The greatest trick Faces Of Death pulled was convincing us it was real

While the original Faces Of Death may seem uniquely threatening, it exists in a long-standing tradition of pseudo-realistic exploitation cinema that includes the scuzzy 1962 Italian docu-provocation Mondo Cane and far-flung descendants like the nauseating 1985 Japanese shocker Guinea Pig 2: Flower Of Flesh And Blood, the latter of which features such convincing depictions of torture and murder that it inspired actor Charlie Sheen to report the filmmakers to the FBI. Schwartz has cited Mondo Cane in particular as an influence on his movie, calling that movie and its many sequels/imitators “the first shockumentaries.” He’s wrong though, since Mondo Cane was itself preceded by a string of titillating and offensive ethnographic pseudo-docs from the ’50s, like Karamoja and Mau Mau, which showcased graphic and then-taboo scenes of nudity and sexual mutilation, as well as atrocity footage, to attract curious viewers.

Exploitation cinema expert Eric Schaefer traced the lineage of pre-Mondo movies like Mau Mau in his essential non-fiction primer Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History Of Exploitation Films 1919-1959. Schaefer argued that earlier scripted “exotics” like Lash Of The Penitentes (1936) and Child Bride (1941) paved the way for a variety of other exploitation pictures given their shared fascination with the purportedly representative habits of underdeveloped communities. “These films dealt with small, remote groups who, according to the moviemakers, suffered from some sort of misplaced sexual energies,” Schaefer wrote. 

Schaefer notes that Mondo Cane, like Mau Mau and other atrocity movies like it, justified their salacious content by reframing scenes of underdeveloped nations as part of a pious post-war critique. Their reactionary stated goals were, in Schaefer’s words, “a reaffirmation of Christian values that would ‘sweep away secularism, materialism, and political radicalism’ in order to reestablish the authority of white American bourgeois ideals.” These shockumentarians had their cake and ate it too by presenting the evils of modern warfare as evidence for how civilized countries despoiled tranquil, nigh-Edenic pre-war societies. In this way, a variety of exploitation filmmakers and their intrepid distributors defended their barely veiled promises of sex and violence with the negligible fig leaf pretext of social commentary. 

Schwartz’s Faces Of Death, along with the seven sequels that he directed, work in a similar vein. Those movies juxtapose, say, car crashes on the Autobahn with the harrowing vivisection of a live monkey at a (fake) Middle Eastern restaurant (actually a Moroccan establishment in Long Beach). That grisly scene haunts many viewers to this day, although Schwartz has repeatedly clarified that we’re not actually looking at a real monkey’s exposed brain, just some cauliflower and fake blood. 

You can also find some classic exploitation moralizing in the framing device that Schwartz used to string together various gruesome scene in Faces Of Death, since the pathologist (Michael Carr) who introduces each segment, not only doesn’t exist, but also provides risible commentary like how “throughout history,” eating monkey brains was thought to “bring those who ate this delicacy closer to God.” Schwartz has said that Carr’s character was inspired by the fictitious narrator of the trippy, sensationalistic Oscar-winning 1971 nature documentary The Hellstrom Chronicle, which presents insects’ violent habits as a warning to human viewers. Schwartz has also described Gross, “as a mouthpiece to say whatever I wanted to say, with nobody censoring me.”

But there’s also no self-incriminating edge to Faces Of Death, no implication of its viewers for seeking out cheap thrills. “I don’t think we were looking at ourselves with that kind of magnifying glass,” Schwartz said. Mark Goodall, author of the provocative pro-Mondo tract Sweet And Savage: The World Through The Mondo Lens, argues that the original Mondo Cane (and some of the follow-ups from its co-directors Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi) “transgress” the two dominant modes of documentary filmmaking in the 1960s, “observational” and “participatory,” by blurring the line between a participatory approach—fostered through voiceover narration, which suggests a more direct involvement with the films’ subjects—with observational techniques, like the use of hidden cameras. J.G. Ballard, who took inspiration from the original Mondo Cane when he wrote his experimental 1970 satire The Atrocity Exhibition, also suggested that contemporary viewers yearned to be implicated in post-war incivilities and atrocities, despite how fake some of them seem. At their best, Mondo movies presented a welcome, if unseemly challenge to the status quo. 

But if Mondo Cane was a rebuke to post-Zapruder-film desensitization, as Ballard argued, how do you explain Faces Of Death‘s nettling appeal? For one thing, you didn’t have to leave home to watch Faces Of Death, though you might’ve had to watch it in secret on your family’s TV. Watching Faces Of Death in one (or more) sitting was a challenge to your home’s domestic sanctity and, for many viewers, a private initiation into an adult world. Without the aid of a time machine, it’s hard to imagine how Goldhaber’s remake could achieve a similarly insidious effect given how easy it now is to search for and find unsimulated footage of sex, death, and torture on the internet. 

It seems impossible that anything as potently disturbing as Faces Of Death could be made, let alone strike the same nerves, now that so many provocative images and videos—not to mention AI-generated content of every flavor—are being force-fed to consumers by everyone from major corporations to the federal government’s social media accounts. The monoculture that Schwartz’s movie and others like it defined themselves against no longer exists, and while acknowledging the existence of movies like Faces Of Death in these metatextual remakes makes a kind of sense, it also robs viewers of the essential mysteriousness that made that original movie so disturbing. Schwartz’s film was always scarier because it effectively preyed on pre-internet fears that what you were looking at could be real. These mondo movies broke down your intellectual boundaries, making you question the little internal voice whose warning—”It’s only a movie”—has gotten less reliable in the modern age of misinformation.