Death, Algorithms, and the Infinite Scroll – Inside FACES OF DEATH with Director / Co-Writer: Daniel Goldhaber & Co-Writer / Producer: Isa Mazzei (Video & Text)

I’ve been tracking Daniel Goldhaber’s Faces of Death long before it slipped into the kind of production purgatory that usually signals trouble. The initial hook alone felt like a dare: follow up the Oscar-shortlisted How to Blow Up a Pipeline with a reimagining of the infamous Faces of Death—and cast Charli XCX & Barbie Ferreira while you’re at it. The film wrapped in 2023 and was slated for a SXSW premiere in 2025, before being yanked at the last minute. That kind of move usually screams “disaster,” but the whispers around this one suggested something else entirely—not just extreme violence, but ideas sharp enough to make distributors nervous. 

At its center is Margot Romero (Barbie Ferreira), a content moderator for a TikTok-adjacent platform called Kino, tasked with filtering the internet’s most depraved impulses before they’re fed back to us as algorithmic slop. It’s numbing, thankless work—until she flags a video that feels… different. Not just brutal, but composed. Deliberate. Cinematic. It even borrows narration from Faces of Death like it’s quoting scripture. Then another clip appears. And another. What starts as routine exposure metastasizes into fixation, as Margot begins tugging at threads that refuse to separate cleanly—blurring the line between performance and reality, until she can’t tell if she’s uncovering a hoax, a horror show, or something far more systemic and unsettling.

I was lucky enough to sit down with Director / Co-Writer Goldhaber and Co-Writer / Producer  Isa Mazzei to talk about threading that needle—taking a so-called snuff artifact (one that was, of course, largely fabricated) and reshaping it into a pointed, feminist meta-commentary on a culture that doesn’t just consume violence, but scrolls past it without blinking.

Faces of Death will be available only in Theaters on April 10th. 

First off, congrats, Daniel and Issa, on the film. As a horror fan, it absolutely delivers. As an ’80s horror kid, this has been one of my most anticipated films of 2026—which I love saying because people always do a double take. You wrapped the film in 2023 with some reshoots in 2024, and I read there were delays. How close is the version hitting theaters to what you originally made?

Daniel Goldhaber: This is the movie we made. I think there’s maybe about a second and a half of gore the MPAA forced us to cut—specifically in the hammerhead scene. They didn’t like a moment where a piece of skull kind of flops, so we had to trim that.

What’s funny is that the exact same moment still appears later when it’s shown on a phone. It’s interesting what the MPAA chooses to censor in one context but allows in another. They tend to be much more comfortable censoring sex than violence, which is something we were definitely thinking about.

And I think it’s relevant that the MPAA had a problem seeing that in the context of that material being censored or moderated. But it had no problem with that content when it was just shown as a piece of violent imagery in the film. I think it has a lot to do with the MPAA not really liking the attention given to the censorship of images or the lack of censorship of violent images.

They love nothing more than to censor sex and let violence run unimpeded on our screens. And so yes by and large every single thing from a violent standpoint that we put in the movie is in the final film. And audiences are kind of getting the full uncut goodies.

The gore is fantastic, but the film is also tackling some dense social themes—especially around social media and violence. When did you realize you’d found your way into the story? Because it’s not what people expect from Faces of Death, and that’s what makes it so compelling.

Isa Mazzei: That was really the reason we wanted to do the project in the first place. We went back and watched the original, which we didn’t grow up with—we’re a little too young—but we realized we had seen pieces of it growing up, but on the internet.

That’s where Faces of Death lives now: on the internet.

We grew up seeing all kinds of violent content online, and now it feels like you can’t even open your phone without being served something by an algorithm. This film gave us a chance to explore what it means to be constantly surrounded by that kind of violent imagery—especially when it’s presented in the bizarre context such as your social media.

Since watching the film, I’ve definitely become more aware of that in my own life. One of my favorite things to mention when pitching this movie to friends is the Charli XCX factor. You cast her pre-Brat, back in 2023—how did that come together?

Isa Mazzei: She actually reached out to us. She had seen a press release about the film and was a fan of our first movie. She basically said, “Hey, I want to be in this.”

At that point, we had one role left to cast, so it worked out perfectly.

Are you surprised the film has become even more relevant over time? It feels like it’s hitting harder now than it might have when you first shot it.

Daniel Goldhaber: What’s funny is we originally pitched the film in 2019. We were trying to figure out where it should take place—YouTube, Instagram—and Isa said, “Have you heard of this new app called TikTok?” I hadn’t, and she was like, “It’s going to be the next big thing.”

What we’re dealing with in the film is a broader social phenomenon—how tech companies shape the way we engage with each other. That makes the kind of ideas that are explored in the film but also the things that we’re seeing reflected in the real world. It makes them a certainty. 

And we know that it’s only going to get worse and worse and worse because the algorithm is literally designed to make us angrier and angrier to drive us further and farther apart from each other to increase violence more and more and more. And so I think that like in a weird way, it comes as no surprise that the movie only becomes more relevant, because until we actually make a major change in how we engage with technology and social media nothing is going to change. And it’s only going to continue spiraling out of control.

 Do you think the controversy surrounding the film might actually help open that conversation? That people might come for the shock value but leave thinking about something deeper?

Daniel Goldhaber: That would be great, but I think it’s a little naïve to expect any one film to have that kind of direct impact.

It used to be when you see something in the newspaper, you watch a movie, humans made that. Some person decided it goes in the newspaper and then somebody printed the newspaper, and another person brought it to your door. And all along the line there were people involved in that kind of media creation that were human beings. And so it really was this form of us connecting with one another.

And when we traded our algorithms over to our news feeds over to the algorithm in 2015 when the infinite scroll was invented, it kind of became this thing that was about addicting you to the platform as much as possible. We are actually removing humans from that mediation process. 

And I think that more than anything what we want the movie to do is,I think to portray that and to portray the kind of alienation and dehumanization that comes not in a didactic way, but in an evocative way, in a horrifying way, in an entertaining way. So that people might look at their own lives and their own experiences on social media differently. 

One last question: the film touches on performance and identity on social media—especially through the killer. How did you develop that look? I love details like the impractical contact lenses.

Isa Mazzei: A lot of that came from Dacre (Montgomery) himself. He brought a strong sense of texture and tactility—materials that felt like something the character would obsess over.

From there, we built it out by thinking about who Arthur is. He’s someone who orders everything online—his house is full of Amazon boxes. So we asked: what kind of mask could he realistically find and replicate? What would he build from those materials?

It became a combination of those practical considerations and our conversations with Dacre that ultimately shaped the look.