Faces of Death: A Critic Remembers the Mondo Shocker, Its Sequels and the 2026 Remake

You Like to Watch, Don't You? My First Encounter With Faces of Death

In 1993, the poster for Sliver, the erotic thriller starring Sharon Stone, teased audiences with a sly question: "You like to watch, don't you?" It was a clever line for a film about voyeurism. But every time I think of Faces of Death, the notorious 1978 mondo film that promised real footage of people and animals dying, that same tagline comes back to me with a different answer.

No. You shouldn't like to watch this.

Whether the deaths in Faces of Death were real, staged, or somewhere in between, the violence on that tape was made to feel real enough to be unbearable. I know, because I tried to watch it as a boy, and I couldn't get through it.

Let me take you back to where my story with this film begins: Cairo, in the late 1970s.

Friday Mornings at the Metro Cinema

I was born in 1971, and some of my happiest childhood memories are set inside the Metro Cinema in downtown Cairo, the house of MGM. Every Friday, from nine to ten in the morning, the Metro screened a full hour of MGM cartoons. Tom and Jerry chased each other across the big screen, along with the rest of the studio's animated family, and the hall filled with children laughing at the same gags their parents had laughed at years before.

Then, at ten o'clock, the feature started.

My mother and I made it a ritual. We bought two tickets and stayed for both sessions, the cartoons and the film. We went so often that the cinema staff knew us by sight. For a boy growing up in Cairo, that weekly double bill was a film school before I knew film schools existed.

Choosing the Friday film was a job I took seriously. During the week, I rode the school bus through downtown, and I studied the huge painted billboards that hung above the cinemas. Those hand-painted posters were how Cairo advertised its movies at the time: giant faces, bold Arabic and English titles, colors brighter than life. From the bus window, I would make my shortlist and present it to my mother.

Somewhere in those years, on a billboard or in the lobby of a cinema, I saw the poster for Faces of Death.

A Poster I Never Forgot

I can't tell you the exact day or which street it was. I was a child, maybe seven or eight. To be honest, I'm not even sure the film was ever screened in Egypt; I don't believe it was. But the image stayed with me: that title, those two words, Faces and Death, side by side, promising something forbidden.

That's the genius, and the cruelty, of exploitation marketing. A poster doesn't need to show you anything. It only needs to make you wonder. And a curious boy who already spent his Fridays in the dark of the Metro Cinema was exactly the audience that kind of curiosity was built for.

I was far too young to see it, of course. The Metro was showing cartoons and family films to my mother and me. Faces of Death went into the back of my memory and waited.

The Video Club Years: Betamax, Then VHS

It waited until the 1980s, when home video changed everything about how my generation watched movies.

Our first machine at home was a Betamax. VHS came later. There were no DVDs, no CDs, and of course no streaming. If you wanted a film at home, you went to the video club, the small neighborhood rental shops where tapes lined the shelves and the covers did all the selling. Picking a tape there was a lot like picking a film from the school bus window. You judged by the box, the title, and the rumors.

Video clubs also gave us trailers. Many tapes began with previews for other releases, and somewhere along the way, on one of those tapes, I saw the trailer for Faces of Death. The poster from my childhood suddenly had moving images behind it.

Curiosity won. I rented the film.

The Tape I Couldn't Finish

I was somewhere between twelve and fifteen years old. I pressed play, and the narrator, a calm, serious "pathologist," began guiding me through a catalog of death: accidents, executions, animals slaughtered, bodies on autopsy tables.

It was disgusting. There's no more elegant word for it.

I don't remember watching the whole thing. I think I fast-forwarded through much of it, the way you cover your eyes in a horror film, except this didn't feel like a horror film. It felt like something I wasn't supposed to see. The film's whole trick was to make me unsure whether I was watching actors or real people dying, and that uncertainty made it worse.

Years later, when I became a professional film critic, I went back to Faces of Death with an adult's eyes and a critic's questions. I learned that it had a whole family of sequels, that much of its "real" footage was staged, that some of it was horribly genuine, and that it belonged to an older Italian tradition called mondo cinema. This year, in 2026, the title came back in a new film from Shudder, built around a killer who copies the original tape.

So this is the story of a film I couldn't finish as a boy and have never quite been able to forget, starting with the question everyone asks first: was any of it real?

What Is Faces of Death? The 1978 Original, Real vs Staged Footage

Before anyone could answer whether it was real, the people who made Faces of Death worked hard to make sure nobody could be sure. That was the whole business plan.

The film was released in the United States on November 10, 1978, distributed by Aquarius Releasing, a company known for grindhouse and exploitation titles. Its writer and director was John Alan Schwartz, though you won't find that name on the original credits. He hid behind pseudonyms, mainly "Conan Le Cilaire," and also "Alan Black." When the director won't sign his own film, it tells you something about what kind of film it is.

Dr. Gröss, Our Guide Through the Morgue

The device that holds Faces of Death together is its host, a soft-spoken pathologist named Dr. Francis B. Gröss. He introduces himself as a man who has spent his career around death and who now wants to show us its many faces, as an education rather than entertainment.

Dr. Gröss was not a doctor. He was an actor, Michael Carr, playing a character, and even the name works as a small private joke. His calm, professional tone is the film's most effective trick. When a man in a white coat tells you something is a medical document, you lower your guard, and the film can put almost anything in front of you.

Mixed in with the fake doctor was at least one real one. Thomas Noguchi, the famous Los Angeles County chief medical examiner, known as the "coroner to the stars," appears in the film. Placing a genuine public figure next to an invented one is exactly how Faces of Death blurs the line between fact and fiction.

The Tour of Death

The structure is simple, like a guided tour or a mondo travelogue. Dr. Gröss moves from one segment to the next, each a different way to die: animals in slaughterhouses, hunters and their prey, accidents, executions, suicides, autopsies, and bodies after disasters and wars.

There's no plot and no hero, only the next scene and the narrator promising it is all real. That promise was the selling point, and the poster carried it: this is not a horror film, this is the truth.

It wasn't, at least not all of it.

The Staged Scenes: Faces of Fakery

Many of the most notorious moments in Faces of Death were staged with actors, makeup, and low-budget effects. Over the years, people who worked on the series have admitted this openly, and the 1999 documentary about the films, which I cover in the next section, shows how several tricks were done.

The most infamous fake is the scene I still can't put out of my mind: tourists at a restaurant eating the brains of a live monkey at the table. It's grotesque, and it was designed to be the part everyone talked about at school the next day. It was staged.

Other well-known set pieces belong in the same category: a hiker attacked by a bear, a ritual cult gathering, and execution scenes, including one by electric chair. They were all constructed, though the filmmakers shot them grainy and shaky so they would look like stolen footage. In 1978 that rough, amateur style was a disguise. Today we would call it found footage, and it's one reason Faces of Death is often listed as an ancestor of that genre.

The Real Footage: Where the Film Stops Pretending

This is the part that makes Faces of Death harder to dismiss as a prank. Not everything was faked.

The film also uses genuine material: slaughterhouse and animal-killing footage, real autopsy and morgue scenes, and archival newsreel of historical deaths. One example is footage of the body of Benito Mussolini after his execution in 1945. Some accident and disaster aftermath scenes were also real recordings.

That mixture is what made the film so disturbing for a twelve-year-old with a remote control, and honestly for an adult as well. Once you know some of it is real, you can't relax during the scenes that are fake. The real material lends its authority to the staged material, and you never know which one you're watching.

"Banned in 46 Countries": The Legend That Sold the Tape

The film's marketing often repeated that it had been banned in dozens of countries; "46" is the number most often quoted. Whether every one of those bans happened is doubtful. The claim worked better as an advertisement than as a fact.

And it worked very well. For a teenager in a video club, the word "banned" on a box was like a dare. Faces of Death became a schoolyard rite of passage across the world in the VHS era, the tape you were dared to watch, then lied about having finished.

I had no dare to accept. I had only my curiosity and a poster from the school bus window. But I understood the dare perfectly when I watched it, because the film itself is built like one, daring you to keep looking.

So, Is Faces of Death Real?

The short answer: partly. Faces of Death is a mix of staged scenes performed by actors and genuine footage of real deaths, mostly animal slaughter, autopsies, and archival news material. The most famous "shocking" scenes, including the monkey-brain dinner, were faked.

Knowing that doesn't make it easier to watch. If anything, it makes the trick feel crueler. The filmmakers used real suffering to make their invented suffering believable, and they did it so well that people are still asking the question nearly fifty years later.

The bigger surprise was that this was only the first tape. Faces of Death became a franchise.

The Faces of Death Sequels and the Documentary That Exposed Them

When I discovered, years after my failed attempt at the first tape, that Faces of Death had sequels, I wasn't surprised. Exploitation cinema runs on a simple rule: if it sold once, sell it again. And Faces of Death had sold, on video shelves around the world, to millions of curious viewers who, like me, rented it on a dare or a rumor.

What followed was a series that stretched across almost two decades, from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, each entry promising more death, more truth, and more forbidden footage. As with most horror franchises, from Friday the 13th to Saw, the promises got bigger while the films got thinner.

Faces of Death II (1981)

The first sequel arrived in 1981, again from John Alan Schwartz, and it brought back the familiar guide: Michael Carr as Dr. Francis B. Gröss, still calm, still serious, still pretending to be a doctor.

The formula didn't change. Faces of Death II moves from segment to segment, mixing news and accident footage with staged material shot to look stolen. By 1981 the audience knew what to expect, and that is the trap every shock sequel falls into. Shock depends on surprise, and you can't be surprised by the same trick twice.

Faces of Death III (1985)

Part three, directed again by Schwartz and co-written with Veronica Lakewood, followed in 1985. It was released overseas first, as early as March of that year, and did not reach American home video until August 1986.

That delay says a lot about how this franchise lived. The theater was never its true home. Its real market was the video club, the same kind of shop where I picked out tapes in Cairo, where a lurid box cover could reach viewers far from any cinema poster or newspaper review.

Faces of Death IV (1990)

By the time Faces of Death IV appeared in 1990, the series had changed hands and changed hosts. Dr. Gröss was gone, replaced by a new narrator figure, and the franchise entered a new decade that would soon bring camcorders, reality television, and the first glimpses of the internet.

Part IV is still remembered among collectors and on horror channels, but the original's mystery had worn off. Audiences had grown more suspicious, and the question "is it real?" now came with a knowing smile.

Faces of Death V and VI (1995–1996): The Recycling Years

The final numbered entries, Faces of Death V in 1995 and VI in 1996, were mostly compilations, assembled from footage of the earlier films. At that point the series was feeding on itself, the way a long-running TV show starts airing "best of" episodes.

The original was also given a fresh life on video under the title The Original Faces of Death, a clever way to sell it again to a generation that had only heard the legend.

The Imitators: Death Scenes and Traces of Death

Success always attracts competitors. In 1989, Death Scenes offered a collection of real crime and morgue photographs and footage, narrated by Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan, a casting choice that tells you how that film wanted to be seen.

In 1993 came Traces of Death, which went further in one key respect: it presented itself as made entirely of real footage, with no staged scenes, set to an aggressive soundtrack. It was a sign of where the genre was heading. Audiences no longer wanted the theatrical fakery of a monkey-brain dinner. They wanted the genuine, unedited thing, and soon another medium would give it to them for free.

Faces of Death: Fact or Fiction? (1999)

Then, in 1999, came the film that pulled back the curtain: Faces of Death: Fact or Fiction?, a documentary about the making of the series.

It confirmed what many viewers had long suspected. Some of the series' most famous deaths were performed by actors and created with makeup, props, and editing. Seeing how ordinary those tricks were, a mask here, some fake blood there, a camera shaking on purpose, is almost a relief. The film that disgusted me as a boy was, in large part, a low-budget magic show.

But the documentary also leaves you with an uncomfortable fact. Exposing the fakes doesn't erase the real footage. The slaughterhouses, the autopsies, and the archival dead were never special effects. The magic show had always been performed on top of real graves.

Why the Franchise Matters to a Critic

As a critic, I find the Faces of Death series more interesting as a cultural object than as cinema. It shows how home video created new markets that cinemas and censors couldn't control. It shows how a poster, a rumor, and the word "banned" could sell a tape across continents. And it shows how quickly shock wears out, which is why every sequel had to promise more while delivering less.

Above all, the franchise is the last famous chapter of a much older tradition, one that started not in an American grindhouse but in Italy in the early 1960s. To understand Faces of Death, we have to go back to the mondo films.

Mondo Films Explained: Why They Were Made and Why They Disappeared

To understand Faces of Death, you have to start in Italy, in 1962, with a film whose title gave a whole genre its name.

The film was Mondo Cane, which translates roughly as "a dog's world." It was made by three Italians, Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara, and Franco Prosperi, and it presented itself as a documentary journey around the globe, showing strange customs, cruel rituals, and bizarre behavior from every continent. It competed at the Cannes Film Festival, and its theme song, "More," earned an Oscar nomination. Few genres have had such a respectable birth before going so far downhill.

The success of Mondo Cane was so big that "mondo" became the label for an entire style of filmmaking. Mondo films, also called mondo movies, shockumentaries, or pseudo documentaries, were feature-length compilations that promised audiences the shocking truth about the world.

The Mondo Formula

Every mondo film followed a similar recipe:

First, a travelogue structure, jumping from country to country and scene to scene, with no story connecting them. Second, a narrator with an ironic, superior, often mocking voice, telling the audience how to feel about what they were seeing. Third, a mix of real and staged footage, presented as if everything were real. And fourth, a soundtrack that was often beautiful, which made the cruelty on screen even more disturbing by contrast.

If that sounds familiar, it should. Faces of Death took that formula almost piece by piece, replacing the ironic narrator with a fake doctor and the exotic travelogue with a tour of the morgue.

Why Mondo Films Were Made

Mondo cinema thrived from the 1960s to the early 1980s for reasons that tell us a lot about that era.

Curiosity about the forbidden. In the early 1960s, most audiences had never seen real death, real violence, or distant cultures on screen. Television news was still limited and mostly censored. Mondo films offered what TV wouldn't show.

The documentary alibi. Because they claimed to be documentaries, mondo films could show things fiction films could not. Calling a scene "educational" or "truth" was a passport through censorship, the same alibi Dr. Gröss used in his white coat.

Cheap to make and easy to sell. Producers could buy news footage, shoot cheaply in remote locations, and stage the rest. Foreign distributors could dub in a new narrator, so the films traveled well across languages and markets.

A colonial gaze. The uncomfortable truth is that many early mondo films looked at non-Western peoples with mockery, treating their cultures as freak shows for Western audiences. That attitude is a big reason these films are hard to defend today.

From Mondo Cane to Cannibal Holocaust

After Mondo Cane came a flood of imitators and sequels, as well as darker works by its own creators. Jacopetti and Prosperi's Africa Addio (1966), about the end of colonial rule in Africa, was accused of staging or provoking real killings for the camera. Jacopetti faced charges in Italy and was cleared, but the film's reputation never recovered. Their Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971) restaged American slavery in such a brutal, provocative way that critics still argue about what it was trying to say.

Later directors, including Antonio Climati and Mario Morra, pushed the genre toward pure violence with films such as Savage Man Savage Beast (1975).

The genre's last famous chapter in Italy was a fiction film disguised as found footage: Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980). It was so convincing that Deodato was taken to court in Italy and had to prove his actors were alive. The human deaths were fake. But real animals were killed on camera, and that stain has followed the film ever since.

Faces of Death, released in 1978, belongs right at the end of this cycle, an American take on an Italian invention, made for the coming age of home video.

Why Mondo Films Stopped Being Made

So why don't we see new mondo movies today? Several forces killed them.

The fakery was exposed. Once audiences learned that the most famous scenes were staged, the "truth" promise collapsed. A mondo film without believability is just a cheap horror film.

Animal cruelty became unacceptable. Laws and public opinion changed. Killing animals for the camera, common in mondo and in Cannibal Holocaust, is now illegal in many countries and unforgivable to most audiences.

Censorship and moral panic. In the 1980s, governments cracked down on violent videos. In Britain, the "video nasty" panic led to the Video Recordings Act of 1984, and similar pressures elsewhere made shock tapes risky to distribute.

The colonial gaze aged badly. The mocking, superior narration that once sold tickets now reads as racism and exploitation.

And above all, the internet. This is the real killer. From the mid-1990s, shock websites began sharing real footage of death and violence. Later, video platforms and social media made such footage available instantly, unedited, and free. Why rent a partly staged tape when real horror is a click away? The internet didn't just replace mondo films. It made their whole business model obsolete.

Today the companies that run those platforms employ content moderators to remove this kind of footage, people who look at the worst images in the world so the rest of us don't have to. It's no accident that the 2026 Faces of Death made one of those moderators its heroine.

Faces of Death (2026): Goldhaber's Remake and the Copycat Killer on Shudder

Almost fifty years after the original tape, Faces of Death came back in 2026. The poster I saw from a school bus in Cairo now had a new version, and this time I watched it at home, as a grown man and a critic, on Shudder.

I'll say it right away: this new Faces of Death is not a straight remake. It's something smarter and, in places, just as hard to sit through.

The Filmmakers: Goldhaber and Mazzei

The film was directed by Daniel Goldhaber and co-written with Isa Mazzei, the same team behind Cam (2018), a thriller about a webcam performer whose online identity is stolen. Goldhaber also directed How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022). Both films are about life online, about what screens do to us and what we do to each other through them.

That background explains their approach. Instead of restaging the 1978 film scene by scene, Goldhaber and Mazzei built a new fiction around the original's legend: its notoriety, its fake-or-real reputation, and its most disturbing images. The result is a film about watching Faces of Death as much as a Faces of Death film.

The Story: A Moderator, a Copycat, and a Tape

Barbie Ferreira plays a young woman who works as a content moderator for Kino, a fictional video app in the TikTok mold that cares more about engagement than safety. She took the job as a kind of grim penance connected to her sister's death, spending her days looking at the worst things people upload so others don't have to.

Then she notices something. Videos of what appear to be real killings are appearing on the platform, and with help from her horror-fan roommate Ryan (Aaron Holliday), she realizes the murders are copies of scenes from the original Faces of Death tape.

Her digging attracts the attention of the killer, Spevak, who is literally remaking Faces of Death, not as a film but as a series of real crimes.

The cast also includes Dacre Montgomery, Josie Totah, Jermaine Fowler, and the pop star Charli XCX.

It's a clever twist on the original's central question. In 1978, audiences asked whether the deaths were real. In 2026, the fictional killer answers that question in the worst way possible: he makes them real.

From Beyond Fest to Shudder

The film premiered in a 35mm screening at Beyond Fest in Chicago on April 5, 2026, then opened in theaters on April 10 through Independent Film Company. It arrived for digital rental and purchase on May 12 and began streaming on Shudder in July, which is where many horror fans, including me, finally saw it.

Visually, the film pays respect to its analog ancestor. It was shot on 35mm by cinematographer Isaac Bauman, with a cold, stark look, and Gavin Brivik's synth score adds an atmosphere that feels close to 1980s horror.

The Scene I Couldn't Watch, Again

Here is where my two encounters with Faces of Death, decades apart, meet.

The new film revisits one of the original's most infamous images: the torture of a small monkey. In 1978 that scene was staged. In 2026 it's presented through a modern, fictional lens. In both cases, I found it among the most disturbing moments in either film.

As a boy in the 1980s, I fast-forwarded through the original. As a critic in 2026, I didn't have a fast-forward button I wanted to use, because I wanted to judge the film properly. But my reaction was the same. Some images don't become easier because you're older, or because you know they're fake. And that, I think, is exactly the film's point.

What the Critics Said

Reviews were mixed. Several critics praised the opening and the premise, while noting that the second half settles into a more familiar cat-and-mouse thriller between the killer and his amateur pursuer. Rue Morgue's Michael Gingold observed that the film isn't really a mystery, since the villain appears early, but credited its suspense and atmosphere. The Guardian's review described it as a reworking that turns horror voyeurism into a fable about moral panic.

Some reviewers went further, arguing that this is a horror film that distrusts horror films, one that suggests watching screen violence, real or fictional, wears down our empathy. Fans who love the genre didn't always enjoy being lectured by it.

A Copycat Story for the Age of Viral Video

Whatever you think of its execution, the 2026 Faces of Death raises a question that matters beyond horror fandom: can watching violence lead someone to repeat it? Spevak is fiction, but the fear of copycat crimes inspired by movies has a long, real history, one I explore in my article on crimes blamed on copying films.

The new film also closes the circle I traced in the last section. The mondo films died because the internet delivered real horror for free. Now the internet itself is the setting for horror, and the hero of a Faces of Death film is the person paid to stop us from watching.

Which brings me back to that tagline from Sliver: you like to watch, don't you? This new film asks the question too, and it doesn't like the answer much more than I do.

Looking Away Is Allowed: Why Faces of Death Still Haunts Us

I started this story at the Metro Cinema in Cairo, with Tom and Jerry on Friday mornings and my mother beside me, and with a poster for Faces of Death glimpsed from a school bus window. I'm ending it decades later, in Ecuador, after watching a 2026 film about a killer who copies that same tape.

In between, the world changed completely. The video club became a streaming menu. The Betamax tape became a file. The shocking footage that mondo producers once sold on a rental shelf is now uploaded every minute, and armies of moderators work to take it down.

Yet the question Faces of Death asked in 1978 hasn't gone away. It has only moved to new screens: is it real? And behind it sits the more important question, the one that Sliver's tagline asked so slyly: do we like to watch?

My answer, as a boy and as a critic, is the same. We shouldn't. Curiosity is human, and understanding why these films existed, why they sold, and why they disappeared is worth a film critic's time. But there's no shame in pressing fast-forward, closing your eyes, or turning a tape off. The violence in Faces of Death, staged or real, was built to be unbearable, and it is.

The original is a relic of the mondo era. The sequels show how quickly shock wears thin. The 1999 documentary proves that much of it was a magic trick. And the 2026 film reminds us that in the age of viral video, the trick is no longer needed, because the real thing is already everywhere.

Sometimes the bravest way to watch a film like this is to know when to stop. Looking away is allowed.

Frequently Asked Questions About Faces of Death

Is Faces of Death real?

Partly. The 1978 Faces of Death mixes staged scenes performed by actors with genuine footage, mostly animal slaughter, autopsies, and archival news material. Many of its most notorious "deaths," including the monkey-brain dinner, were faked with makeup, props, and editing.

Is the monkey scene in Faces of Death real?

No. The famous scene of tourists eating a live monkey's brains in the original film was staged. It remains one of the most disturbing and most discussed scenes in the series.

Who made Faces of Death?

The original was written and directed by John Alan Schwartz under the pseudonyms "Conan Le Cilaire" and "Alan Black." Actor Michael Carr played the host, the fictional pathologist Dr. Francis B. Gröss.

Was Faces of Death banned?

The film was marketed as "banned in 46 countries." It faced restrictions in some places, but the exact number of bans was never verified and was largely a publicity claim that helped sell the tape.

How many Faces of Death movies are there?

The main series includes Faces of Death (1978), II (1981), III (1985), IV (1990), V (1995), and VI (1996), the last two mostly compilations. There is also the documentary Faces of Death: Fact or Fiction? (1999) and the 2026 film directed by Daniel Goldhaber.

Is the 2026 Faces of Death a remake or a sequel?

Neither exactly. It's a new story built around the original's legend: a content moderator for a video app discovers that a killer is recreating deaths from the 1978 tape. It stars Barbie Ferreira and streams on Shudder.

What is a mondo film?

A mondo film is a pseudo documentary, also called a shockumentary, that presents a mix of real and staged footage of shocking customs, violence, and death as the truth about the world. The name comes from the Italian film Mondo Cane (1962).

Why are mondo films no longer made?

Their fakery was exposed, animal cruelty on camera became illegal and unacceptable, censorship tightened in the 1980s, their colonial attitudes aged badly, and the internet made real violent footage freely available, which made the format obsolete.

Is Faces of Death a found-footage film?

Not officially, but its staged scenes were shot to look like raw, stolen footage. That style makes it an ancestor of found-footage horror, alongside Cannibal Holocaust (1980).

What is Faces of Death: Fact or Fiction?

It's a 1999 documentary about the making of the series. It reveals how several famous death scenes were staged with actors and effects.

Where can I watch Faces of Death?

The 2026 film streams on Shudder. The original has appeared on services such as Prime Video and Tubi, but availability changes by country, so check your local streaming guide.

Where does "You like to watch, don't you?" come from?

It was the tagline of Sliver (1993), the erotic thriller starring Sharon Stone about voyeurism. It fits Faces of Death, a film built entirely on the urge to watch what we shouldn't.