Daniel Goldhaber
33 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
Scream (1996)
Directed by Wes Craven
influenced Faces of Death (2026)
Visuals Themes Characters Dialogue
…straight-ahead kill scenes framed in Scream-like quotation marks…
…with the most go-to critical comparison of Faces likely to be the Scream franchise.
Director / co-writer Daniel Goldhaber’s fiendishly clever reimagining of Faces of Death is no less a watershed among self-referential slashers than 1996’s Scream.
It’s impossible to do an openly meta horror movie these days and not think of Scream, but Faces of Death doesn’t feel like a Scream retread…
…she does what Sidney Prescott lamented was the problem with horror movies: A woman runs up the stairs when she should be heading out the front door…
…later explaining his motives in a monologue reminiscent of the one from the end of the original Scream…
In 1978, the horror exploitation film Faces of Death satisfied a perverse craving for modern audiences…
Into this space came 1978 film Faces Of Death.
Inspired by the 1978 snuff-film oddity…
John Alan Schwartz’s Faces of Death (1978) was presented as if it were a documentary where pathologist Francis B. Gröss (Michael Carr) reflects on mortality through clips of various fatal incidents—some staged for the film and others pulled from pre-existing real-world footage.
Would it be like the classic horror movie of the same name by presenting staged yet incredibly unnerving scenes of violence and depravity…
The original Faces of Death didn’t make much of an impression when it was released in 1978.
In scenes reminiscent of Red Rooms, and providing a similar warning to viewers…
2023’s phenomenal Red Rooms, a Canadian crime drama for the dark web age…
Their Faces of Death doesn’t reach the disturbing heights of Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms, but it does present the same commentary and themes in a more mainstream package with presumably greater appeal.
…this update superficially wades into ideas already covered more chillingly in films like Red Rooms.
Pascal Plante’s excellent serial killer thriller Red Rooms…
In a way, this version of Faces of Death is in almost perfect communication with Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms, which also dealt with the subject of obsession, albeit in a more intimate setting…
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Directed by Jonathan Demme
influenced Faces of Death (2026)
Plot Characters
This is less Sidney Prescott vs. Ghostface and more Clarice Starling vs. Buffalo Bill…
While there was chatter a few years back about Longlegs being positioned as a modern The Silence of the Lambs, with its central performance touted as a millennial Clarice Starling…
The thriller American Sweatshop, which I really liked…
From last year’s American Sweatshop to Monitor, which premiered at SXSW last month, filmmakers are clearly intrigued by this profession.
Halloween (2018)…
…silently stalking his victims in an outfit pieced together from the wardrobes of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees…
Faces of Death includes a much better, more focused commentary on our current culture than Scream 7 did…
…that it’s arriving alongside the wide release of Scream 7 seems significant.
(It's a little like Nastassja Kinski in Paris, Texas, except untouchable behind a computer screen rather than behind glass.)
In the 2000s, studios set out to produce remakes of the horror titans of the ’70s and ’80s, such as “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,”…
In some ways, it reminds me of David Cronenberg’s “Videodrome.”
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)
Directed by John McNaughton
influenced Faces of Death (2026)
Themes
Goldhaber might have updated not just Faces of Death but 1986’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, that unblinking indictment of video-age voyeurism…
…would’ve benefited from a colder, more clinical approach reminiscent of other, superior works about media desensitization like Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video…
…a mean throwback to graphic late-1990s crime thrillers like 8MM, Se7en, and American Psycho…
…creating a recursive loop of influence and imitation that occasionally feels in conversation with Scream 2, if Scream 2 were less a student of meta genre cleverness and more a student of early 2000s torture porn.
…a mean throwback to graphic late-1990s crime thrillers like 8MM, Se7en, and American Psycho…
…a mean throwback to graphic late-1990s crime thrillers like 8MM, Se7en, and American Psycho…
The scary pitfalls of online existence have been examined in everything from Black Mirror to Hard Candy (or Goldhaber’s own Cam).
The scary pitfalls of online existence have been examined in everything from Black Mirror to Hard Candy (or Goldhaber’s own Cam).
…or would it be a found-footage film similar to the V/H/S movies?
This isn’t “Terrifier” country.