Why The New Faces Of Death Is Not Really A Remake [Exclusive]

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How do you remake "Faces of Death?" John Alan Schwartz's notorious 1978 mondo movie haunted video stores for decades (the ones that would carry it, at least). A series of gruesome clips claiming to show real moments of death, the film was mostly made up of staged footage (there's some real footage of animal deaths and some death-tinged newsreel footage as well). "Faces of Death" became the stuff of legend; a viral video before anyone had coined the term, passed around at sleepovers and sold at flea markets.

There's not much of a story to it, though. A basic set-up introduces us to pathologist Francis B. Gröss (Michael Carr), who claims to have collected a library of footage showcasing various deaths. And that's about it. So how do you remake that, exactly? If you're Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber, the answer is ... you don't. Not really. Director and co-writer Goldhaber and co-writer and producer Mazzei (who also worked on the excellent "How to Blow up a Pipeline") were given the somewhat daunting task of reviving "Faces of Death" for the modern era. Their meta approach was to tell the story about a serial killer who is literally remaking "Faces of Death" by killing people via elaborate recreations from the original movie, filming the murders, and uploading the footage online.

"I think that for us, it was not really even a remake or re-imagining," Goldhaber told me during an exclusive interview. "It was really just, it's a movie about 'Faces of Death.' It's a kind of '80s-inspired slasher movie about a slasher who has been inspired by 'Faces of Death.' And I think that for us, it was just cool to have the opportunity to work with this iconic piece of media and to integrate it into a new story."

Bringing Faces of Death into the internet age

Isa Mazzei revealed that when she and Goldhaber were approached to make the new "Faces of Death," they decided to watch the original, assuming they had never seen it before. But that turned out to not be true. 

"We had seen it online, kind of these little clips or little bits of it," Mazzei told me. "And so, for us, realizing that 'Faces of Death' has this second life online [and] it's been recontextualized for the internet age now was really compelling to us, actually. So we did have a familiarity and we were kind of excited to dig in along those lines."

Have we become desensitized after having so much death and violence beamed into the palm of our hands? "I think that our baseline level of anxiety and trauma has actually just leveled up, because we are served this content even when we're not seeking it out, even when I'm scrolling my phone," Mazzei said. "Now I can be on Instagram or TikTok, looking at a picture of my friend, looking at a funny video, and then all of a sudden, whoa, there's a dead body [...] I think we're just used to feeling this constant barrage of violence and anxiety."

Several films inspired the new Faces of Death

Since this new "Faces of Death" isn't strictly a remake or a reboot, the filmmakers had to get creative with where they drew their influences. Beyond the original infamous video, they also looked to films like Peter Bogdanovich's 1968 film "Targets," which was inspired by the real-life shooting spree of Charles Whitman. Other titles they looked to included Brian De Palma's "Blow Out," Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up," and Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation."

"All three of those were also, I think, some of our initial inspirations, just in terms of being movies about looking, trying to examine the veracity of images," Goldhaber said. Those are a trio of acclaimed films, which gives you some insight into the type of movie Goldhaber and Mazzei are trying to make here.

It would've been easy to turn the new "Faces of Death" into cheap, exploitative schlock. Instead, the "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" team have attempted to create something more thoughtful, and more disturbing. Part of what made the original "Faces of Death" so taboo was that the footage felt like something you wouldn't normally see. But that's changed in the modern internet age, when death and destruction are broadcast on social media platforms at all times. "[N]ow, there are images that are beamed into everyone's pocket around the world 24/7," Goldhaber said. "And some of the largest corporations on the planet sell ad space on them. That feels like a tectonic shift in our relationship to violent imagery, our relationship to images in general, and it's really scary. And I think that felt like a very, very fruitful idea to build a horror film around."

"Faces of Death" opens in theaters on April 10, 2026.