For ’80s kids, few films capture the decade in horror better than Faces of Death. Even though it released in 1978, and draws inspiration from the mondo sub-genre that began in the ’60s, Faces of Death was a mainstay on video store shelves and a frequent subject on the playground. The cool kids whose parents let them watch it described in great detail the grisly fatalities on display, while the other kids imagined horrid images of monkey brains and people burned alive.
These days, you can find that and worse by scrolling through Reddit. So it’s to the credit of director Daniel Goldhaber and co-writer Isa Mazzei that they lean into our internet reality with their 2026 remake. The latest trailer for Faces of Death promises a meta-slasher, in which a woman (Barbie Ferreira) who moderates a video platform realizes that a killer is recreating the kills from the 1978 movie. Joining her in her search are comedian Jermaine Fowler, Dacre Montgomery from Stranger Things, and pop star Charli XCX.
Nowhere is that cross-generational aspect more clear than when, early in the trailer, Ferreira’s character googles the phrase “How to tell if a snuff film is real?” Certainly, many of those old enough to learn about Faces of Death in the pre-internet age did the same when search engines allowed us to confirm the urban myths of our youth.
The original 1978 film presented itself as the findings of researcher Francis B. Gröss (Michael Carr), who has devoted his life to exploring the nature of death. Throughout the film, Gröss shows the audience the various people expiring in gruesome ways: someone gets eaten alive by an alligator, police gun down a suspect (back when that wasn’t so frequently recorded), a criminal is executed via electric chair.
