Faces of Death Trailer Brings the Infamous ’80s Horror Franchise into 2026
Can the guy who directed Cam make Faces of Death scary in 2026?
You don’t have to watch Stranger Things to know that the 1980s were a scary time. There was Satanic Panic, rumors about poisoned Halloween candy, and Thatcher and Reagan. But nothing scared kids on the playground more than rumors about a movie that showed real-life images of people dying. That movie was Faces of Death, and it’s coming back in 2026 to traumatize us all over again.
The first teaser for the 2026 update of Faces of Death recalls those primal fears. The teaser has no narrative and instead features random images of horrible things. A bear drags away a limp man. A truck levels a bystander. A hammer slams into a skull. Between the whimpers of pain and cries for help, we hear a voice musing about death, asking, “The end of the beginning? Or the beginning of the end?”
The original Faces of Death from 1978 was written and directed by John Alan Schwartz and starred Michael Carr as Dr. Francis B. Gröss. Although presented as real material, Faces of Death is in fact fictional, the story of Dr. Gröss sharing his collection of footage featuring people and animals dying. Over the video of everything from car accidents to executions to Holocaust scenes, Gröss delivers vaguely philosophical narration about the nature of humanity.
Faces of Death is part of the Mondo (Italian for “world”) horror subgenre, exploitation takes on documentary travelogues. Where mainstream travelogues would introduce the viewers to Scandinavian saunas or Japanese kabuki, the Mondo films purported to reveal some nasty or taboo aspect of a subculture. 1962’s Mondo Cane, considered one of the progenitors of the subgenre, takes audiences around the world, showing them animals being slaughtered for food, Australian women in swimsuits giving CPR to young men, and everything in between. Nasty as the material gets, an authoritarian narrator describes it all in perfect calm, helping the viewers excuse their lust as intellectual pursuits.
Faces of Death and its fellow Mondo movies appealed to audiences in part because such lascivious material was hard to find in the ’60s and ’70s. So hard, in fact, that most of them had to stage the “real” events they documented, a trick made easier by the grainy film stock of the time. But that’s not the case in 2026, when horrible things are both all too real and way too accessible.
If there’s anyone who can deal with that challenge and make Faces of Death relevant in 2026, it’s director Daniel Goldhaber. Goldhaber not only directed the 2018 screenlife movie Cam (written by Isa Mazzei, who co-writes Faces of Death), but he made 2022’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, turning a nonfiction anarchist instructional document into a riveting fictional drama.
Clearly, Daniel Goldhaber is the best person to help ’80s kids to recall the terrors of the playground and make them real for adults in 2026, forcing us to stare into the faces of death once again.
Faces of Death releases in theaters on April 10, 2026.