Faces of Death is meta-horror done right
The 2026 Faces of Death remake/reboot/reimagining will go down as one of the most unusual box office bombs in horror history. It had the media hype train behind it, it had a big name cast, it had influencers pimping it all over the socials, it had the gory magazine covers and it had a low-key brilliant marketing campaign … and nobody saw it in theaters earlier this year. The Wikipedia hive mind says the film cost more than $7 million to make (and that’s not counting advertising costs and all of the mundane logistics expenses) and barely grossed $3 million during its entire theatrical run.
Now that Faces of Death is on VOD, maybe it’ll finally get some attention — and it rightly should.
Faces of Death is a bizarre example of a movie failing to find an audience, not because it was ahead of its time but because it was of its time. It feels like a throwback period piece as soon as you start watching it — there’s this time capsule quality to the film that makes it feel more like a statement than passive entertainment. And weirdly enough, it’s not really a political statement, either. It’s a movie that sees the nihilism of the social media sphere and how it has railroaded so many young people into abandoning their lives in pursuit of some low-level infamy with greater costs than benefits. It’s so implicit in the film itself that it never comes off as a moralizing sermon about the “evils” of TikTok and Instagram. It’s a film that sees what’s going to be blindingly obvious to everybody 20 years from now; and this movie does a better job of demonstrating the obviousness that we can’t see than just about any mainstream, major release movie I’ve watched this decade.
I’ll admit, I was skeptical at first. “Remaking” something like Faces of Death — something that’s not only tied to a specific point at time, but welded to a totally different multimedia landscape that we’ll never return to — seemed like a fool’s errand. Learning that it was going to be a “meta-sequel” that simply used the controversial “mondo” movie as its central plot conceit didn’t exactly win me over, either. I’m not saying my expectations were low heading into it, but they were certainly tempered.
To use an iffy baseball analogy, director Daniel Goldhaber may not have hit a home run here, but he at least bopped a double — maybe even a triple. It takes a premise that doesn’t seem like it would work at all and he finds a way to make it believable, gripping and downright exciting at times. It’s a run of the mill slasher movie at heart, but he does so many counter-intuitive things with the stock formula that you actually feel a sense of unpredictably pumping through its veins again. Maybe calling this film The Silence of the Lambs for the brainrot generation sounds like a putdown, but it’s a description that’s WAY more apt than it sounds.
The movie is anchored by two really great performances. Barbie Ferreira of Euphoria fame plays our designated final girl and she is STELLAR in this thing. There’s this despondency and obsession to her performance that you don’t really see in modern day horror films. She’s a nervous wreck, but for good reason. She pops Addies at work and struggles with the trauma of losing a sibling in a Jackass stunt gone wrong and when it comes time for her to confront her figurative and literal demons, it’s SO satisfying to see her kick some ass. Needless to say, I’d pay good money to watch her knife fight with Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees someday.
The other standout performance in the film comes from Dacre Montgomery. Now, I’m not really spoiling anything when I say he’s the psycho killer of the movie — I mean, his deranged face is literally on the poster of the movie. We’ve seen a lot of fame-seeking wacko killers at the cineplex as of late, but there’s something different about Montgomery’s performance. Imagine Buffalo Bill and the titular character from the old detective show Monk and you kinda get the gist of things. If Jeffery Dahmer had his own BitChute channel, he’d probably look and sound a LOT like Montgomery.
By and large the Faces of Death “brand” is little more than a MacGuffin in this flick. Barbie plays a content moderator at a fictitious social media juggernaut, where she censors instructional videos about condom usage and Narcan and lets videos of probable executions stay up and age-unrestricted (which is one of those blink and you’ll miss it details that really gets the message of the movie across.) Well, one day she starts seeing a series of realistic murder “simulations” all modeled after notorious segments from the 1978 movie. Yes, even the fake “monkey brains” sequence, although here it’s given an ingenious twist (that the killer of the movie uses elaborate mannequins to technically carry out his murders is another one of those subtle bits of social commentary that’ll probably be lost on viewers not paying attention.)
So naturally Barbie goes on Reddit and starts playing weekend detective and it isn’t long before our central psychopath knows where she lives and from there, the movie takes an expected turn, albeit with some unexpected outcomes. I don’t think you have to be a master Jungian to see the symbolism in the types of people our masked maniac holds hostage: beauty influencers and TV news anchors and podcasters, etc. Oh, and there’s another twist to his M.O. — Michael Myers never used fentanyl to kill and subdue his victims, but then again, that stuff was kinda’ hard to come by in the late ‘70s.
You’re expecting a turn-the-tables, paint-the-walls red bloodbath finale and you GET it in Faces of Death. For a change, the final confrontation actually feels visceral and sloppy and pathetic at times. It’s just two people — in various degrees of madness, justified or unjustified — ensnared in primal bloodlust. It’s gross, it’s painful and it calls to mind any number of grindhouse classics where the violence felt anything but chic and glamorous. And again, I don’t think you have to strain your brain too hard to pick up on the social media metaphor.
Give it time and Faces of Death will find its following. It’s too keenly aware of its own culture for it to be dismissed as popcorn detritus. It’s sleazy, it’s grimy, it’s the horror movie equivalent of mildew build-up on your bathtub faucets. And yes, that is a compliment. It’s doubtful that this Faces of Death will ever garner a fraction of the notoriety and cult classic status as its 1978 inspiration. But it would be unwise to simply write off Faces of Death 2K26 as just another forgettable cash grab. Indeed, it’s one of the smartest horror movies to hit theaters in quite some time — it’s just that you have to look past all of the armpit stabbings and acid bath corpse disposals to recognize it.
GIVE IT A WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Doomscrolling, the golden era of LiveLeak, stabbing implements cleverly disguised as lipstick
Director: Daniel Goldhaber
Writer: Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei
Starring: Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, Josie Torah, Charli XCX
Studio: Legendary Pictures, Angry Films
Distributor: Independent Film Company
Language: English
Runtime: 97 Minutes
Release Date: May 12, 2026 (VOD)
