Review: In meta-slasher ‘Faces of Death’, there’s nothing scarier than social media
2026 / Dir. Daniel Goldhaber
Rating: 3/5
Watch if you like: The Scream series, Red Rooms, the societal brainrot of endless doomscrolling that enables evil billionaires to continue to profit off of our collective suffering.
In the era of Blockbuster and physical media, the original Faces of Death was one of those “holy grails” of horror whispered about by that guy on the playground who told you with absolute certainty that his uncle was a surgeon who removed Marilyn Manson’s ribs. Purporting to be a documentary showcasing real, gruesome deaths around the world, most of it turned out to be fake, though it did unleash a legion of sequels, imitators, and “gore mixtapes” with the real thing. Watching it today is a pretty tedious experience, and if you’re looking for edgelord thrills, there’s this thing called the internet.
Director Daniel Goldhaber (Cam, How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and co-writer/frequent collaborator Isa Mazzei seem to understand this by not trying to remake Faces of Death at all, but instead giving us a meta slasher about how the scariest thing in the world is social media companies pumping us full of addictive hyperviolent content. The end result of that? An actual serial killer (Dacre Montgomery, Stranger Things, Went Up the Hill) who creates his own snuff films, referencing iconic moments from the original Faces of Death, that go viral on a TikTok-like platform called Kino.
It’s quite a clever idea, and so is having the main character, Margot (Barbie Ferreira, Euphoria, Unpregnant), work as a content moderator for the social media network that has no problem approving the serial killer’s videos since they can’t prove they’re actually real or fake. However, videos on how to administer Narcan or have safe sex, get ‘em out of there! Goldhaber and Mazzei certainly aren’t subtle in their social media mudslinging, but they probably shouldn’t be.
Margot is herself a social media victim after making her sister film a stupid video that resulted in her sister being hit by a train, and views working as a moderator as either penance or doing her part to protect people. When she keeps seeing the killer’s stylized death videos and can’t get her boss to care because it would be bad for the algorithm, she does her own research. Sort of.
The mystery plotline falls flat because we already know who the killer is: a guy who works at a wireless company that allows him to find influencers and local news anchors to kidnap. Margot is also a pretty bad detective, relying entirely on other people on Reddit to help her figure out if the videos are real or not, and lucking out that her horror-obsessed roommate happens to have the original Faces of Death on VHS (which she hilariously fast-forwards through to find the scenes that match the killer’s video recreations).
Dacre Montgomery shines as the killer, Arthur, who lives in a generic McMansion and seems to have taken plenty of inspiration from The Silence of the Lambs and Matthew Lillard’s character in the original Scream. The actor is genuinely unsettling and fascinating to watch every time he’s on screen. When he’s not on screen, Faces of Death is pretty hit or miss, particularly as it veers more from its clever content moderation hook to generic slasher.
Faces of Death isn’t particularly scary, and it’s surprisingly tame for using the name of one of the most notorious films of all time. There’s a feeling of trying to have your cake and eat it too, with the film making the case that no horror movie can be as frightening as what’s on our phones every day, while trying to halfheartedly satisfy traditional slasher movie tropes with mixed results.
Along the same lines, Ferreira shines when we get to the final confrontation, but before then, Margot is confusingly drawn to be someone who is so clever she can spot this serial killer conspiracy yet makes all sorts of dumb moves like searching for video evidence in Arthur’s house despite having rescued a kidnapped influencer who can collaborate everything. A reveal of sorts of her actual motivation for tracking down the killer is an eyeroll, and I wish the attention returned at some point to the social media company itself, rather than finger-wagging at the audience for participating in our own algorithm-addicted downfall that none of us asked for and can’t totally escape as long as these companies continue to get away with murdering our brains.
Goldhaber and Mazzei have a clear understanding of how to deconstruct and make an interesting movie about the internet; they did so much more successfully in their 2018 movie Cam. They also had the misfortune of finishing their movie in 2023, and between production and release, Red Rooms came out, a truly horrifying film without any onscreen violence that nails the obsessive internet cultural fascination with true-crime and real-world death. While still full of relevant social media criticism and interesting meta ideas, Faces of Death is ultimately a curiosity rather than a gutting, must-see horror experience.