{"id":44648,"date":"2026-04-08T09:51:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T09:51:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/?p=44648"},"modified":"2026-04-08T09:51:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T09:51:17","slug":"new-faces-of-death-filmmaker-interview-how-real-violence-shaped","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/?p=44648","title":{"rendered":"New \u2018Faces of Death\u2019 Filmmaker Interview: How Real Violence Shaped"},"content":{"rendered":"


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For director Daniel Goldhaber<\/a> and his co-screenwriter Isa Mazzei<\/a>, the new \u201cFaces of Death\u201d<\/a> didn\u2019t begin on today\u2019s internet<\/a>. In fact, the spirit of their terrifyingly inventive script traces all the way back to the mid-1990s in Boulder, Colorado \u2014 where the filmmaking duo first met.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat moment growing up there had a weirdly outsized influence on American culture, but also one that was kind of invisible,\u201d Goldhaber said in a recent interview with Mazzei and IndieWire. \u201cBoulder people realize how pervasive it was<\/a>, but it\u2019s not like everybody else did.\u201d<\/p>\n

Long before the pair got started reimagining one of the web\u2019s most infamous shock tapes for the Independent Film<\/a> Company (in theaters Friday, April 10), Goldhaber and Mazzei were just two kids living in a community where mass violence was suddenly everywhere. <\/p>\n

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The Columbine high school shooting<\/a> of 1999 loomed large over their adolescence, and the 9\/11 attacks brought televised death to the entire country. Years later, the Aurora movie theater shooting hit close to their old neighborhood. And in 2021, another gunman opened fire inside a local grocery store, where Goldhaber once made a student film.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s this sense of being unable to look away,\u201d Mazzei said, recalling how she and Goldhaber watched that shooting unfold via livestream from different cities. That instinct \u2014 to witness, process, and keep witnessing, even when you maybe <\/em>shouldn\u2019t \u2014 is the connective tissue between the duo\u2019s Rocky Mountain upbringing and their latest horror film.<\/p>\n

\"FACES
\u2018Faces of Death<\/a>\u2018 (2026)\u00a9IFC Films\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s also the question at the heart of the new \u201cFaces of Death.\u201d On the surface, Goldhaber and Mazzei\u2019s latest is a vigilante crime thriller about a content moderator (Barbie Ferreira) who is busy hunting a web-obsessed serial killer (Dacre Montgomery). The so-called \u201cremake\u201d is also an homage to a notorious VHS artifact from 1978. The new version is less interested in sincerely traumatizing audiences than it is in asking why they\u2019re already so hard to shock. Mazzei traces that shift back to her own childhood.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember very well my first experience of digital violence, which was watching the World Trade Centers, watching the jumpers,\u201d she said. \u201cI was in elementary school. I was way too little to see that.\u201d What followed wasn\u2019t numbness so much as a necessary adaptation for survival.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t actually know anymore when I see a violent image on my phone if it\u2019s affecting me,\u201d Mazzei said. \u201cI\u2019ve just kind of had to normalize how that feels, and it\u2019s become my new baseline.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2018Faces of Death\u2019 (2026)\u00a9IFC Films\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That distinction, between desensitization and normalization, is crucial to how Goldhaber and Mazzei approach scares in the digital age. While many modern genre films escalate gore in search of new extremes, \u201cFaces of Death\u201d suggests something more unsettling: that the real threat is ambient and permanently bleak. It\u2019s not about feeling nothing<\/em>, but about getting used to feeling bad all the time<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s an algorithm that wants to keep everyone on their phones,\u201d Mazzei said. \u201cIt wants to keep us scrolling forever, and it has figured out that the best way to keep you engaged is to keep you angry, to keep you kind of depressed, and to keep feeding you more violence, fear, and rage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goldhaber argues that Big Tech companies aren\u2019t just profiting off of our communications and our social media engagement. They\u2019re using it to actively stoke our anxieties and addictions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re [tracking] our usage of these platforms [in a way] that doesn\u2019t even feel like \u2018engagement\u2019 anymore,\u201d he said. \u201cBut there\u2019s no real other way to talk to each other. It\u2019s created a vicious cycle that is virtually impossible to escape.\u201d That tension, embedded into the film\u2019s script, came directly from Goldhaber\u2019s own experience.<\/p>\n

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\u2018Faces of Death\u2019 (2026)\u00a9IFC Films\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cIt was just an idea,\u201d he said. \u201cI had worked as a content moderator, and we had discussed doing a kind of paranoid thriller set in that world.\u201d The project continues a thematic throughline from their earlier collaborations, including the 2018 techno-thriller \u201cCam,\u201d which explored digital identity and exploitation through sex work \u2014\u00a0and the radicalization drama, \u201cHow to Blow Up a Pipeline,\u201d another film as concerned with historic systems of power as it is the consequences of contemporary desperation. <\/p>\n

After being asked to pitch an idea geared toward the old \u201cFaces of Death\u201d IP, Goldhaber and Mazzei concluded that the job of an internet user now reflects a broader, more frightening reality \u2014 one where opting out of doomscrolling is no longer an option for most normal people. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you want to interface with modern society, you have to be online,\u201d Mazzei said. \u201cYou have to exist somewhere and have some type of footprint.\u201d <\/p>\n

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\u2018Faces of Death\u2019 (2026)\u00a9IFC Films\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That social trap makes the movie\u2019s connection to its source material especially pointed. The original \u201cFaces of Death\u201d was a pseudo-documentary that presented death scenes \u2014 some real, many staged \u2014 under the guise of an educational inquiry. Hosted by a fictional pathologist, the legendary oddity blurred facts and falsehoods just enough to make viewers question what they were really seeing.<\/p>\n

When it later exploded in popularity on VHS, \u201cFaces of Death\u201d became a kind of underground rite of passage of the late 20th century. The tape was passed between friends, hidden behind rental counters, and whispered about as something you weren\u2019t technically \u201csupposed\u201d to watch. Goldhaber and Mazzei aren\u2019t interested in recreating that experience. In their view, the internet \u2014 and the first movie\u2019s multiple <\/em>sequels \u2014 already have.<\/p>\n

\"FACES
\u2018Faces of Death\u2019 (1978)\u00a9Aquarius Releasing, Inc.\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s become so normal to view death on our phones, that we wanted to place it on screen in a movie theater so that you\u2019re recontextualizing how it feels to see it,\u201d Mazzei said. <\/p>\n

To that end, the filmmakers made the controversial decision to incorporate some authentic death footage sourced from the internet into their narrative feature. It\u2019s material meant not to sensationalize violence, but to confront audiences with the same images they might otherwise absorb without reflection. <\/p>\n

\u201cHumans have always wanted to witness death,\u201d Mazzei said. \u201cI think it comes from a deep desire to understand this one thing that we cannot and will not ever understand while we\u2019re alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goldhaber, meanwhile, pushes back on the idea that violent imagery is inherently harmful.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think that there\u2019s much of a moral case to be made around how much violence or gore is in a film,\u201d he said. \u201cRepresentation of violence can be performance art, fake blood, people having a good time\u2026 The tension that our movie confronts is that it\u2019s not necessarily the representation of the thing that matters. It\u2019s what idea that representation conveys.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2018Faces of Death\u2019 (2026)\u00a9IFC Films\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With roots in real school shooting legislation, that philosophy extended into the film\u2019s real-world rollout \u2014\u00a0which has already been marked by clashes with censorship boards in 2026. The \u201cFaces of Death\u201d filmmakers have described issues with the MPAA (including objections to specific imagery depending on its context in the final cut), highlighting the arbitrary nature of how violence is judged and regulated.<\/p>\n

For Goldhaber and Mazzei, that contradiction is the point. As they put it in the \u201cFaces of Death\u201d promo materials, this isn\u2019t a traditional reboot so much as \u201can exploitation of an iconic exploitation film\u201d \u2014 one\u00a0specifically designed to \u201cexpose the horror of the mainstream.\u201d<\/p>\n

If anything, the lifelong friends and filmmakers\u2019 goal was to restore emotional weight to images that have lost it, while making audiences sit with something they might otherwise scroll past. In a world where reality itself feels increasingly unstable, that delineation still matters.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes a real image means that there\u2019s real violence on the other end,\u201d Goldhaber said. \u201cAnd real violence is something that we owe it to ourselves to eradicate.\u201d The problem, he suggests, isn\u2019t that we can\u2019t tell what\u2019s real or not. It\u2019s that we might stop caring either way.<\/p>\n

From Independent Film Company, \u201cFaces of Death\u201d is in theaters on Friday, April 10. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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