Overlook 2026 – The low-vibrational “Video Nasty” centering shock value and morbidity has evolved since the 70’s-80’s. Buh-bye analog, but concerningly enough, it’s looking real familiar in the mirror right now. Back in the day, pushback by the press, society, and even religious organizations obliterated the nano-genre’s chances to submit for distribution. We can’t review that moment in censorship history without crediting cinematic weirdo John Alan Schwartz’s 1978 cult classic, Faces of Death. Now, following his first successful tech dystopia Cam (2018), Daniel Goldhaber returns with a new digital nightmare of the “run it back” variety.
We’re facing the threat of living through the boss level of a surveillance state. With the internet in our pockets, and a camera every 5 feet from where you stand, the everyman can create their own lore, for better, or for deception. That being said, DIY horror is trafficking, and Faces of Death takes a respectable stab at threatening the people with a horror that might exist under our thumbs. The stab aims for the shoulder, or wherever you can avoid major organs, mind you. A critical hit to the original FoD mockumentary blueprint wasn’t the plan, but it should’ve been to better challenge one of the biggest whales in cult cinema history.
The difference between then and now, is that the days of searching for morbidity is dead. Consent isn’t a requirement to witness terrors that sneak through the algorithm. Society’s stomach for gore has grown 10 fold because of it, but just like the video nasty era, we’re still damp with doubts on if we should be trusting what we see at face value or not. The baby tech dystopia we exist in makes it a perfect time to bring exploitation back into conversation. It’s also the reason I can’t and won’t call Faces of Death a remake, but a continuation of an intervention we’re in slight denial of, but not speaking on through movies to this degree. Maybe it would’ve been too much of a risk (damn, the irony), but again, a truer remake attempt could’ve been thrice as shocking as a copycat slasher that walks with the puffed up ego of Scream 2 through 4.
Another thing the new Faces of Death is not, is a video nasty. Let’s call it “contemporary taboo”, using the OG source material as the wheels. The film stars Barbie Ferreira in her final girl moment; a content moderator for the pseudo-Tiktok app “Kino”. Intentions of a corporate department focused on protecting web users from violence and offense is a good thing, but Goldhaber and co-writer Isa Mazzei are honest with the holes corporate tech digs at our expense. They don’t care about whatever violence is going down in the atmosphere, they just don’t want it on their app. The C word, censorship, is the one that matters most. History repeats itself, yeah?
While on the clock, Margo (Ferreira) comes across a series of ultra violent murders looking too real to be simulated. The kill sequences circulating the app are all recreations of the examples used in the original FoD, which our chronically online killer, Arthur (Dacre Montgomery) has a nasty fetish for. These sequences are the prize, and the only aspect that really honors the lifeblood. The meat of FoD is a crowded, amphetamine fueled cat and mouse chase that really should reconsider its daily dose. It has the kind of mania that is counterintuitive to lifting a plot you can see from miles away. It does have the kind of mania a cocktail of Adderall and personal trauma will have a chick stuck on, though. Can’t deny that’s always fun.
Contacting the authorities definitely ain’t a part of a content moderators job description. Hell, that’s a crack to the corporate NDA. Still, as a victim of online scrutiny herself, Margo falls ill with my favorite strain of cinematic obsession; when monsters make monsters out of men (or woman). We’ve seen it before in films like Kim Jee-woon’s “I Saw The Devil”, where what starts as empathy or revenge, quickly turns into a personal vendetta to be completed by any means. It’s a super smart turn in character development inspired by the very real subculture of internet sleuthing, but regrettably doesn’t come close to fruition, leaving us with a typical, single dimension final girl.
Barbie’s potential with high octane horror is extremely visible, and Dacre’s convincingly unstable character study, although barely studied, still squeaks like a freshly greased pistol. I can only imagine how much more impactful these performances would be if their characters were observed under a brighter lamp. After all, both installments should be, in some way, an analysis of the human condition. The lack of shock value is shocking, but I am impressed how both leads still hold their bag, dripping with blood and nervous ticks.
