Faces of Death (1978)

Faces of Death is less a conventional horror movie than a notorious time capsule: a 1978 shock-doc that helped define how “forbidden” footage and deadpan narration could be packaged into a midnight-movie dare. What makes it compelling today isn’t just the extremity, but the way it plays like a grim museum tour—part exploitation, part morbid anthropology—capturing the era’s fascination with taboo imagery and the thin line between documentary authority and carnival-barker showmanship. If you’re a horror historian, a genre completist, or simply curious about the film that became a cultural reference point for decades of transgressive cinema, it’s a fascinating artifact to finally see firsthand. It’s also absolutely not for everyone: the material is relentlessly graphic and intentionally provocative, so it rewards the stout-hearted viewer more with context and infamy than with traditional storytelling.

Faces of Death is trying to dress up pure taboo curiosity as a “documentary” meditation on mortality, using a calm narrator and a grab-bag of death-related footage to make it feel like you’re learning something. The problem is that a lot of it plays as crude exploitation—some sequences are staged or obviously manipulated, and the film’s structure is so repetitive that the shock factor wears off fast and leaves you with boredom and a bad taste. If you’re looking for a serious, ethical documentary about death, or even a genuinely scary horror film with craft and suspense, this likely isn’t your lane. Its only real value today is as a notorious piece of grindhouse history and a time capsule of how far sensationalism could be pushed, but you’ll need a high tolerance for tastelessness to sit through it.