The 1978 mondo horror Faces of Death presented the viewer with various ways people can die – including shocking real-life footage. It’s the inspiration for a new movie of the same name, in which an online moderator (Euphoria’s Barbie Ferreira) comes across a group re-enacting the original film’s murders. Director-co-writer Daniel Goldhaber and co-writer-producer Isa Mazzei told us about updating the notorious ‘shockumentary’ for the age of social media…
STARBURST: Why reboot Faces Of Death now, and what was your approach to it?
Daniel Goldhaber: We were approached to make this movie by Legendary. They said, “Hey, we have the rights to remake Faces Of Death, are you interested?” And we asked what it was because we’d never seen it. We sat down, watched it, and realised that we had actually seen bite-size pieces of it on websites like eBaum’s World, Rotten.com, LiveLeak and whatnot. That was the jumping off point for the movie itself – essentially we wanted to tell a story about where Faces Of Death is today, and about how the attention economy has habituated a lot of us to both accept and commit acts of violence.
Do you think audiences’ perceptions on shockumentaries have changed since the original film, especially with today’s culture of social media and its moderation?
Isa Mazzei: I think their perception has absolutely changed. We talked to people who are just a few years older than us, who remember seeking out the original video. They would ask someone’s older brother to go rent it for them, and you couldn’t rent it everywhere – you kind of had to bribe someone to get it. It became something that you really had to seek out if you wanted to see it. I think that now, if I go to Google and type in ‘dead bodies’, boom, it’s there; there’s no barriers to entry anymore. And we’re also getting served this content when we don’t want it and when we don’t seek it out – it’s still coming up on our feeds on social media. So I think our relationship with those images, our ability to be shocked, has been greatly altered.
So do you think there’s been an increase in the violent content people see due to social media algorithms and new technology such as AI?
Isa: The social media algorithm wants us to be engaged, right? That’s what it wants. It wants our attention. Arthur [played by Stranger Things’ Dacre Montgomery] says exactly that in the movie; that it’s an attention economy. They want us to pay attention. And I think the algorithms, whether they’re controlled by AI or not, have figured out that things that are violent, things that make us angry, things that make us feel sick, that is what keeps us engaged, that is what keeps us clicking, that is what keeps us sharing and commenting. So our feeds have been trained to show that content more and more, because that’s what keeps us on the platform.
The film has quite a strong message about the attention economy and the scrolling mentality. Are there any other underlying messages that you want people to pick up on?
Daniel: I think ultimately what we’re trying to demonstrate in the movie is how sinister the digital world can be. What makes social media and digital technology so insidious is that there’s this convenience beneath it, this kind of smokescreen of the user interface design that removes us from the actual feelings, sensations and experience of communicating with another person. We don’t necessarily realise how alienating that is. Human beings are supposed to be in a physical space with each other, we’re supposed to smell each other and be able to experience the entirety of somebody’s body. We’re not supposed to engage with each other as floating heads on a computer screen – I feel exhausted after a day of Zoom meetings. There’s a lot in the visual language and in the thematic and narrative structure of the movie that’s meant to get people to recognise, hopefully not in a terribly didactic way, the ways that the alienation of modern society and technology drives us towards anger and violence.
Do you think the original Faces Of Death is going to see a resurgence after people watch this reboot?
Daniel: I definitely think it could.
Isa: I think it definitely informs this film in a way where seeing both is an interesting experience. We didn’t remake Faces Of Death, we just made a movie in which Faces Of Death exists in the real world. So anyone who’s curious about the original can go seek it out, and it will inform the watching of this film as well.
FACES OF DEATH will be released in US cinemas on April 10th.
