daniel goldhaber

Faces of Death (2026)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Many longtime Scream fans were horrified by what happened to their beloved slasher franchise this year, after the brand chose to self-implode rather than to employ actors vocally opposed to the ongoing Palestinian genocide. Just a few months later, it turns out not to be such a big deal that Scream 7 was a morally & creatively bankrupt shit show after all. The producers got what they wanted in reliable name-recognition box office returns from the politically apathetic masses, and the more discerning audiences who boycotted can now get what they want in the new Faces of Death: a reboot of a legacy horror franchise that questions the ways the genre has changed in the decades since its start. 2026’s Faces of Death has a lot more to say about modern audiences’ relationship with violent entertainment media than any Scream movie has in at least fifteen years. Notably, it does so by tracking the ways horrifically violent imagery has moved from the cineplex to our smartphones, including news footage of the aforementioned genocide.

Euphoria‘s Barbie Ferreira stars as a content moderator for a TikTok-style social media platform called Kino. She spends long, demoralizing days approving or disapproving user-flagged content on the platform, flooding her brain with the most heinous imagery & behavior her fellow humans can conceive & shoot. Much like with the original 1970s mondo movie Faces of Death, it becomes increasingly difficult for her to differentiate what violent content is simulated vs. what is authentic, pressured by her corporate higher-ups to avoid being overly censorious. The plot gets meta when she stumbles across an anonymous account that’s recreating the most gruesome scenes from Faces of Death “for real,” and she struggles to convince anyone in her life that she’s uncovered an active serial killer. When she takes this discovery to online message boards, she is subsequently abducted by that killer to star in his next viral video. Many flame-war social media posts and real-life bludgeonings ensue.

If the new Faces of Death has any overt shortcomings, it’s that it’s not nearly scary nor upsetting enough to earn its title, at least not to the desensitized eyes of a social media addict such as myself. That largely appears to be the point. Technically, this is a bloody bodycount slasher, but all of its payoffs are purely intellectual. Longtime collaborators Daniel Goldhaber & Isa Mazzei (Cam, How to Blow Up a Pipeline) clearly took on the project as an opportunity to discuss the ways snuff-footage media akin to the original Faces of Death has become mundane thanks to the social media feeds that relentlessly overstuff our brains with real-life grotesqueries. There’s more meaning in the transition of its fictional news broadcast switching from vertical smartphone footage of a suicide to a fluff piece about a puppy shelter than there is in the cruelty of any particular kill. The movie isn’t especially scary, but it is remarkably thoughtful about the current corporate-sponsored hellscape we all willing enter every day through our phone screens.

That lack of genuine scares is no fault of its masked killer, played by Stranger Things‘s Dacre Montgomery. Covering both the ice-cold intellectualism of Hannibal Lecter and the perverse sensuality of Buffalo Bill, Montgomery’s Arthur is the total package. He’s converted his suburban McMansion into a makeshift movie studio, restaging scenes from Faces of Death because reboots are favored by the algorithm. He finds his own sense of style in the process too, murdering his victims via automaton contraptions constructed out of department store mannequins. He’s even transformed himself into a living mannequin of sorts, via skinsuits & masks, further removing himself from the violence he films for views. Everything is mediated through an artificial remove, to the point where his final showdown with Ferreira’s final girl mostly plays out on their individual laptop & phone screens even while they’re standing feet apart in the same blood-spattered room. It’s chilling to think about, even if it’s not especially scary to watch, unlike its namesake source of inspiration.

Faces of Death recently saw its local premiere at The Overlook Film Festival, where Goldhaber & crew gushed about how wonderful New Orleans is as a shooting location. Besides a brief throwaway scene set at a corporate crawfish boil on the lakefront, there isn’t much indicating that the story is set here, whereas most New Orleans movies make sure to toss in a few French Quarter scenes for local flavor. There’s probably some substantive commentary in there about the way screenlife has flattened all modern living to one locationless artificial world devoid of discernible local culture, as this is a movie entirely made of metatextual commentary about the current state of things. The Scream franchise used to think about these kinds of things too, before it devolved into cataloging the life & love soap opera milestones of Sidney Prescott, et al. Now you have to find your Slasher With Ideas kicks elsewhere, starting here.

-Brandon Ledet

How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2023)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

In Bertrand Bonello’s 2016 political provocation Nocturama, a group of young, hip domestic terrorists set off a disparate series of homemade bombs in modern Paris, then await the state’s violent military response in a shopping mall.  In Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a group of young, hip domestic terrorists set off two homemade bombs along a Texan desert pipeline, then await the state’s violent military response in the hot American sand.  The Parisian kids never fully explain the reasoning behind their explosives beyond a vague sense of economic unrest & cultural ennui.  The central point of Nocturama is making its teenage dissidents look cool—which it does—before they all meet a violent end.  By contrast, the American kids explain the ideology behind their explosive Direct Actions at length, intending to disrupt the economic viability of crude oil as a means to slow down Climate Change.  The point of How to Blow Up a Pipeline isn’t to inform the audience how to replicate this violence ourselves, but to motivate us to get serious about Climate Change as a mass extinction event that needs to be directly, immediately combated.  Both films are structured as non-linear heist thrillers, joining their hip teen terrorists in the hours before their respective bombings before flashing back to the planning stages of those attacks.  They both function as feature-length Building the Team montages as a result, which is always the most satisfying sequence in heist movies anyway.  In contrast, the American version of Nocturama is less pretty & more explainy than the French one, but it’s also a much more useful political motivator, which counts for a lot in this context. 

Goldhaber & crew do their best to make this Lefty manifesto traditionally entertaining so that its incendiary politics ignite the widest audience possible. This was never a concern of Bonello’s, who made a provocative aesthetic object to be appreciated by a small audience of art nerds.  How to Blow Up a Pipeline uses retro synth scoring & 90s blockbuster fonts to disguise itself as a throwback to crowd-pleaser heist thrillers like Point Break, but its full-hearted advocacy of its climate activists’ property destruction is much more daring & modern than the genre’s cop-friendly past.  Most of the shocking plot twists are the exact kind of undercover, double-crossing character reveals we’re used to in that context, but the movie loudly endorses the titular bombing and the activists behind it every chance it gets.  The most Goldhaber & editor Daniel Garber shake up the traditional blockbuster heist film formula is by cutting away from explosions seconds before detonation to retreat into flashbacks, letting the tension ride for several minutes before returning to the Bruckheimerian balls of fire.  Otherwise, it works within a familiar, comforting Dad Movie story template that this time just happens to be populated by pissed-off crust punks & college campus leftists.  The tension of whether a homemade explosive will be jolted the wrong way by those nervous rioters before they reach their targeted pipeline is continuously effective in the moment, but it’s all in service of stringing the audience along to listen to the reason behind their planned property destruction in their downtime between backroom chemistry experiments.

It’s extremely shallow of me to compare Pipeline‘s cool-cred endorsement of violent political action to the much more nihilist, beauty-obsessed Nocturama, as if they’re the only two films of their kind.  There’s a wide range of uncivil unrest advocacy cinema in this movie’s lineage, from 2018’s Empty Metal to 1983’s Born in Flames to 1966’s Battle of Algiers.  It would also be shallow of me to assign an auteurist reading to its production, given that it’s officially credited as “a film by Daniel Goldhaber, Ariela Barar, Jordan Sjol, and Daniel Garber” (a list that includes the director’s co-writers and aforementioned editor).  I’m going to do it anyway, though, because I’m a shallow guy.  I appreciate that some of the paranoid technophobia from Goldhaber’s debut feature Cam bled through to this follow-up, represented in Pipeline by characters’ constant awareness of being surveilled via their smartphones, even when dormant.  Still, I miss the slick, fantastical aesthetics of that indoor sex-work cyberthriller, which are traded in here for the grit & sweat of the outdoor American West.  That cinematic preference for beauty & artifice over more practical, real-world concerns is likely why Nocturama was at the forefront of my mind throughout Pipeline.  I felt as if I had already seen my ideal version of this picture in Bonello’s puzzle-box terrorist thriller, so even when admiring the big-picture politics & scene-to-scene tension of Goldhaber’s version, I could never fully crossover into zealous love for it.  It’s a consistently entertaining, ideologically solid eco-activist thriller that never fully shook me out of my cowardly complacency as a passive political thinker & pop media consumer. Or, that’s at least what I want to convey to the FBI.

-Brandon Ledet