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
Swampflix 