From Columbine to the 9/11 Attacks, Real-Life Violence Informed the New ‘Faces of Death’

Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei explain using authentic terror in their (mostly) fictional script.

For director Daniel Goldhaber and his co-screenwriter Isa Mazzei, the new “Faces of Death” didn’t begin on today’s internet. In fact, the spirit of their terrifyingly inventive script traces all the way back to the mid-1990s in Boulder, Colorado — where the filmmaking duo first met.

“That moment growing up there had a weirdly outsized influence on American culture, but also one that was kind of invisible,” Goldhaber said in a recent interview with Mazzei and IndieWire. “Boulder people realize how pervasive it was, but it’s not like everybody else did.”

Long before the pair got started reimagining one of the web’s most infamous shock tapes for the Independent Film Company (in theaters Friday, April 10), Goldhaber and Mazzei were just two kids living in a community where mass violence was suddenly everywhere.

The Columbine high school shooting of 1999 loomed large over their adolescence, and the 9/11 attacks brought televised death to the entire country. Years later, the Aurora movie theater shooting hit close to their old neighborhood. And in 2021, another gunman opened fire inside a local grocery store, where Goldhaber once made a student film.

“There’s this sense of being unable to look away,” Mazzei said, recalling how she and Goldhaber watched that shooting unfold via livestream from different cities. That instinct — to witness, process, and keep witnessing, even when you maybe shouldn’t — is the connective tissue between the duo’s Rocky Mountain upbringing and their latest horror film.

It’s also the question at the heart of the new “Faces of Death.” On the surface, Goldhaber and Mazzei’s latest is a vigilante crime thriller about a content moderator (Barbie Ferreira) who is busy hunting a web-obsessed serial killer (Dacre Montgomery). The so-called “remake” is also an homage to a notorious VHS artifact from 1978. The new version is less interested in sincerely traumatizing audiences than it is in asking why they’re already so hard to shock. Mazzei traces that shift back to her own childhood.

“I remember very well my first experience of digital violence, which was watching the World Trade Centers, watching the jumpers,” she said. “I was in elementary school. I was way too little to see that.” What followed wasn’t numbness so much as a necessary adaptation for survival.

“I don’t actually know anymore when I see a violent image on my phone if it’s affecting me,” Mazzei said. “I’ve just kind of had to normalize how that feels, and it’s become my new baseline.”

That distinction, between desensitization and normalization, is crucial to how Goldhaber and Mazzei approach scares in the digital age. While many modern genre films escalate gore in search of new extremes, “Faces of Death” suggests something more unsettling: that the real threat is ambient and permanently bleak. It’s not about feeling nothing, but about getting used to feeling bad all the time.

“There’s an algorithm that wants to keep everyone on their phones,” Mazzei said. “It wants to keep us scrolling forever, and it has figured out that the best way to keep you engaged is to keep you angry, to keep you kind of depressed, and to keep feeding you more violence, fear, and rage.”

Goldhaber argues that Big Tech companies aren’t just profiting off of our communications and our social media engagement. They’re using it to actively stoke our anxieties and addictions.

“They’re [tracking] our usage of these platforms [in a way] that doesn’t even feel like ‘engagement’ anymore,” he said. “But there’s no real other way to talk to each other. It’s created a vicious cycle that is virtually impossible to escape.” That tension, embedded into the film’s script, came directly from Goldhaber’s own experience.

“It was just an idea,” he said. “I had worked as a content moderator, and we had discussed doing a kind of paranoid thriller set in that world.” The project continues a thematic throughline from their earlier collaborations, including the 2018 techno-thriller “Cam,” which explored digital identity and exploitation through sex work — and the radicalization drama, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” another film as concerned with historic systems of power as it is the consequences of contemporary desperation.

After being asked to pitch an idea geared toward the old “Faces of Death” IP, Goldhaber and Mazzei concluded that the job of an internet user now reflects a broader, more frightening reality — one where opting out of doomscrolling is no longer an option for most normal people.

“If you want to interface with modern society, you have to be online,” Mazzei said. “You have to exist somewhere and have some type of footprint.”

That social trap makes the movie’s connection to its source material especially pointed. The original “Faces of Death” was a pseudo-documentary that presented death scenes — some real, many staged — under the guise of an educational inquiry. Hosted by a fictional pathologist, the legendary oddity blurred facts and falsehoods just enough to make viewers question what they were really seeing.

When it later exploded in popularity on VHS, “Faces of Death” became a kind of underground rite of passage of the late 20th century. The tape was passed between friends, hidden behind rental counters, and whispered about as something you weren’t technically “supposed” to watch. Goldhaber and Mazzei aren’t interested in recreating that experience. In their view, the internet — and the first movie’s multiple sequels — already have.

“It’s become so normal to view death on our phones, that we wanted to place it on screen in a movie theater so that you’re recontextualizing how it feels to see it,” Mazzei said.

To that end, the filmmakers made the controversial decision to incorporate some authentic death footage sourced from the internet into their narrative feature. It’s material meant not to sensationalize violence, but to confront audiences with the same images they might otherwise absorb without reflection.

“Humans have always wanted to witness death,” Mazzei said. “I think it comes from a deep desire to understand this one thing that we cannot and will not ever understand while we’re alive.”

Goldhaber, meanwhile, pushes back on the idea that violent imagery is inherently harmful.

“I don’t think that there’s much of a moral case to be made around how much violence or gore is in a film,” he said. “Representation of violence can be performance art, fake blood, people having a good time… The tension that our movie confronts is that it’s not necessarily the representation of the thing that matters. It’s what idea that representation conveys.”

With roots in real school shooting legislation, that philosophy extended into the film’s real-world rollout — which has already been marked by clashes with censorship boards in 2026. The “Faces of Death” filmmakers have described issues with the MPAA (including objections to specific imagery depending on its context in the final cut), highlighting the arbitrary nature of how violence is judged and regulated.

For Goldhaber and Mazzei, that contradiction is the point. As they put it in the “Faces of Death” promo materials, this isn’t a traditional reboot so much as “an exploitation of an iconic exploitation film” — one specifically designed to “expose the horror of the mainstream.”

If anything, the lifelong friends and filmmakers’ goal was to restore emotional weight to images that have lost it, while making audiences sit with something they might otherwise scroll past. In a world where reality itself feels increasingly unstable, that delineation still matters.

“Sometimes a real image means that there’s real violence on the other end,” Goldhaber said. “And real violence is something that we owe it to ourselves to eradicate.” The problem, he suggests, isn’t that we can’t tell what’s real or not. It’s that we might stop caring either way.

From Independent Film Company, “Faces of Death” is in theaters on Friday, April 10.