Digital Age Nightmare
Instead of just a montage of gruesome clips like the original, directors Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber (Cam) are giving us a meta twist for the social media era.
The story follows a moderator for a YouTube-style site—basically the person whose job it is to scrub the internet of all the stuff you really don’t want to see. She stumbles upon a group that is meticulously recreating the murders from the original 1978 film. The big, terrifying question hanging over the movie: are these new videos real, or just really good fakes? In an age of deepfakes and misinformation, that’s a scary thought.
The Cast:
The lineup for this movie is surprisingly stacked for a gore-fest. Barbie Ferreira (Euphoria) stars along with Dacre Montgomery, our favorite “Stranger Things” lifeguard/villain. Charli XCX, Josie Totah, and Jermaine Fowler round out a very modern cast.
Why the Original Was So Controversial
For the uninitiated, Faces of Death was the stuff of playground legends. It was a “mondo” horror flick that mixed faked death scenes with actual footage of real-life accidents, animal attacks, etc. It was so grisly that it got banned in multiple countries and ended up on the UK’s “Video Nasty” list.
The studio is playing up that “banned” reputation again. Apparently, the new teaser trailer is considered too taboo for mainstream ads, leaving it to horror sites to spread the word like a digital urban legend.
If you liked the “found footage” dread of V/H/S or the psychological tension of Cam, this is probably going to be your new obsession. Get ready, Faces of Death is set to leave you in shock this April when it hits select theatres.
WARNING! NSFW!
