Faces of Death Review: Reworked Video Nasty Fuels Moral Panic

A new film, "Faces of Death," offers a postmodern rethink of John Alan Schwartz's notorious 1978 "video nasty," shifting the focus from explicit gore to the moral panic surrounding digital content consumption. Directed by Daniel Goldhaber, known for "How to Blow Up a Pipeline," this contemporary take initially mirrors the themes of Prano Bailey-Bond's "Censor," which explored the psychological impact of consuming disturbing media. The film centers on Margot, portrayed by Barbie Ferreira, a content moderator working for a tech firm. Her job involves classifying user-generated footage, a task that becomes increasingly challenging as she encounters increasingly graphic material. Margot is haunted by personal memories and viral clips of a traumatic event, while her professional life is complicated by the influx of repurposed "Faces of Death" clips appearing in high-definition on her watchlist. Her supervisor, played by Jermaine Fowler, encourages her to approve these clips, citing the strong performance of DIY horror content in terms of viewership numbers. The situation escalates when a masked antagonist, played by Dacre Montgomery, enters the narrative, further blurring the lines between real-world horror and the digital content Margot is tasked with moderating. The original "Faces of Death" emerged during the 1970s home-rental boom as an extension of the "mondo" genre, which combined real and staged gruesome footage to provoke shock and morbid fascination. Its notoriety was amplified when it was included on the UK's Director of Public Prosecutions' "video nasty" list, a designation applied to a list of films deemed obscene and banned from distribution. This new iteration, nearly fifty years later, uses some of the original film's imagery but embeds it within a more conventional digital-age horror framework. The film critiques the modern digital landscape where extreme content can proliferate rapidly and gain traction through viral sharing and engagement metrics, raising questions about the ethical responsibilities of content moderators and the societal implications of readily accessible disturbing material. Goldhaber's direction aims to transform the original's voyeuristic horror into a commentary on contemporary anxieties about what we watch and its effect on our collective psyche, ultimately presenting a fable about moral panic in the digital era.