Faces of Death 4K 1978

This film is certainly telling. But not at all because of the number of mutilated corpses shown on screen.

What makes it telling is the reaction to it. Far more gruesome and graphic corpses are shown on wide screens in the numerous installments of *Saw* or *Hostel*.

However, they don’t provoke such a strong reaction there. These are feature films, horror movies—that’s just how it’s supposed to be.

Guys, you’re going to be really surprised, but everything I’m about to say is nothing new. Search the English-language internet (there’s just very little information on the Russian internet), or just read Wikipedia, for heaven’s sake (unfortunately, only the English version too)!

‘Faces of Death (1978)’ – a feature film with staged scenes. Not all the scenes there are staged, and not all the photos are—but most are. The creators have long joked in interviews about how skillfully they mixed a minimum of reality with a heap of fabrications and staged scenes, and how this film has become an epic, sinister ‘Urban Legend’. How they created a dark aura around this creation, which became its main plot device.

So what’s my point? That this film is very good. Specifically because of the direction—creating a terrifying horror film not with special effects, but… with what? With atmosphere, the atmosphere of reality. Even if it is fictional. It wasn’t banned in 46 countries, by the way—only in 4 at different times (and that’s yet another proof of brilliant directing and… marketing? promotion? I don’t know… they even split the countries!). I probably wouldn’t have dug any deeper if I hadn’t been put off by the cannibalism scene and the orgy that followed—a bit of a spoiler there, after all.

So technically I didn’t write a spoiler, right? I just called a feature film a feature film, that’s all. And yet, if I’d watched it knowing what I later found out about it—I definitely wouldn’t have watched it with such… not even interest. A sense of horror and revulsion. A sense of reality. And that gloomy, wise voice of the pathologist off-screen... Brilliant!

There have never been films like this, and there never will be. It’s one of a kind. A masterpiece in its own right.