When John Alan Schwartz’s “Faces of Death” came out in 1978, it emerged at a time when the proliferation of violent images wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is today. The mondo-horror film, which featured everything from animal cruelty, a firing squad execution, and death by electric chair (to name a few of its violent delights), quickly became a cult classic, passed around between people who dared to expose themselves to the film’s gruesome footage. It was the type of forbidden cinema that cemented those in possession of its VHS tape as edgy and provocative.
It was later revealed that the footage, particularly that depicting human death, was revealed to be staged–and if you were to watch the footage today, it pales in comparison to the real-life horrors that are ever-present on the screens in our pockets. Only in 2026, when scrolling through reels, can I see a video of ICE raids sandwiched between a recipe for the best seafood boil and on-the-ground footage of the genocide in Gaza.
2026’s “Faces of Death”, helmed by director and co-writer Daniel Goldhaber and co-writer and producer Isa Mazzei, isn’t a remake of Schwartz’s film, nor is it fair to call it a reimagining. It is a project that is very much in conversation with the 70s film, interrogating the ways we’ve become so numbed to the violence around us, while also putting the crosshairs on the algorithms and institutions that benefit from our doomscrolling. Grafting a narrative onto its bloody exploits, it focuses on a content moderator, Margot (Barbie Ferreira), who is responsible for filtering out any content that is offensive or violent on a TikTok-type platform called Kino. Being exposed to the worst of what the Internet has to offer takes a toll on her, and her breaking point comes when she sees a series of videos uploaded by a mysterious user, Arthur (Scare Montegomery), who uploads brutal murders that are inspired by the original “Faces of Death” film. She attempts to track Arthur down to determine whether these murders are real or not, unknowingly bringing herself further into Arthur’s sinister machinations.
Mazzei and Goldhaber were in Chicago for the world premiere of their film, which screened as the closing night film of the inaugural Beyond Chicago Film Festival. It was a pleasure to speak with them in person about the importance of fidelity when depicting the internet, the secret to being “prophetic” filmmakers, the surprising drama around the depiction of the film’s cheese pizza, and whether or not online spaces can be redeemed.
It’s not lost on me that your film is premiering on Easter day. Have you guys given thought to “Faces of Death” being an Easter film?
Isa Mazzei: It’s a movie for the whole family!
Daniel Goldhaber: Maybe there’s something about death and resurrection.
IM: Arthur is reborn!
DG: Don’t you mean, Margot? How is he reborn?
IM: Because he lives online.
DG: Well, there you go. Just like Jesus.
IM: It works on multiple levels.
Daniel, in an interview and in press notes, you’ve praised Isa for being able to predict the future, whether it’s her saying “Legally Blonde” is a feminist masterpiece or incorporating TikTok in the film before it became so ubiquitous. Isa, what’s the secret to your power?
IM: I think there’s power in just being immersed in the times in which we live. I am chronically online, but I’m also not judgmental of it. It’s a space where my friends are, where my peers are, where people are doing really cool work and also really fucked up things. I think the key is just fully embracing the energy and the culture of the time you’re in without judging it. It is the best way to feel the current flow of what’s going on and what’s going to happen next. The second you try to place value judgments on what’s happening in culture, you immediately are separate from it, and that immediately makes it difficult to understand where it’s going.
DG: I also think that figuring out what comes next is just pattern recognition. In order to be good at pattern recognition, you have to be paying attention, and you also have to be asking, “What comes next in this series?” I think that for a lot of people, and even maybe a lot of artists, that’s not a question that they’re interested in asking. For us, we really want to be a part of our time, and then we want to make work that reflects it.
What’s interesting about “Cam” is that we made that movie about what life was like in 2016. There was nothing about that movie that was intended to make you think about what was “next.”
What’s happened with Alice–to say it explicitly–is that she’s been copied by an AI bot. We always knew that, but never wanted to dig into it because we didn’t want the movie to be sci-fi. That film was about the depersonalizing feeling of having a version of yourself out there on the Internet that you don’t have control over. I think it’s interesting how technology has kind of caught up to what we were saying.
Which, in some ways, is not dissimilar to what people have understood now that when you sabotage oil infrastructure as the price of it goes up, is something that has recently also become somewhat relevant. I don’t think Donald Trump is reading Verso Books literature, but you never know. Maybe he’s joined the cause. (Laughs)
To what you’re saying about capturing a very specific moment, have you both given thought to how, since our relationship to technology is changing so rapidly, the disparity might be larger between what you depict in your film versus how we actually interact with technology?
IM: We started making this movie in 2019. We’re never trying to make a movie about the future, we’re trying to make a movie about how life is in the time in which we’re making a movie, which generally speaking is a year or two or three before it’s ever going to come out. With “Faces of Death,” what has happened is that some of the emotions and some of this engagement with violence that we were feeling in social media, in the Internet in 2019, have, if anything, escalated exponentially since then.
I love how you both are committed to depicting the Internet with a type of authenticity that other filmmakers don’t even attempt to. What’s unique, though, is that with “Cam,” you never explained what the glitch was that was afflicting Alice. Sustaining that mystery meant you tapped into how much of the Internet is unknown to us. You pull the curtain back a bit with this film, where you’re showing the machinations of how people can use the Internet in cruel and violent ways, like with the sequence where Arthur makes a traceable link. Was that a conscious shift to go from obfuscation of the Internet to diving into its inner workings?
DG: Re: traceable links, does that really exist, as it exists in the movie?
IM: Absolutely.
DG: But it’s not that easy …
IM: When I was in middle school, no one had protected IP addresses. It might be more difficult, but that is absolutely a real thing that people used to be able to do very easily. It’s a little more complicated now.
DG: I think what people need to understand about the way that we make these movies is that the IP website has to be designed. So that’s not a real IP website. That’s not what a real IP website looks like. Same thing with the moderation interface, right? What makes these movies work is that we sit down and we say, “Okay, how does a real moderation website look?” Then we go “Okay, cool, how do we make that website feel not just legible, but cinematic? How do we retain its actual design features while still rendering those design features in a way that works for a movie?
IM: We’re also deliberate about using a collage of time periods. We’re very deliberate about incorporating things like the IP website, which is maybe a relic of older internet time, for things that feel more immediate, like a TikTok. Doing that helps aestheticize the internet, which makes the movie feel timeless. It doesn’t feel like it’s so specifically set at a certain year that it will immediately be dated later when you’re looking at the tech. We also do that with the physical technology in our film. We’re often sourcing iPhones or laptops that are slightly older and from slightly different time periods, which means that it feels more like the real world rather than having all our characters have the latest iPhone, laptop, or version of Google Chrome.
DG: I saw a great little reaction video because we sent the first 20 minutes of the movie to a handful of influencers, and there’s a woman who’s watching it. When it gets to Margot’s flip phone, she goes, “Wait, what year is this set in?” I love that that’s something that someone is immediately reacting to in our movie.
IM: That Pink Razor flip phone has been in all three of our movies, and it will continue to be featured. That was my cell phone in high school.
DG: We try to just be very in touch with how using the internet feels. What Isa was very clear about in setting the movie on TikTok is that she felt it was pouring fuel on the fire of Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. From the very beginning, it was clear that TikTok had really mastered the art of short-form video content and the short-form video content delivery service, so that something like what is happening in “Faces of Death” would actually be highly plausible. One of the issues that we’d always had with this project was that the content that Arthur is making wouldn’t have really gone viral on YouTube or Instagram, circa even like 2018. You could see how it would be on the internet, but it wouldn’t necessarily be popular. TikTok has so effectively tapped into our need for more when it comes to video; now, I see what happens in “Faces of Death” could actually transpire.
IM: I also think there are a lot of similarities between what happens to Margot in this film and what happens with Alice in “Cam” related to this idea. They’re both stories about characters who feel like pieces of themselves online have gotten away, they’ve lost control of that narrative, they’ve lost control of their agency, and the Internet is kind of like running away without them. There are parallels between those two films and how we feel about social media in general.
I think one of my favorite gags is that we never get to hear Margot finish her presentation, which she gives to the new Kino workers about how to survive burnout. Arthur jumping into the comments to defend himself was also a great bit. As violent and as serious as the film is, it is also quite funny, and I’m curious if, at the script level,what that was like to write in these moments of levity between the brutality.
IM: It’s good that you found those parts funny because that’s what we wanted. Especially with how Arthur was engaging, a lot of that is just drawn from the things we want to do when people comment on our shit. Someone will leave a comment, and we’re like, “If I’m going to respond to that, I have to make a Finsta to do it.” I end up not doing that, but we thought it would be really funny if Arthur actually did. Seeing the way he types, where he’ll type, delete, then repeat, those
These are all experiences we’ve all had online. I think they’re what make Arthur actually kind of relatable.
DG: I don’t particularly like the experience of being scared in a movie. Just on a personal level, I’m almost always chasing humor even in moments of terror. I think most of the scares in this movie could be read as scary, but they’re also funny. It’s funny that the mannequins are eating brains with forks. It’s gross and horrifying, but it’s hilarious. It’s funny that Arthur is hiding behind Neal in the laundry room and then jumps out, peekaboo style.
For the At Large podcast, something you shared, Daniel, was the futility of believing a film can enact social change, but what you can control is how you make the film and how you can care for people in that way. I’m curious how that manifested in the process of making this film.
DG: You don’t want to forget that you’re ultimately making a movie. That is the crew’s job; they’re dependent on that work to live and support their families. You don’t want to just be like “Hey, just have a good time!” This is a person’s job, and you want to treat them with respect and fairness as an employer. Yet on top of that, I do hope that there are aspects of working on this project that every member of the crew feels they’re able to express a part of themselves through their position.
I think part of the reason that film doesn’t necessarily actually lead to social change is that our relationship to film has completely changed in a way that media theory or even casual social theory hasn’t caught up to yet. I think for a long time, we went to the movies to imagine a different world. Twenty years ago, we weren’t using images to communicate daily, but now we are. Movies have become part of our language, our vocabulary, in a way that they weren’t prior, and so I think that in this weird way, movies are much more a reflection of our lives. In making a film, you’re trying to invent language through memes in a way that is just the reality of being a filmmaker today.
As a result, I think that like the way that we conceptualize film and narrative as social change, that’s very different.There are so many like memes, gifs, and images that become so immediately decontextualized from the movie that they’re a part of, and they’re used to tell a completely different story. As a creative, you have to accept that the best thing that you can do is create new images that up until that moment had not been communicated. Then those are images that enter into the cultural vocabulary in a way that can be transformative in terms of how we communicate with each other.
A core mantra of the film is “give the people what they want.” I think, in so many ways, what you’ve made me think about is “How can we retrain people’s desires to want something else?” These algorithms have us hooked on ragebait, but I wonder if filmmaking can be this tool to make people reflect, “Maybe I want more from my online experience.”
IM: I think for us, this film isn’t even so much about what people want in terms of our audiences; it’s more about who’s benefiting from this attention economy. Who is profiting off your doom scrolling? And by kind of recontextualizing some of these images that we’re so used to seeing on our phones and putting them in a movie theater and kind ofconfronting you with your emotional reaction to them, we kind of want to start that conversation: why? Why are we being kind of lured into engaging with this when we don’t even necessarily want this?
Speaking of “new images,” I found the presentation of food to be striking. I’ve never been more repulsed by crawfish or pizza before.
DG: I have some thoughts about the pizza in the movie.
IM: The pizza is too small.
DG: On the day we were doing that scene where Arthur is feeding his captives, we didn’t have time to get a different one. It’s supposed to be like a slumber party-sized pizza that’s like forty inches. It turned into its own bizarre comedy. I wanted the cheese to be floppy and fall off the slice, but it didn’t happen.
IM: Weirdly, the small pizza is more unnerving and elevates the horror of that scene. There’s something actually really uncomfortable about how inappropriately small the pizza is.
DG: The pizza now, I think, feels much more reflective of Arthur’s plastic-esque house, and the food itself almost feels like it’s made out of plastic.
IM: It reminds me of “Vivarium,” where they get the boxes of food there.
Isa, you’ve said something interesting about how it’s less that we’re less so “desensitized to violence … we have gotten used to living in a state of perpetual neurological stress.” I’m curious if you can speak to the value of still feeling the intensity of emotion even if it’s easier to just numb yourself.
DG: The way that social media operates, we know that the addiction and reactivity that social media engenders is something that is preying on our instincts as humans as social creatures. It’s kind of taking advantage of a natural empathy to see something violent and react. What it’s doing is it’s taking all these things that were supposed to exist in real life, and it’s moving them onto this digitally mediated platform and then supercharging it in a way that is just like optimized to addict us to the platform and actually remove us from our everyday lives. I would say that, unfortunately, if you want to get back to feeling things from the real world, you have to get off your phone. The science proves that idea out. If you want to live in reality, you have to live in reality. It’s very distressing that most of the power structures in our world are trying to make that a harder and harder thing. That’s the ultimate horror that the movie is talking about.
IM: I think the interesting thing that I’ve been digging into recently is that the internet doesn’t have to be this way.We’ve taken for granted that this is what the internet is, and therefore, either you take it or leave it, but we are actually capable of constructing social media that fosters connection and community. We are capable of building websites that are not endless holes to doomscroll. We are capable of creating an internet infrastructure that makes us happy. It’s just fostering that new type of internet and fostering people who are fighting that type of fight, and not continuing to give our attention to giant tech companies. We don’t have to just be no phone or this reality.
You’re making me think about what “constructive virality” might look like. For example, the way you credit your films, as “a film by Isa and Daniel,” … I would hope more people take note of that and begin to think about the ways film credits can reflect the collaborative nature of making a film rather than just submitting to auteur theory.
IM: We’ve seen recently more people crediting films this way as well. I think that as the younger generation comes up in Hollywood, we’re going to see a shift towards different types of crediting, different types of sets, different types of casting, and different types of crews. We’re going to see things change.
DG: A genuinely collective mode of production is the future. I think the most exciting film collective, this real indie filmmaking movement that’s come out of the US over the last few years, is the Omnes Films Collective. It’s not even structured as a collective. They’re still all working solo, but they all work on each other’s stuff. As a result, they’re able to make these really cool, expansive films at a reasonable price point. I think other people will continue to find new modes to essentially band together to keep the cinema alive.
“Faces of Death” releases in theaters on April 10th.
