It\u2019s a shame the \u201cScream<\/a>\u201d franchise has already bled out everywhere but the box office, because Daniel Goldhaber\u2019s<\/a> similarly meta \u201cFaces of Death<\/a>\u201d is sharp enough to have cut that self-cannibalizing shibboleth down to size on its own. Much uglier and more pointed than Paramount\u2019s stab-happy ATM of a movie franchise, this similarly meta reflection on media consumption \u2014 on the \u201crules\u201d of the game, and our detached relationship to ubiquitous scenes of violence \u2014\u00a0exhumes one of the most notorious horror movies ever made in order to shudder at the banality that snuff films have come to assume in the age of social media. Here is a smart, fun, and deeply unsettling post-modern slasher that know it can\u2019t manufacture anything scarier than what people scroll past on their phones every day, and leverages that awareness into a multiplex-ready meditation on the terror of living in a world where even the worst atrocities have been flattened into digital wallpaper.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Consider how different things were back when John Alan Schwartz\u2019s \u201cFaces of Death<\/a>\u201d was first released in 1978. Enshrined in Goldhaber\u2019s film<\/a> as \u201cthe first viral video,\u201d the cheap but extremely profitable faux-documentary \u2014 in which a fake pathologist by the name of Francis B. Gr\u00f6ss (lol) narrates a semi-convincing series of staged executions, presented to the audience for purportedly scientific reasons and interspersed with legitimate news footage in order to appear more credible by association \u2014 became the stuff of urban legend as rumor spread that everything in it was authentic. It was happily branded as a cursed object, and hidden among the porno tapes behind the beaded curtains at video stores across the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n Today, video stores have virtually all gone out of business, and every teenager in America goes to school with a portal in their pocket that allows \u2014 or encourages<\/em> \u2014 them to witness all of the world\u2019s atrocities as they play out in real-time so that a small handful of tech giants can profit off that morbid attention. \u201cFaces of Death\u201d is no longer \u201cbanned in 46 countries\u201d (as its exaggerated marketing once boasted), it\u2019s now the world\u2019s most lucrative business model. How do you scale that idea to its current extreme? It\u2019s simple: Instead of goading people to wonder if something is \u201creal,\u201d you create an intangible social fabric in which everything feels equally fake.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.indiewire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/https___cdn.sanity.io_images_xq1bjtf4_production_56b3dcd429cb515de55feaecdff855a5cf8f3c51-3996x2160-1.jpg?w=300&h=168&crop=1\")
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