Body horror, whether it’s a David Cronenberg movie or an infamous torture flick like The Human Centipede and Hostel, often gives a film a reputation for being nothing but gore for the sake of gore. Sometimes this is fair and sometimes it isn’t, but the most infamous example of the genre went a step further by claiming to show real death up close and personal.
While the veracity of these claims is complicated, its place in horror movie history is irrefutable. And now you can stream Faces of Death for yourself if you want to experience a movie that bragged about being “banned in 46 countries.”
Horror movie streamer Shudder recently added the 1978 movie, which claimed to show the “graphic reality of death, close-up.” The film is presented as a collection of clips of people really dying, using the guise of a documentary study of death to justify the gruesomeness. Its infamously sleazy approach earned it a reputation as a “snuff film” that was discussed in whispers by suburban teens, although the claim is only partially true.
While there are some brutal clips in the film, including real footage of concentration camps and slaughterhouses, most of the scenes, like a man being executed via electric chair, are accompanied by re-enacted footage. The special effects are often cheap, but juxtaposing the real aftermath of a plane crash or media footage of a horrific accident with exploitative recreations of a bear attack creates a strange tone where it’s hard to tell if what you’re seeing is real, even when you know most of it is fake.
Similar to found footage films like The Blair Witch Project, half the terror comes from the confusing context, not the movie itself. Regardless of how truthful it was being, that ambiguity was enough to make Faces of Death a relative success that warranted multiple sequels. Today, when you can find all the disturbing content you want online, the novelty of Faces of Death is lessened. But its legacy as a traumatizing rite of passage remains, and that’s enough to make it an unsettling watch.
Meanwhile, the Faces of Death franchise will live on in a new format. The team behind the 2018 techie psychological thriller Cam is remaking Faces of Death with a Gen-Z edge: instead of being presented as an anthropological work, it will center around a moderator of an online forum who’s responsible for removing offensive content. With a cast boasting Barbie Ferriera, Dacre Montgomery, and Charli XCX, it will bring the original movie’s doubt over what’s real and what’s fake into the era of online misinformation. That’s an appropriate fate for a film that became an urban legend in and of itself.
