Blow the dust off the VHS player, dim the lights, and prepare to be horrified – let’s talk about Faces of Death.
The iconic 1978 video nasty was written and directed by John Schwartz (using the pseudonyms Conan Le Cilaire and Alan Black, respectively), and was famously marketed as showing a number of depictions of real deaths, murders, suicides, and executions; from human to animal, from cults to spree killers, Faces of Death promised a deep-dive into all things morbid for those who couldn’t get enough carnage from their fictional flicks.
Originally planned as just a collection of footage depicting the real-life death of animals and people (most of it from unaired newsreels), an initial screening led investors to request a more coherent plot to keep the viewer engaged amongst the death and destruction. Schwartz headed back to the drawing board, and came up with the mockumentary format the film would ultimately be released under. Part of the Mondo genre, a shock-jock side of cinema that blended gross-out horror and documentary through the thick-lensed gaze of apparent “scientific” interest, Faces of Death is arguably the most famous of the Mondo movies – and, arguably, the most controversial, too.
Michael Carr stars as pathologist Francis B. Gross (just in case the film’s nasty content wasn’t enough of a warning), cast due to his striking vocal similarity to Leonard Nimoy, who was fronting the popular In Search Of…TV series at the time, which presented odd phenomena in a documentary format, and upon which Schwartz also worked.
The movie purports to follow B. Gross through a series of real-life deaths, from execution to suicide to accident and pretty much everything in-between (including a cannibal hippie cult feasting on human flesh, with Schwartz playing the cult’s leader). Faces of Death doesn’t hold back in it’s variety of slaughter; an unfortunate victim of an alligator attack is shredded on camera, which Gross blames on the “continued abuse of mankind”, assassins pick off unwitting targets, and a police shootout climaxes in the discovery of the shooter’s family murdered in his own home, peppered amongst historical footage of atrocities like the Holocaust. Real-life medical examiner Thomas Noguchi (known as the “coroner to the stars” due to his involvement in the autopsies of people like Sharon Tate and Marilyn Monroe) even makes an appearance to lead the viewer through the embalming process, the movie’s version of a celebrity cameo.
Upon it’s release, Faces of Death had a surprisingly lucrative opening, bringing in an estimated $35 million on it’s first weekend, but it wasn’t until it’s VHS release five years later that it began to develop it’s iconic cult status. The VHS release in 1983 was immediately met with censorship. Later releases of the movie claimed it was banned in 46 countries, though exactly how many classification boards banned the movie’s release isn’t exactly clear. It was famously included on the Video Nasties list – films banned under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act – in the UK, alongside horror classics like I Spit On Your Grave, The Evil Dead, and Bay of Blood, cementing it’s place as one of the most coveted horrors of the decade. Faces of Death soon earned cult status, as viewers sought to test their cinematic mettle by viewing actual images of death, what amounted to a snuff film despite the pseudo-documentary format.
But the question is – how much of Faces of Death is actually real? In short, almost none of it. While archival footage did show actual dead bodies, nobody dies on-screen in Faces of Death, though dead people do appear in the movie. It’s easier to list what actually was real than what was invented by the excellent special effects team at the time; studying real-life newsreel footage and crime scene photos to ensure realism, special effects artists Douglas White and Alan Apone tried to capture the gore and violence in scripted form to fit the film’s mockumentary approach.
An electric chair sequence used toothpaste in place of the dramatically frothing mouth of the victim, and a scene where a monkey’s brains are eaten on-screen was actually a mix of cauliflower and stage blood. Interspersed with real-life footage of road accidents and other fatal incidents – including the aftermath of the Flight 182 catastrophe, which the film was re-cut to include after the fatal air collision took place just months before the movie was due to release – the movie deliberately didn’t distinguish between the scripted scenes and the real-life images, inhabiting an uneasy middle ground between the two.
I think it’s this mix of dramatic and gruesome fakery and more banal real-life images of death that made Faces of Death such an enduring part of the Video Nasty phenomenon, the deliberate blurring of the lines between what’s real and what’s now. Looking back now, it’s clear that the more shocking aspects of the movie are completely fake (the dog fight, which purported to be two canines fighting to the death, was actually just footage of a pair of dogs playing re-cut over dramatic music, for example), and the mockumentary wraparound is relatively boring in comparison.
But it does represent an interesting touchstone in the horror genre, not least because it’s one of the first mockumentaries to real make waves. Faces of Death showed that there was a hunger for this kind of storytelling, that people wanted to see horrible things presented under the guise of reality, laying the groundwork for a swell in the found footage genre in years to come. As for the legacy of the movie itself, seven sequels followed in much the same tone, and a remake or reboot to the series was announced earlier this year, starring Dacre Montgomery and directed by Daniel Goldhaber (who made the excellent Cam a few years ago), though a release date hasn’t been confirmed yet.
Did you watch Faces of Death? If you did, what did you make of the iconic mondo flick? Were you convinced by the effects, did you find it disturbing, or were you made of sterner stuff? Let me know in the comments!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via IMDB)
No But Listen 