We have not seen the 1978 Faces of Death. Let’s just get that out of the way. Neither of us has, and honestly, neither of us was rushing to fix that.
The original was written and directed by John Alan Schwartz under a pile of pseudonyms (probably because he knew what was coming) and is classified as a Mondo horror film. That means documentary or mockumentary style, centered around a forensic pathologist who examines what he calls different “faces of death.”
Throughout the film, he presents a mix of staged death scenes and actual footage of real disasters, from the aftermath of historical atrocities to footage from a 1978 PSA Boeing flight that collided midair with a private plane and killed nearly 150 people over San Diego.
As Arthur put it:
And they showed that. The aftermath. Fucking insane.
Yeah. That about covers it.
The film was panned on release, predictably. But it made roughly $35 million on an estimated $450,000 budget, spawned a string of sequels throughout the 80s and 90s, and became this untouchable cult artifact that you cannot find on digital or streaming.
People have old VHS copies of it. And that scarcity, that taboo quality, is a big part of why the IP has this kind of lasting grip on people who lived through it, and why the name still carries weight today.
What the 2026 Film Actually Does With It
This is where things get interesting. The new Faces of Death is not a documentary. It is not a mockumentary. It is not a found footage film. It does borrow stylistic fragments of that original format, but only in pieces, specific clips woven into a larger narrative. What we get instead is a psychological thriller with a very clear modernization thesis: what if someone recreated scenes from the original film and posted them to TikTok?
Barbie Ferreira plays Margo Romero, a content moderator at a fictional social media app called Kino, which is basically TikTok with a different name. She spends her days watching flagged videos and deciding what stays and what goes. Through her work, she starts encountering a series of strange videos that appear to show people being killed, recreated to closely mirror scenes from Faces of Death. She does what any reasonable person in 2024 would do: she posts about it on Reddit.
“Old Reddit,” Arthur was quick to clarify. “It has, like, the old school skin to it.”
From there, Margo becomes obsessed with identifying who’s making these videos, while we also spend significant time inside the perspective of the killer himself. His name is Arthur Spivak (yes, Arthur, we know), played by Dacre Montgomery. And the film is very much a cat-and-mouse game between the two of them.
Margo also carries a significant backstory. A few years before the events of the film, she was filming a TikTok dance with her sister on train tracks. They were supposed to jump off at the last second. Her sister slipped on the gravel, fell backward, and was killed. The video went viral. People recognize Margo in public and taunt her as “train girl.” She has been living in near-total social withdrawal ever since.
So the film is doing a lot at once. Grief. Guilt. The internet’s relationship with death and violence. Content moderation as a job. Viral fame as a curse. A lot of plates are spinning, and for the most part, they stay up.
The Performances
Dacre Montgomery is the standout. Full stop. You know him from Stranger Things as Billy, which already showed he can do unhinged, but this is something else. Arthur’s character has a meticulous duality to him. When he is around people in normal circumstances, he makes himself small.
Hunched posture, nasal voice, averted eyes, a baggy coat to hide a frame that is clearly built. He looks like someone who causes no concern. And then you see what he is actually doing at home, a house with hidden doors, sliding library shelves, a dedicated staging room in the basement where he shoots everything in a full protective bodysuit.
He is also, and this is the part that genuinely stuck with us, disgusted by blood. He is a serial killer who is repulsed by blood. You watch him shoot someone, watch a drop of blood hit his covered shoe, and he freezes. Wipes it off on the floor. Cuts immediately to a sink, where he is scrubbing under his nails with genuine horror.
Dexter level smart and meticulous,
Arthur said, “but then if something touches him, he’s like oh my god. And then he runs away.“
Ferreira holds her own throughout. There is a tendency in films like this for the killer to swallow the screen entirely, but that does not happen here. She carries the first two-thirds of the film with quiet, accumulating dread, and by the time she completely loses it in the third act, it reads as earned.
You can track Margo’s slow acceptance of her grief throughout the whole runtime. At the start of the film, any mention of her sister sends her inside and off the grid. By the final scene, a cab driver asks if she is a train girl, and she just says yes. That is it. “Yep. That’s fucking me.”
Jermaine Fowler also appears, and we were delighted about that. He is wonderful in everything (you may know him from The Blackening, or from Terrestrial, which we caught at Fantasia last year). Charli XCX has a brief appearance, two scenes, less than we expected, but she is apparently getting into acting now and will show up in more things soon.
The Social Media Commentary
This is the part of the film that we found most interesting, and the part that works best when it is being shown rather than explained out loud. Arthur’s videos are gaining massive traction on Kino, accumulating comments, followers, and engagement.
And the reason is that they sit right on the line between clearly fake and possibly real. The algorithm amplifies what keeps people watching. Violence that looks staged just enough to stay on the platform is, it turns out, exactly what people engage with the most.
Meaghan put it well:
Why did we used to go to public hangings and executions back in the day and stuff? This is our version of that now.
The moderation sequences are especially pointed. Margo allows footage of a person appearing to fall from a building. She flags a woman explaining how to use Narcan to prevent an overdose. She flags a condom demonstration as sexually explicit.
Arthur’s death videos keep getting approved because they look fake enough to qualify as entertainment. The film is arguing something specific about how these platforms function, and it does it by just showing you the job rather than making a speech about it.
Where the film stumbles is when it stops trusting you to get it. Arthur’s climactic monologue, in which he explains in some detail why his videos are popular and what makes people want to watch them, is too much. We already understood. You probably would have too.
“Everyone has TikTok on their phone,” Arthur said during the scene. “We know.” Some things do not need to be narrated, and the film’s instinct to underline its own message in that sequence is its most significant misstep.
The Kills and the Horror
Here is the honest answer: this film is not as brutal as the marketing suggests. The whole campaign leaned into the idea that it was too shocking to be seen, too violent for mainstream audiences. There is imagery on social media of the poster with a censored filter over it. It absolutely plays on the original film’s reputation for being forbidden material.
In reality, the kills are visceral but restrained. They feel realistic, which is what makes them land. No extended gore sequences, no shock-for-its-own-sake excess. The most explicitly gory moment involves acid being used to dissolve a body, and even that looks a bit too artificial to be genuinely disturbing. “It just looked fake,” Arthur admitted. “Pretty fake.” And we have to account for the fact that we are a 2026 audience that has seen a lot.
Arthur’s method for taking victims is what got to us the most. He approaches them with what is essentially an EpiPen loaded with fentanyl, and just bam, drives it in without warning. Every time. It is so sudden and aggressive that you flinch before you even register what happened.
So no, you do not need to brace yourself for something unwatchable. This is a film you can watch with popcorn. It is tense, it is occasionally uncomfortable in all the right ways, and it is well-executed. But it is not going to destroy you.
Our Score and What’s Next
For this horror movie review, we both landed in the six to six and a half out of ten range. It is a genuinely good film that is probably a little better than the marketing campaign made us expect, and a little more restrained in its violence than that same campaign wanted you to believe. The performances are strong across the board, the social media commentary is largely effective when it does not over-explain itself, and the final act delivers. There is real craft here.
Next up for us is the Exit 8 theatrical release, which we have been tracking, and Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, the TV show we have been quietly working through and have a lot to say about. More reviews dropping shortly, so stay tuned.
This might not be a horror movie you would watch on a whim, but it is still a decent requel worth checking out.