FACES OF DEATH Movie Casts Dacre Montgomery and Barbie Ferreira

A couple of years ago it was announced that the hardcore and disturbing VHS franchise Faces of Death was going to be adapted into a feature film. Well, that project is moving forward with Stranger Things actor Dacre Montgomery and Euphoria actress Barbie Ferreira set to star.

Legendary Pictures is producing the reimagining of the Faces of Death franchise with Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber set to write and direct. This is the same creative team behind the 2018 psychological thriller Cam and the upcoming film, How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

The new film is said to revolve around “a female moderator of a YouTube-like website, whose job is to weed out offensive and violent content and who herself is recovering from a serious trauma, that stumbles across a group that is recreating the murders from the original film. But in the story primed for the digital age and age of online misinformation, the question faced is are the murders real or fake?”

The original cult movie was released in 1978, and it was meant to be a faux documentary. It had “the conceit of a pathologist exploring gruesome ways to die via footage purportedly culled from around the world. In reality, most of the death scenes were staged and faked, but no matter, the movie had its producers’ desired effect: outrage, revulsion, banning (although not in 52 countries as hyped by the film’s makers), and, of course, a money-making hit that spawned sequels and imitators.”

That original movie was written and directed by John Allan Schwartz, and he used multiple pseudonyms for several crew jobs on the movie. The film spawned several sequels including Faces of Death II (1981), Faces of Death III (1985), The Worst of Faces of Death (1987), Faces of Death IV (1990), Faces of Death V (1995) Faces of Death VI (1996).

Mazzei and Goldhaber said in a statement: “Faces of Death was one of the first viral video tapes, and we are so lucky to be able to use it as a jumping-off point for this exploration of cycles of violence and the way they perpetuate themselves online.”

I remember watching these videos with my friends when I was a teenager, and yeah, we thought it was all real, and it disturbed the hell out of us and freaked us out. I was happy to learn later in life that it was all fake.

As someone who’s very familiar with Faces of Death, I’m curious to see how this movie turns out.