FrightFest review – Faces of Death (2026)
I’ve no idea whether director Daniel Goldhaber and co-writer Isa Mazzei – of the excellent Cam – came up with the idea of rebooting the Faces of Death franchise for the TikTok era or whether some rights holders went to them with a desperate plea to do something with what might be considered white elephant IP. In the event, they manage a more thoughtful meta-slasher than the Town That Dreaded Sundown remake/reimagining while covering similar territory. It’s handy that Faces of Death (1979), a controversial item in its day, can be sold as ‘the first viral video’ and its mondo assembly of (mostly fake) atrocities now look like the start of phenomena which have metastatised along with the internet. Like Cam, the new Faces of Death has a lot of serious material to cover about the state of the digital village – but it’s also an effective slasher pic in which a determined final girl goes up against a supposed genius serial killer, with the added fillip that antagonists Margot Romero (Barbie Ferreira) and Arthur Spevak (Dacre Montgomery) are not just heroine and monster but content moderator (no one likes to use the term ‘censor’) and creator.
Margot has taken a gig with Kino, investigating complaints made about clips filed online – routinely glancing at them for seconds before deciding to leave them up as her supervisor (Jermaine Fowler) wishes, since the gig is to rubberstamp and protect against future litigation rather than take down any clips which might be offensive but which customers will click on anyway. She’s motivated to her thankless task because she once went viral (as ‘Train Girl’) in a stunt which went wrong and got her sister killed, a horror which means she’s recognised whenever she shows her face in public. In the course of her job, Margot comes across a couple of gruesome clips she thinks might be real – though they’re also restagings of scenes from Faces of Death which were fake. Conveniently, her artist roommate Ryan (Aaron Holiday) collects original big box video nasties and fills her in on the story behind John Alan Schwartz’s original film. Meanwhile, bland Arthur – even his stocking-and-whiteface mask is ordinary – stalks and abducts an influencer (Josie Totah) and a TV anchor (Kurt Yue), the latest of his series of media-related appropriate victims. Arthur, also a menial at an ISP company, and Margot compete to track each other with digital skillz … then face off in Arthur’s ordinary-on-the-outside house of horrors. The agony is piled on when Arthur calls the cops before Margot does, to lodge a claim of stalking and harassment which makes her look crazy – ‘she killed her sister’ – and him sane.
This ranks high on the short list of cult remakes far superior to the well-remembered but actually iffy originals (the recent Silent Night, Deadly Night is there too). I’ve not even been motivated to watch the check discs I have of the last two films in the original series – I tapped out after Faces of Death II – which have been in a shoebox with other passed-over released since DVD was the big new thing. I wouldn’t have said there was any call for a reboot, remake or relaunch … but if we have to have a 2026 Faces of Death, I’m glad this is it rather than say a Jackass-type five-hour compilation of actual beheading, animal cruelty or hideous accident videos. Charli XCX has a non sequitur cameo as a less conscientious moderator, which at least ties the film deeper into the zeitgeist. Now this is out of the way, please give Goldhaber and Mazzei something really substantial to be getting on with. Considering what they’ve achieved with a franchise I once said ‘could become landfill with no great loss to cinema as entertainment, art or popular culture ‘, imagine what they could do with really good source material.
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