Interview: Daniel Goldhaber & Isa Mazzei on ‘Faces of Death’
How do you go about remaking a film like Faces of Death?
Originally released in 1978 and directed by John Alan Schwartz, credited under the pseudonyms “Conan Le Cilaire” and “Alan Black” respectively, Faces of Death consisted of footage showing different gruesome ways of dying from a variety of sources, some real, some fake and some a combination of both. Presented as if it were a pseudo-documentary narrated by pathologist Francis B. Gröss (played by actor Michael Carr), Faces of Death contains no actual plot or any narrative threads for audiences to follow, instead prioritizing shock factor, a decision that repelled some viewers and attracted others, curious as to how far the film would actually go in its efforts to capture the many “faces of death.”
And while it’s difficult to call it an actual film, Faces of Death can be best described as an experiment, one that was largely successful; while the film received poor reviews from critics, it was undoubtedly a success, grossing $35 million worldwide on a $450,000 budget (and even more from its subsequent home video releases). But in the modern age of the internet, where gore and (alleged) snuff films are easily accessible through a click of a button, how does Faces of Death hold up? The answer is not very well, if at all.
In 2026, Faces of Death holds next to no presence in the cultural zeitgeist, relegated to a kind of mythologized relic of a pre-internet era, when access to the forbidden still required effort, and curiosity came with a sense of risk. A film that once thrived on its ambiguity, on the uneasy question of what was real and what wasn’t, now feels flattened in a world where that line has long since turned, twisted and eventually dissolved.
So the question becomes less about how you remake Faces of Death, and more about whether it’s even possible to recreate what made it work in the first place. And what made it work wasn’t just the (very bloody, very gruesome) content, but the context in which it existed. The original film existed in a space where audiences didn’t have the tools to verify what they were seeing. Its power came from suggestion, from the tension between authenticity and artifice. Today, that tension barely holds. We’ve seen too much. We know too much. The internet has not only desensitized viewers, it has also trained them to question everything.
A remake, then, can’t rely on shock alone. It can’t simply escalate the imagery, because escalation is a losing game. There will always be something more extreme, more real, more immediate elsewhere. Trying to outdo that misses the point entirely. Instead, the only way forward is to shift the focus. Not on death itself, but on our relationship to it. On why we watch. On the systems that feed our appetite for violence and the platforms that package it. And on the quiet normalization of it all.
In that sense, a modern Faces of Death would have to be less of a spectacle and more of a mirror. Not asking “how far can we go,” but “why do we keep looking?” So who better to remake the film than Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei, who first burst onto the scene in 2018 with Cam, a techno-thriller that incisively and sharply dissected the ever-shifting landscape of the internet, the personas we build online, and the versions of ourselves we choose to project.
Ironically, neither Goldhaber or Mazzei had seen the original Faces of Death when they were approached to helm the remake by Legendary following the success of Cam. “When Legendary first came to us, we had not [seen the original],” says Goldhaber. “We went and watched it, and then realized that we actually had seen bits and pieces of it online on places like LiveLeak. That in itself felt like a very fruitful place to start making a movie from. So we asked ourselves, ‘Where is death today?’ It’s everywhere, and that felt really scary and really interesting. And so then we started toying around with the idea of okay,’it’s about a a serial killer who’s really making Faces of Death but actually killing people.’ And when you start thinking ‘Okay, who’s tracking him down trying to stop him?’ The idea that it’s a content moderator felt like an obvious foil to him.”
Goldhaber and Mazzei’s film is markedly different from the original in a lot of ways. It has a narrative, for one, and a game group of rising stars (Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, Josie Totah and Aaron Holliday) who deliver pitch perfect performances to sell that narrative. One element from the original that remains is the exploration of its infamous “is it real or not?” conceit, this time deeply and directly baked into the film’s plot. The new film follows Margot (Ferreira), a woman working as a content moderator for a major video platform. Still reeling from the untimely, violent death of her sister, the footage of which went viral, Margot has next to no social life, instead devoting her life to her job in an effort to prevent what happened to the footage of her sister’s death from happening again. One day, Margot discovers what appears to be re-enactments of murders from the original Faces of Death and tries her best to track down the source of these videos. In an online world where nothing can be trusted, she must determine whether the violence is fiction, or unfolding in real time.
An intriguing creative choice Goldhaber and Mazzei make is to split the film’s gaze, refusing to stay tethered solely to Margot’s perspective. Instead, they also follow Dacre Montgomery‘s serial killer, Arthur, cutting away from her investigation to sit, however uncomfortably, with the person behind the violence. It’s a risky move but a deliberate one. By widening the lens, the film resists becoming just another procedural or a one-sided descent into grief. It creates a tension between watcher and watched, collapsing the distance between the person trying to stop the images and the one manufacturing them. And in doing so, it mirrors the very ecosystem it’s critiquing, one where creators and consumers exist in a constant, uneasy loop.
“I think that Margot and Arthur represent two sides of a relationship with the internet,” says Mazzei. “Arthur is someone who is trying to use the internet to create connection. He’s trying to get attention, he’s trying to get validation and a sense of identity, a sense of purpose from the internet. Margot is someone who has a flip phone, right? She’s completely rejected the internet. She doesn’t even own a computer. At the beginning of the movie, she’s very much pushing away from the internet and trying to live separate from it, so they’re kind of the opposite ends of the spectrum who ultimately come together. And so for us, it was very important to show both sides of that. I think the split-screen, which was Daniel’s idea, is this brilliant moment of two characters coming together in the thing that they disagree on in the internet to track each other. It’s this brilliant, tense moment where we really see those character beats realized on-screen.”
Known for his role as former bully Billy Hargrove in Stranger Things, Dacre Montgomery has spent the years following that breakout performance actively pursuing roles that push against type, most notably mortgage broker Richard Hall in Dead Man’s Wire and queer orphan Jack in Went Up the Hill. It’s safe to say that his role of Arthur takes that instinct even further. Here, Montgomery leans into something far colder, far less legible. Arthur isn’t built on the kind of outward volatility that defined Billy, but something more contained and unsettling. There’s an intensity to him that feels tightly wound, like it could snap at any moment. But what makes the performance land is the contradiction running through it, a kind of social awkwardness that sits just beneath the surface.
And then there’s the other layer. In remaking Faces of Death within the film itself, Arthur becomes a kind of director, staging and orchestrating his own horrific set pieces with an eerie sense of control. There’s something darkly funny in those moments, in the way he “directs” with a dry, almost wry humor, treating acts of violence with the casual precision of someone calling shots on a set. “I was six months into editing this movie and all of a sudden I had a realization,” says Goldhaber. “I called Dacre and I was like, ‘When Arthur is being a director in this film and doing this director voice, is that my voice that he’s doing?’ And Dacre said, ‘Did you really just figure that out?'”
“I think Arthur was a very personal character for the both of us in different ways,” says Goldhaber of his experience working with Montgomery to bring the character of Arthur to life. “I think that it was an avenue for us both to explore alienation and obsession. The drive and desire to create films and tell stories as a means of connecting to other people. Obviously, Arthur is doing that in a violent way, but I think that some of the motivations are universal. I think that we always wanted him to be coming from an honest place.”
Another surprising addition to the cast is Charli xcx, who plays Margot’s fellow content moderator Jenny. Charli has become somewhat prolific in the film industry today, with Faces of Death being the fourth film she’s featured in this year alone. However, Goldhaber and Mazzei are quick to point out that Faces of Death is Charli’s first actual role, filmed in 2023 prior to any of her other roles. “We are her first film,” says Mazzei. “It was her who reached out to us. We were very close to production and a press release came out about the movie. I think she had seen our first movie [Cam], and she was a fan of Faces [the original film]. She called us and was like, ‘Can I be in your film?’ And we said, ‘Yeah, we have literally one role that is not cast yet. Do you want it?’ And so that’s how it how it came about.”
In addition to the performances, another aspect of the film that is incredibly impressive is its technical proficiency. While the film was developed in 2019 and shot in 2023, it still feels wildly relevant and fresh today in the way that it tackles internet culture and social media. Screens and platforms sit at the center of the experience, fully integrated into the visual language rather than feeling separate from it. “I think what’s interesting is we pitched this movie in 2019,” explains Goldhaber. “And when Isa and I were coming up with our take, we were trying to figure out what platform this movie should take place on. We were like, ‘Instagram YouTube,’ and Isa’s like, ‘Actually, have you heard of this new app called TikTok? I think it’s going to be a big deal.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I haven’t heard of TikTok.’ Obviously, the movie takes place on its own app. It’s called Kino. It’s literally TikTok but it’s inspired by TikTok primarily, and what was so interesting is that, like a lot of the phenomenon that I think we’re talking about in this movie, the kind of escalation, the gradual escalation of this violence, of this intensity of these images, of the kind of hypocrisy of the platforms that are disseminating them… This was evident in 2019, where we were going, and without a societal-level shift in how we engage with social media, it’s not going to stop anytime soon. The movie is only going to continue to feel more and more relevant, in part because of how plausible it is. I legitimately think that if you were a serial killer, and you went and started staging intricate recreations of Faces of Death and posting them online, you 100% would go viral and would become known. And that’s crazy. There’s not a single thing in this movie that I think is implausible.”
That kind of foresight is undoubtedly one of the reasons why the film has been able to connect with audiences. At the time of writing, following the film’s Beyond Fest screening and LA premiere, it sits at a comfortable 68% on Rotten Tomatoes, a considerably high score for horror and almost triple the film’s original Rotten Tomatoes score. Aside from that, however, Faces of Death is surprisingly also a crowdpleaser. Thanks to Ferreira’s committed and highly nuanced performance, it’s quite easy for viewers to root for her in her journey. But what makes the film surprisingly audience-friendly and also more accessible than one would think a remake of Faces of Death could ever be is its chase scenes. Tight, propulsive and cleanly staged, they inject a sense of urgency that keeps the film moving forward, giving audiences something immediate to latch onto amid some of the darker themes.
So it may be surprising to learn that the film’s journey to theaters has been anything but easy. Officially greenlit in 2021 with production starting and ending in 2023, Faces of Death has been sitting on a shelf for almost 3 years now. Goldhaber has remained mostly tight-lipped about the situation but what’s known is this: the film was originally tipped for a 2024 SXSW world premiere but was pulled from the festival three days before the line-up was announced. Online chatter also claims that Legendary was unhappy with the film, despite glowing responses from test screenings (an audience that is notoriously difficult to please). But now, a few years later, Independent Film Company (IFC) has acquired the film’s rights and is planning its widest theatrical release for it.
Does it feel like a relief to Goldhaber and Mazzei to finally have the film out? “It feels really good,” says Mazzei. “We’re really excited. I think that IFC has an incredible plan for the film and just being able to be in theaters is so meaningful. The way that we always envisioned this film is that it is a film that is best seen in theaters. It’s also a film that when you see it with a lot of other people, there’s something very visceral about the reactions, about the jokes, about some of the moments that I think will make it really special. So we’re just really, really happy that it has found a way out in the world and that that way is also in theaters.”
FACES OF DEATH will be released in theaters this Friday, April 10.