Spoilers for the movie (and Scream 4)
The other day I saw a TikTok where someone said “all roads of modern horror lead back to Scream 4”. This aphorism can be said about Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei’s 2026 reimagining of the 70s cult classic Faces of Death. The original is a sort of documentary which follows a pathologist who explores the different faces of people and animals when dying. Most of the marketing exaggerated the film material and claimed the deaths were all real, this led to it being banned in a number of countries.
The 2026 reimagining follows Margot (Barbie Ferreira), a content moderator for a platform called Kino (think TikTok). Her career choice was chosen as she got her sister killed recording a stupidly dangerous video on a train track. This video got leaked and went viral and she’s now known as ‘the train girl’, so now she’s trying to find some sort of redemption. Her work leads her to a serial killer, Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), who’s inspired by the original Faces of Death and recreates scenes from the original for a modern audience.
Goldhaber and Mazzei’s movie takes on a meta reimagining of the original and tackles themes such as modern society’s desensitisation to violence, the remake epidemic we seem to be in and greedy corporations.
After watching this, Margot has easily become one of my favourite final girls. Due to the trauma she’s experienced she tries to make a difference. She is simultaneously the victim of the attention economy and a participant in it, and becomes a moderator of it to try to bring about change. Through trying to ‘make a difference’ (something she says in a cringey tone), she finds out the company she works for doesn’t exactly care about what’s out there. They are willing to let things go unflagged in defence of ‘censorship’, even when Margot believes the videos she’s seeing are real. When she goes to her manager for help, he basically tells her to let it go and not get too concerned over it because it’s ‘probably fake’. She quickly realised her job isn’t going to bring about the change she wants, because if the company doesn’t care about what happens to the content once it’s on the platform, then it isn’t really moderating anything. Margot wants to believe she can bring about real change working in a massive corporation but as we all know, corporations don’t want change they just want engagement.
Going back to “all roads of modern horror lead back to Scream 4,” Arthur’s motive is he kinda just wants to be famous. In Scream 4, Jill’s motive is she’s jealous of Sidney and wants the same fame and celebrity status as her. Similarly, Arthur in the third act states “it’s the attention economy baby and business is booming.” In different points in the film we see him obsessing over the videos he uploads, looking through his views, likes and replies to trolls. Through Arthur, the film puts into focus how obsessive we are for online validation, how most people crave their five seconds of fame. Both Jill and Arthur don’t want to watch the story from the sidelines anymore, they want to BE the story.
The movie also tackles other themes such as desensitisation to violence; it asks the question: what happens in a world when everything we watch is Faces of Death? Online, we are constantly exposed to violence in all forms, be it racism, footage of genocide, children being murdered, we scroll scroll and scroll. This exposure, combined with the rise of AI and deepfakes, means we can’t readily tell what’s real or fake and even if it’s real, some of us don’t care. We just want to be constantly entertained, we’re hungry for entertainment and Arthur leverages this. The more violent his videos, the more viral they go; his videos end up on the news and even spews a viral internet challenge. Faces of Death criticises the way algorithms turn human suffering into consumable content.
“The algorithm loves remakes. People love remakes. If it’s a remake, you can get away with murder.” – Arthur
We are in a remake epidemic, we’re getting reboots, remakes, reimaginings, requels, all of it! And our villain is emblematic of Hollywood, trying to resurrect a dead IP. Arthur takes Faces of Death, a piece of cult cinema, and repackages it for a new audience and, of course, the irony is that Legendary is doing the same thing, taking a zombie IP and repackaging it for a new generation (how meta).
I really enjoyed this movie! Dacre Montgomery gives an incredibly compelling performance as the villain and I hope he keeps playing bad guys because he lowkey just has the face for it. Barbie Ferreira was also great in this and the supporting cast also did a good job. My issue is mostly with the script. I felt like the dialogue was a bit heavy-handed at times and I get it’s meant to be META, but I felt like in the third act, the movie became too “look how clever we are, we’re in on the joke too, wink wink.” But given that studio execs asked Goldhaber and Mazzei to make a lot of changes and had a lot of red tape just a few weeks before shooting, I think it turned out to be a good film (went to a Q&A and they spilled ALL the TEA). I recommend it to anyone who’s craving an easy watch with a good amount of gore.
Faces of Death is available to watch in the UK on Apple TV
