Interview with Faces of Death writer-director Daniel Goldhaber and writer-producer Isa Mazzei

Released in 1978 and banned in almost 50 countries, the original Faces of Death became a cult classic. Its shocking footage of purportedly real death scenes gained the film notoriety among horror fans and teenagers the world over. It was, of course, not a real documentary and they were not real snuff films.

In a time when that kind of content – both real and fake – is readily available on the internet, a film like that would barely register. That’s where the creative team of writer/director Daniel Goldhaber and writer/producer Isa Mazzei come in. The filmmakers behind 2018 webcam horror Cam and 2022’s eco-thriller How to Blow Up A Pipeline have put a smart meta spin on Faces of Death for the internet age.

Centring on a deranged killer seemingly recreating the kills from the original Faces of Death, Goldhaber and Mazzei use that film as a jumping off point to look at society’s desensitisation to death, how we present ourselves online, and the unscrupulous policies of social media giants.

Screening as part of the Midnight Madness strand at the 2026 Edinburgh International Film Festival, I was able to sit down with Goldhaber and Mazzei to discuss the film.

For more on the film, you can read my Faces of Death review from EIFF 2026.

You guys wrote Faces of Death before your previous film, How to Blow Up a Pipeline. How was it coming back to this film afterwards and now promoting it so many years after you started working on it?

Daniel Goldhaber: It’s weird. It’s interesting because the idea and I think that the thing that we were responding to in the world was something that was for us, I think more present. Like, I wouldn’t make this movie today. I wouldn’t have made this movie two years ago. It’s a movie we started writing in 2019, and so I definitely think it’s a weird kind of period piece, not just in the time period it covers, but even on some level in kind of like the moment of the internet that it’s reflecting on. It’s very strange because I think it’s always going to be seen because it’s about the internet as being contemporarily set. And ultimately, I just think that that will make the movie mean more. We just had this experience where we just saw Cam for the first time in eight years because we got it freed from Netflix, and we got a 35mm print made. And I felt that the movie has aged unbelievably well, like surprisingly well. Like I liked it more now than I did after I made it. I hope and think that Faces of Death will have a similar thing where like the further you get away from the kind of topical moment that the movie is dealing with, the more that I think audiences and myself included, will be able to kind of appreciate the human aspects of it, and not necessarily these kind of like socio political aspects of it, the cinematic aspects of it. So I’m excited to come back to Faces of Death in five years and watch it again.

The film centres around someone recreating the deaths from the original Faces of Death. What kind of relationship did you guys have with that film?

Isa Mazzei: We had not actually seen it. It was a little before our time, so we were actually approached by the studio for the adaptation, and we went back and watched the the original 1978 film, and I think we had a very similar experience in viewing it for the first time, which is that we realized we had actually seen bits and pieces of it clips over the years online and kind of pulled out of the original. So that kind of sparked this idea for us. Okay. Where does Faces of Death live now in the modern age? Literally online. And that’s kind of where we began the process of our ideas.

Where do you think the original film sits in culture today? Its influence on the genre seems pretty big, with the likes of the V/H/S series, ABCs of Death etc. referencing it in some way, but do you think the film has any kind of cultural impact otherwise?

DG: I think one interesting thing that I was told by the director of the original Faces of Death (John Alan Schwartz) was that, it’s important to remember that the movie came out right after the Vietnam War. So the movie came on the heels of the first fully televised war that was fought. And I think that after that war came to a close, there was a recognition from media companies that there was a vacuum being left in the ecosystem of like, images of death. And I think Faces of Death was one of the most prominent films that came to fill that. Obviously, it was part of the whole mondo horror movement, which I think was, again, in part a response to the end of Vietnam. Something that the director of Faces of Death told me was that he was actually told by the head of ABC news many years after the movie came out, that the kind of cultural reaction around Faces of Death opened the door for them to broadcast more grisly images not of violence overseas, but of domestic violence of shootings, etc. And so I think that the legacy that Faces of Death has from our standpoint is much less maybe cinematic and much more like concretely cultural in what it has opened the door to represent, and I think in the feedback loop of human behavior that has come on the heels of that. And I think that that’s in part what the movie that we made is talking about.

It definitely feels like now is the time for an update because you see death more easily and readily than you ever have. Was that something that you had in mind when you were writing the film, making the film?

IM: Yeah, we were thinking about our experience growing up on the internet. Some of the first imagery of violence I remember is watching people jump from the World Trade Centers as a child in elementary school, you know, and the school showing it on a TV and watching that as a young child. And then growing up seeing beheadings on LiveLeak, all of that content kind of just passed around school. I think now even if you don’t seek it out, we’re kind of fed violent imagery constantly in a steady stream on social media, you’re scrolling and all of a sudden, oh, there’s someone dying, there’s someone dead, there’s a war crime. And then you go back to pictures of your friends and things like that. I think that kind of weird, disjointed relationship to violent imagery is something that is only becoming more and more prevalent. I think that’s exactly what we wanted to talk about with the film.

Both of your previous films touched on social media and Cam in particular is an internet-based horror. Is there something about the internet and digital spaces that you think is inherently rife for horror?

DG: I mean, it’s scary. The thing that I think was interesting about revisiting Cam eight years later is that it’s talking about the fact that we have cleaved off parts of ourselves, and then there are these versions of ourselves that run around on the internet that have nothing to do with us. This is a way of being that we have all accepted, and that is a bit psychotic. I think that when we all accept a version of reality like that, then reality is very easily corruptible. The more that we live in a corruptible reality, the more that our own sense of reality becomes fragile. And that is one of the core things that horror is based on.

Barbie Ferreira’s character in the film works as a content moderator for a video sharing site a la Tik Tok. Was that kind of moderation and censorship something you specifically wanted to explore, and how do you feel about the way current social media platforms handle that kind of content?

DG: I mean, look at the Perez Hilton incident from two weeks ago. A moderation incident. They couldn’t take down something for twenty minutes. Give me a break. Yeah, give me a break. You know that video did gangbusters for the platform. Like this is the whole point of the movie: TikTok profited off of that, TikTok’s advertisers profited off of that. People made money off of that video. That’s insane. That’s horrifying. And that’s structural, that that’s allowed to happen. That’s structural.

The film itself faced some censorship issues prior to release. Was there much of it that you had to actually change, or was that more so around the marketing materials?

DG: No, the aspects of the movie that the studio forced us to change actually had much less to do with the violence in the film, and much more to do with other content that they found to be undesirable.

IM: It was really interesting to us because there is real snuff in our film. We went out and licensed. There are real people dying in our movie, and that was important to kind of engage directly with the real violence that we’re seeing on our phones. It would feel disingenuous to not have real death in our movie. When I can open Instagram and see someone die in two seconds. And so it was very interesting for us, a really interesting and eye opening experience to see that the real deaths, the real violence, had no issue actually with the studio whatsoever.

What kind of thing did they censored? Was it sexual content?

DG: Queer content. Explicit queer content.

Oh, okay. That’s interesting…

DG: Yes it is! (laughs)

How did the characters of Margot and Arthur come to you, and what was the process like in casting Barbie Ferreira and Dacre Montgomery?

IM: Margot and Arthur for us was an interesting conception. We always saw them as two pieces of the same coin. You know, someone who’s avoiding the internet, someone who is obsessed with the internet. But ultimately having kind of like a similar experience with the internet as they’re brought closer and closer to each other and then finally having this moment of, no spoilers, but a physicality together. I think in anyone who sees our first film (Cam), you’ll see similar themes that we’re grappling with in that film and I think for us, it was very important that Margo and Arthur be two characters that can kind of hold a mirror up to each other and reflect off each other in their confrontations with each other. And I think, Danny, I’m just going to shout out one of my favourite parts of the film is this incredible split screen where they’re kind of hunting each other down at the same time. Danny, I think did a fantastic job of making a scene that is so riveting, so compelling, and so character driven in two internet based split screens, it’s really a feat that I find very impressive.

Yeah, for sure. How was the casting process for those characters?

DG: A lot of meeting people and then just trying to find people. I think for me, I kind of think actors are people first and foremost, and they bring themselves and their perspective on the world and their perspective on making work to the characters. You learn so much more about what an actor’s performance is going to be based on the first five minutes of talking about a project than I think you can truly learn in five minutes of a self-tape. I hate self-tapes, I think they’re useless. I think that SAG should ban their practice like one hundred percent. They should not be allowed. They’re a waste of time for everybody, and they’re unfair. It’s unfair to actors. But for example, I met with I don’t know how many people for Arthur, but Dacre, when we met, the first thing he started talking to me about was his own experiences with OCD and how he connected with Arthur so much as a character because of that. I found that so interesting because almost every other actor I talked to about Arthur was always talking about this other guy, this guy they’d seen in the media, this guy they’d seen in the news, and I think I could imitate that behavior. Dacre was the only one who was like, “no, no, no, no, no. I see myself in Arthur. I see myself in this character and I’m interested in exploring the parts of myself that I see inside of him”. And to me, that is what makes a great performance, andI think it takes a lot of courage and a lot of intelligence, and craft for an actor to find ways to channel the darkest parts of themselves into a role like this.

I would love to have more time to talk about his character, because he’s fascinating. I see a lot of almost incel or fascist shades in him, or at least in how he presents himself.

DG: Yeah. I think that what’s interesting about Arthur is that he is somebody who has very consciously constructed his identity. He does not have a political motivation. He is not a men’s rights guy. He is not an incel. He is somebody who is seeking relevance. And so the ways in which he is borrowing from fascist iconography is precisely because he knows that there’s an audience for that. There are people in my life who have gone down the far right rabbit hole of both consuming far right content, but also making far right content. And the people I know who have become far right content creators have done so much less from an ideological position and much more from the position of it got them a lot of attention. And that was something that they wanted, was a lot of attention. And I think that that’s the thing about contemporary fascism that is interesting and disturbing, a lot of it has less to do with politics and more to do with the nature of how the algorithm is tuned to amplify the things that make us angry and upset.

Faces of Death is screening on August 19th at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and will be released digitally in the UK on September 7th via Signature Entertainment.