Warning: This teaser features some genuinely distressing imagery.
Faces of Death, the cult faux documentary that caused a massive stir when it was first released way in 1978, is being rebooted by Legendary Pictures with the goal of launching a new horror franchise, and the first teaser has finally made its way online ahead of an April 10 release - six years after it was filmed.
Cam filmmakers Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber write and direct, respectively, while Angry Films' Susan Montford and Don Murphy produce.
The original movie followed a pathologist studying the most horrific ways to die, and presented what was purported to be actual footage of people and animals being brutally killed. Most of it was staged, of course (there were some real slaughterhouse and morgue shots), but it fooled a lot of people back in the day, and ended up being banned in several countries - though not 46 as the poster claimed.
It spawned several sequels, and is considered one of the very first "video nasties."
This new take on the concept "revolves around a female moderator of a YouTube-like website whose job is to weed out offensive and violent content and who herself is recovering from a serious trauma, who stumbles across a group that is re-creating the murders from the original film. But in the story primed for the digital age of online misinformation, the question is: Are the murders real or fake?"
The uncensored teaser is predictably morbid and disturbing, featuring various ghastly images of a man being mauled by a bear, someone getting beheaded, a woman being mowed down by a train, etc. It's not real (obviously), but the grainy, black-and-white footage was still removed from YouTube for violating its terms and services.
Faces of Death stars Stranger Things' Dacre Montgomery and Euphoria's Barbie Ferreira, with Sarah Voigt (Terrifier 2), Tadasay Young (Five Nights at Freddy's), Josie Totah (Spider-Man: Homecoming), Aaron Holliday (Cocaine Bear), Jermaine Fowler (The Blackening), and pop singer turned actress Charli XCX in supporting roles.
"Faces of Death was one of the first viral video tapes, and we are so lucky to be able to use it as a jumping off point for this exploration of cycles of violence and the way they perpetuate themselves online," Goldhaber previously teased
Check out the teaser for Faces of Death at the link below... if you dare!