Happy Death Day

Faces of Death, compiled and passed around as contraband starting in the late-1970s, is the point at which any sane film fan stops and turns around. It’s the one “movie” that Beyond Video, Baltimore’s magnificent video library, will not stock. They have the Mondo Cane films, pornography restored by Vinegar Syndrome, and Soul Man with C. Thomas Howell. But they don’t have Faces of Death. Does the “movie” even have any appeal for young people today? Even when I was a teenager, in the late-2000s and early-2010s, snuff wasn’t hard to avoid. By then, we’d seen beheading videos and even worse on sites like LiveLeak, but these grim tubes weren’t yet integrated into Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Even if your algorithm spared you footage of Palestine and Russian car accidents, the assassination of Charlie Kirk reintroduced snuff into the mainstream for the first time since the execution of Daniel Pearl.

Shot in 2023, Daniel Goldhaber’s Faces of Death “remake” arrives oddly on time; its leading lady, Barbie Ferreira, distinguishes herself in her first major movie role the very week that Euphoria, a show she quit under bad terms, returns to HBO after a four-year hiatus. Goldhaber’s film is more conventional than Sam Levinson’s expanded and refreshingly baffling show, but it’s far from a cash-in or an easy way out with an easy “brand name.”

I’ve never seen the “original” Faces of Death, but like anyone with an interest in film history, I know the name and everything the film represents. Real death is antithetical to “the movies” as we know them; even in the most gruesome or disturbing horror movies, there’s some resolution, if little comfort. Why else would people get so annoyed when a movie “just ends”? Why do people check out when so-and-so dies early or doesn’t even make it to the end? William Goldman knew that The Great Waldo Pepper was going to flop at the first preview screening when Susan Sarandon died a half hour in. She doesn’t come back from the dead, like Baxter in Anchorman, the most successful comic animal “death” in movie history.

A routine slasher, Faces of Death deals with the 2020s in concrete terms that most contemporary movies avoid: Ferreira plays a content moderator, flagging and allowing extreme videos on a social media site called Kino. This distinctly post-2010 job hasn’t been addressed in movies or pop culture for obvious reasons: how do you treat it without sickening the audience? Ferreira maintains a professional detachment going through videos of rape, murder, grizzly Darwin Awards deaths, overdoses, and much worse; like surgeons in an operating theater, she has to keep it together. Even when she notices a real serial killer “remaking” Faces of Death, flags him, and unintentionally gets his attention, she’s as cool as Neve Campbell in Scream, the screaming but ultimately unflappable final girl. It’s a winning performance, and one wonders how Ferreira’s career would be faring now if Faces of Death was released two years ago as planned. I’ve no idea why Legendary Pictures didn’t like the movie Goldhaber delivered; contrary to early reports, the movie’s hardly “experimental.”

Besides, most people haven’t seen Faces of Death; but it’s a very familiar title with a lot of baggage, just like Reefer Madness, Song of the South, and The Birth of a Nation (the notion of lumping in D.W. Griffith’s film with Reefer Madness might seem silly to people past a certain age, but the target audience for Faces of Death regards Griffith with as much contempt, however misinformed, as Leni Riefenstahl). The only reason I made a point of seeing the movie was because it was called Faces of Death—would I have made sure to see it in its first week if it were called Flagged? Although the movie wasn’t treated as poorly as Julia Docournau’s Alpha, promotion was spotty and posters only went up a few weeks ago; when it opened at The Charles in Baltimore, it only played once every few days at 9:30 p.m. It won’t make its $7 million budget back, but Goldhaber and everyone else have moved on, and the only mystery left is why the studio shelved the movie for so long. Faces of Death is a fine meta-remake of the “classic” film maudit, but it’s not radical or “experimental,” however enjoyable it is on a familiar, basic level.

—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM