Faces of Death reboot: Cam’s Daniel Goldhaber directing for Legendary

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Back in 2006, it was announced that a Faces of Death reboot was in the works, with Don Murphy and Susan Montford producing and J.T. Petty attached to write and direct. Petty remained on the project for several years, even mentioning that he had turned in a "new draft of the script" near the end of 2013, but the project just never made it into production.  Now it has been announced that Murphy and Montford's company Angry Films is teaming up with Legendary Entertainment to get the reboot made, and they're starting from scratch with writer Isa Mazzei and director Daniel Goldhaber, the team that brought us the Netflix release Cam.

Cory Kaplan will be co-producing the new Faces of Death, while Rick Benattar of BT Productions serves as executive producer. John Burrud, who produced the original Faces of Death films with his father, is also involved with the project.

Released in 1978, the first Faces of Death was about 

a pathologist exploring gruesome ways to die via footage purportedly culled from around the world. In reality, most of the death scenes were staged, but no matter, the movie had its producers’ desired effect: outrage, revulsion, banning (although not in 52 countries, as hyped by the film’s makers), and, of course, a money-making hit that spawned sequels and imitators. It was written and directed by John Alan Schwartz, who used multiple pseudonyms for several crew jobs on the flick.

Seven sequels followed over the next twenty-one years.

Mazzei and Goldhaber's take on the concept will center on 

a female moderator of a YouTube-like website whose job is to weed out offensive and violent content and who herself is recovering from a serious trauma, who stumbles across a group that is re-creating the murders from the original film. But in the story primed for the digital age of online misinformation, the question is: Are the murders real or fake?

The Hollywood Reporter says Legendary is aiming to make this "more in the psychological horror field than in the slasher mould".