Barbie Ferreira (Euphoria) and Dacre Montgomery (Stranger things) will star in a new 1978 version Faces of Deathnews that is sure to send shivers down more than a few film fans.
That’s all thanks to the reputation of the original Faces of Death, as infamous as any movie you would have found on the shelves of your average video store in the ’80s and ’90s. The film featured images of animal and human deaths, some real and some fabricated, but all presented as the genuine article and cumulatively intended to disturb even the most die-hard of viewers.
Faces of Death was directed by filmmaker John A. Schwartz, under the pseudonym Conan Le Cilaire. A graduate of CalArts (where he reportedly lived with David Hasselhoff), Schwartz became involved with the project while working for a small production house.
Taylor Hill/Getty; Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Barbie Ferreira and Dacre Montgomery star in a new version of the infamous 1978 horror film ‘Faces of Death’
“One day several Japanese executives came to us and asked if we could make a documentary about death,” Schwartz recalled in a 2013 essay for Cine Excess. “They wanted us to capture the horror of extinction, and the more macabre the better. After the meeting, the owner’s son came up with the title and I came up with the concept: the story of a pathologist who, over time, has built a library of put together the death. The movie would simply describe his experiences.”
Release Aquarius Poster for ‘Faces of Death’
Schwartz cast an actor named Michael Carr as the supposed pathologist who introduced viewers to the film’s often stunningly grotesque imagery, which mixed documentary footage from film libraries with material staged by the director himself. For a sequence in which diners kill a monkey and eat its brain, Schwartz shot a live monkey and then used cauliflower to represent the animal’s gray matter. “To this day, this is the only segment that people swear is real,” Schwartz noted in the Cine Excess article.
The final film would in many ways herald the era of found footage horror films that ushered in in 1999. The Blair Witch Project.
“Part of the creative challenge was how to make it look like real life, to really fool people,” Schwartz told Deadspin in 2012. “We were way ahead of ourselves in that area.”
The film was banned in some countries, including the UK, where it was listed as a “video nasties”. Such censorship helped hype the film in the many territories where the film was shown. While the movie only cost $450,000, Faces of Death would make some serious money, with Schwartz claiming the final gross would be over $60 million.
Schwartz directed sequels to the movie before he passed away in 2019, but it’s the original Faces of Death that stands as his lasting, if barely bearable, legacy, a savage reminder of our own inevitable encounter with the Grim Reaper.
As the director wrote in his article for Cine Excess“In the end, that’s what Faces of Death was all about – shining a light on the one thing we all face.”
The new Faces of Death is being written by Isa Mazzei and directed by Daniel Goldhaber, part of the creative team behind the 2018 horror film Cam. The Hollywood Reporter came first with the news.
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