The Bad Kind of Violence, pt. 2: I'm never watching the old Faces of Death movies
Fair content warning up top. I don't want to ruin anybody's day. Descriptions of violence and death to follow.
Thinking about 9-1-1 as violence I can't stand for its weightlessness and for all the overwritten melodrama in its wake, I had to also think about violence I can't stand for the opposite reason. I’m fine with fake movie gore, violence and misery. I own physical copies of things like Antichrist, I saw The Sadness twice in theaters (in separate countries!), I love Sam Raimi-type violence that one-ups itself until you have to laugh, etc. I don’t have a lot of time for the gore nadir of Hong Kong Category III movies, but that’s because a person purely interested in shocking you is almost always going to make boring art, and not because I’m offended by all the make-up effects. This is all wildly different from real death. So here's the same essay you may have read yesterday.
I'm interested in the recent Faces of Death movie. Not enough to have seen it in theaters or to re-up my long-dormant Shudder subscription, where the Faces reboot-ish has been streaming since July, but if it showed up on HBO Max tomorrow, I'd watch it immediately. Such is the impenetrable barrier of the $5 rental fee for a thing you're half-intrigued by.
My interest comes from two places. First, the people behind it. It's directed by Daniel Goldhaber, who previously made Cam and How To Blow Up A Pipeline, both of which I enjoyed, and it's co-written by Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei, who wrote Cam.
Cam is a horror movie mostly drawn from Mazzei's own experiences as a camgirl, and while it goes to supernatural places, the story's at its best when it's about the specificity of online sex work and the social contract that exists between people in that world. How To Blow Up A Pipeline is a fictional heist thriller adapting Andreas Malm's non-fiction book about the need for true force in climate activism. These movies come at their themes from smart, unique angles and the new Faces of Death, a film at least partly about the series of mondo movies of the same name, seems to be a continuation of that approach. It’s a great idea, to get much more real than you’d normally go with genre fiction while still allowing for filmic techniques and storytelling tricks normally verboten in documentary. The new Faces is about a killer inspired by the old Faces series, set against the backdrop of online content moderation. I'm sure that sounds super boring to a lot of people, but I'm in.
Second, those mondo movies fascinate me. I've never seen any of the original Faces of Death pseudo-docs, but, conceptually, they're such a weird phenomenon nobody's really explored in film, at least with any distance. If you're not familiar, the first Faces of Death came out in 1978 and was presented as a documentary on death. A “doctor” walks the viewer through grotesque and violent footage, some of it real and some staged. Supposedly, the staged stuff looks like shit, i.e. a guy who can't act pretends to be killed in an electric chair, and a monkey is scalped so tourists can eat its brains, but the brains are clearly cauliflower covered in red corn syrup. That's fine with me, no different from the makeup effects in a zombie movie. But there's also real footage of a cow being butchered, you see the aftermath of an actual plane crash and hear audio from its black box, you see what's left of a bicyclist run over by a trailer. That's fucked.
The original Faces of Death ran in theaters and got some attention, but really took off on video and Betamax, moving ridiculous numbers of tapes, not quite Disney clamshell VHS numbers, but not as far off as you might thing. By the mid-90s, Faces of Death was a series with four mainline entries, bootleg sequels and a Worst Of compilation. They sold well enough to inspire knock-off series like Traces of Death, Death Faces, Death Scenes, and on and on. Some of these were sketchy video store staples, some were only sold out of catalogues by semi-anonymous hobbyists.
Faces of Death is mostly fake, though the knock-offs used their authenticity as a selling point, i.e. “You’ve seen Faces of Death, now it’s time for the real thing.” This all culminates in stuff like 1998's Banned From Television, the brainchild of human smegma Joe Francis, who used footage news shows and his day job, Real TV, couldn't air. You remember the informercials.
As interested as I am in the new Faces, I'm not interested in watching any of these. What I'm interested in is the once-thriving market for them, and how that turned into shock sites and YouTube. That's what the new, explicitly fictional Faces of Death is about– a content moderator at a video site, a person whose job is simply to watch 8 hours of hell every day and flag anything outside what their employer has decided it'll host.
This is real. Here's a Facebook moderator talking about her job in 2021. Here's The Guardian reporting that 140 Facebook moderators in Kenya— because of course we ship this scarring work overseas— have been diagnosed with severe PTSD. These are not isolated incidents.
Isn't that wild? Facebook and Meta are rightly forced to pay out millions of dollars in settlements to employees doing what plenty of dirtbags willingly sought out a couple decades ago. I just don't understand the appeal.
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It's been raining pretty hard here recently. Earlier this week, I went to throw something away in the recycling can in the little concrete rectangle behind our home and introduced my son to the phrase "ah, fuck, Jesus, shit" when I looked into the bin and saw a big, black, furry thing, floating dead in two feet of water. Showers had filled the bin up, a possum had jumped in or fallen down while looking for food and it had drowned back there. When I dumped the water and the possum's body surfed out, a little baby possum, also dead, followed it.
I'm a vegetarian, maybe this is to be expected from a beta cuck, I recognize you’re subscribed to a newsletter from a safe space landlord, but I've thought of those possums a few times a day since I found them. I thought of them when I spotted a black cat walking around our neighborhood, when my son was watching Wild Kratts, an educational wildlife cartoon where people in Iron Man suits get animal powers. I thought of them when somebody in my office saw a mouse in a stairwell. I thought of them when I took the recycling out last night and I'll think of them when I bring the bins back behind our house today. Two living things died, panicked and drowning, and I don’t need them to have self-awareness or a high level of consciousness to feel bad about it.
This isn't even the worst time something like that's happened. We put lids on our trash cans, but rats and racoons claw and bite little holes in the sides and they get in. Earlier this year, I took off a lid and threw a bag into a trash can and heard an "EEP." I'm not going to draw this story out, I'll just tell you that over the course of ten minutes, I got a live rat out of the trash can and then found two dead rats where it had been stuck. I think about all those rats a lot, too.
All this is to say nothing of the infinitely more distressing human suffering we all see every day, from adults nodding off at bus stops to videos of children gunned down in Palestine. I don’t seek out footage from genocides but I don’t ignore it, either. I have enough respect for the murdered to not force my algorithm to abstain from passing on news of all that devastation, and an honest news source will invariably mark slaughter. I’m sure we all think about the killed and who they were and how their faces looked and what they were doing when they were forced out of the world. Nobody's ever looked at one of those kids and then immediately forgot about them.
Does this not happen with some people? Maybe it doesn't. I have OCD, I think about the same things over and over. When I see something viscerally upsetting, that thing tattoos itself to my brain. I know the dog fight in Faces of Death is fake, maybe even laughable, that I could handle that, but I also know I'd think of the plane crash debris and all the people mixed in with it and I'd never stop thinking about it. I can say that with certainty because I accidentally watched the actual footage of Vic Morrow, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen during Twilight Zone: The Movie's shoot and it muscles its way back into my brain whenever I see a helicopter. It didn’t look how I thought it would. You can't see much, but you can see enough.
I should say most things tattoo themselves to my brain. I don’t have anywhere near a photographic memory, but I’ve got my triggers, as we all do, and they aren’t exclusively related to misery. I heard the company name “Frigidaire” this weekend and thought, as I always do, of a Drive-By Truckers lyric. If you mention Doritos, Cheetos or Fritos, especially if you bring up two or all three, I’m going to be sitting there, mentally running through the line in”Accordion” where MF DOOM lists them off. Being reminded of Madvillainy doesn’t make me wince, though. It’s a little less severe than when I’m left immediately thinking about a helicopter falling on two children and the adult who tried to save them.
There’s respect for the dead, there’s me feeling uncomfortable with finding anything entertaining about the hopeless final moments of a person whose parachute isn’t going to release, but I’m also talking about self-preservation here. There’s also me simply not wanting to have a bad day remembering somebody’s last one. There’s the selfishness of using another’s pain as the thing you watch on Saturday night instead of the newest Spider-Man movie and then there’s also the lesser selfishness of not wanting another’s pain to flash across your mind when somebody mentions John Landis or helicopter crashes or on-set accidents. Even in the rare case a person would benefit from me bearing witness to their suffering, there’s still me left watching, feeling something.
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Have you seen anything like this recently?
Probably nine years ago, I was working in Philly's Frankford neighborhood and saw this sign near my train. If you're like me, you see the word "VIDEO" and take notice, even if you're most likely looking at the vestigial signage of a place that closed down years ago, in an area unable to draw in any new leasees.
Amazingly, this store was not long-dead. As of three years ago, it was still there. Their liquidation sale began around 2012. This little sign, identifying the place as "Movie's Movie's Movie's," advertised the shop as operating from 1-8pm, 7 days a week, but that wasn't the case when I worked nearby. Sometimes I'd get out of my job early, check Son Of A Son Of A Movie or whatever those apostrophes are supposed to indicate and the place would be closed.
For a while, I assumed the store was dead. The only window was plastered with so many VHS covers you couldn't see inside. There was a little display out front with what looked like posters printed off a Yahoo image search, stored in dirty plastic bags and taped to the security grille, advertising the weirdest stuff. Here we have promos for Alex Haley's post-Roots TV miniseries Queen and three Italian horror movies, including the notorious Cannibal Ferox.
One day, I tried my luck and the place was open. I wish I'd taken better pictures, but that Reddit link a few paragraphs ago has good ones. This was a small room, lit only by fluorescent lights even as the sun was bright outside. The center of the room was full of garbage and every wall looked like this:
Up near the ceiling, there were more print-outs of extreme horror posters:
My incompetence and the harsh light make it hard to see most of those titles, but right up top you've got Wife to be Sacrificed and Entrails of a Virgin, Japanese "pink" films where people have sex and then women are tortured and killed. Wikipedia says those are two of the better examples of the genre.
I didn't take a picture, but there was a whole little corner for Faces of Death-related videos and DVDs. There was also quite a bit of porn surprisingly close to the Family section. As a Reddit commenter with a deleted account pointed out in 2023, Movie's Movie's Movie's kept "A Nightmare Before Christmas next to Clit Lickers and Bitches." Do we assume that's carelessness or an intentional "fuck you" to the normies?
The owner was an older man who'd previously run a chain of six stores before downsizing to this one location, where he was selling his remaining stock with the assistance of his nephew, clearly the person in charge of decorating. I bought four DVDs, including a legitimate-looking copy of Hard Boiled that the nephew swapped out for a burned DVD-R after I'd checked out, but I'd only paid $1.50 so I didn't call foul. It hurts to know that's probably the last video store I'll ever walk into.
This is my mental image of a Faces of Death enthusiast: hoarder, pretty much only watches the goriest stuff they can find, too socially incompetent to think twice about shelving porn next to Disney movies. And as a socially incompetent person, I do not mean to denigrate our kind. We are a taciturn people, but we're generally better than this.
I don't think going out of your way to watch violence smooths your brain out until you can't differentiate between Bambi and Busty Step-Moms, but I do think the Faces of Death fan is likely already that person.
This being my frame of reference for gore tapes, the only time my sheltered ass has ever seen these videos in person, does nothing to clarify whether other people can shake this stuff. Maybe that dude thinks about the Vic Morrow footage all the time and doesn't feel bad about it. I'm not trying to be a conservative parent blaming Marilyn Manson for school shootings– fuck Manson for other reasons– but there's really no scenario I can imagine where a person owns and rewatches four Faces of Death movies and is also a regular, empathetic person. This isn't about the person who cues one of these things up on Dailymotion out of curiosity, it's about the person pre-ordering the $55 4K Ultra HD version of Faces of Death IV. I'm also a guy who whines about Pixar movies being too depressing, so take this as you will. I'm just outlining my limits, letting you know the point at which I am forced to yell "Good heavens, this is obscene!" as the monocle slowly falls from my face.
Forced to watch either real violence or the fake, airless stuff, I'll of course opt for fake. The argument here is not "These two things are the same if you really think about it." There isn't much of an argument. I'm just entering my nth year of trying to figure out (and also condescending to (sorry)) fans of both kinds. And if you've had better luck, I'd sincerely love to hear from you about it.