Mondo films took their cue from the Italian film Mondo Cane , a compilation of travelogue vignettes — from tribal rituals in Africa to women in America using strange flesh-jiggling machines as part of a health craze. Mondo films often featured graphic scenes of animal slaughter. A big fan of Mondo Cane, he had been particularly struck by a scene that took place in a death house in China, where the sick and elderly were taken to spend their final days.
When LeCilaire was meeting the man from the Japanese film company, that scene leapt into his head. He said he was tired of doing films about animals and wanted to try something more ambitious. He convinced a doctor friend to let him into a morgue, where he shot an autopsy, cutting it together with other graphic footage including seals being clubbed to death.
When his prospective clients flew in from Japan, he took them into a screening room and showed them the results. LeCilaire set about finding enough graphic footage to fill a feature film. He went to news organisations and purchased a shot of a woman jumping to her death from an apartment building, as well as the aftermath of several car accidents. He and a writer came up with a list of fatal scenarios — alligator attack, electric chair, beheading — and added other elaborately disgusting sections, such as the monkey brains scene.
He hired actors, booked locations, and a professional Hollywood crew shot the film in a little over a month. That said, many of the sections of genuine documentary footage — in particular, the grisly aftermath of a plane crash — are undeniably shocking.
When Faces of Death hit Japanese cinemas in , under the title Junk, it was a massive hit. By , there were 42m players in the US alone, creating an unprecedented demand for content.
In fact, Faces of Death may have only been banned in a few countries. The film was certainly illegal in Britain, where the distribution of video nasties was a criminal offence. But in the US, Faces of Death was unstoppable. Released in , Faces of Death was a seminal mockumentary that earned a place in horror history despite its amateurish production due to its shocking content. The movie is now set to receive a contemporary remake, prompting some horror fans to wonder what the original Faces of Death controversy centered on.
Faces of Death is a mondo movie, an exploitative documentary sub-genre that was something of a progenitor to the found footage craze, with what's real and what's fake being left to viewer's imaginations. Popular during the sixties and seventies, mondo movies waned from relevance in the '80s. Isn't that a snuff film? Did I just watch somebody die?
The answer is more complex than you think. Come along on our postmortem examination as we explore the untold truth of Faces of Death.
Since its release in , Faces of Death has been passed down from weird older brothers and cool aunts everywhere to new, unsuspecting generations, always looking to make their world a little bigger in search of the next taboo. It's really the only way to explain the movie's appeal—unlike, say, The Shining , Faces of Death can't be appreciated for its awe-inspiring cinematography, or a gripping and layered story with universal relevance.
The taboo surrounding death lends the movie its entire morbid appeal. Beyond that, there's the "Is this real? People being shot, people being executed, people set on fire—the footage brings up a reaction. Am I really seeing this?
Part of the culture around Faces of Death is the wealth of misinformation that surrounds it, some of it deliberately planted in marketing materials. Then there's people repeating falsehoods about the movie to their friends, either because they don't know any better or because they want to make the movie scarier. And he would know—Schwartz is the sole creator of the Faces of Death series, though you won't find his name in the credits. If you go by the credits, the responsibility for Faces of Death falls on two principal figures: Alan Black, who wrote the movie, and Conan Le Cilaire, the director.
But both of these mysterious individuals are actually one person: John Alan Schwartz, who was also a main producer on the movie, and even acted in some of its sequences. The movies, he said, served "as a mouthpiece to say whatever I wanted to say, with nobody censoring me. We were our own censors, but we didn't censor anything.
The darker we got, the more excited we were. It wasn't an original idea. Faces of Death was made with money from Japanese investors for the Japanese video market, who approached Schwartz to make the movie with their idea in mind. And what young aspiring filmmaker wouldn't want to do that? They gave us the money and we put it all together and never had anybody to answer to but ourselves. The project came to America thanks to a collection of independent distributors, who saw the film and saved it from a life of obscurity.
Faces of Death appeared at a time when filmmakers were beginning to push the boundaries of what a movie even was. Specifically, Faces of Death falls into the "mondo" genre, a term which was practically invented upon the release of the movie Mondo Cane. In essence, the mondo movie is a provocative film designed to shock. Originally, they focused on taboos, usually cultural ones, showing foreign people engaging in behaviors western audiences would seemingly be put off by—which often turned out to be cruel footage of animals being beaten and killed, a trope that is prominently featured in the Faces of Death series.
By the end of the s, this boundary-pushing, which started in a place we would today find remarkably tame, had progressed to the point that, for the sake of shock value, mondo films started purporting to show real violence and death onscreen. There's animal slaughter of the sort you'd see in a movie trying to scare you into veganism, and a fatal shootout between armed civilians and police.
Bodies are shown so carved up that they're barely recognizable, and purported traditions of death from around the world are shown in an out-there sequence of human sacrifice, followed by cannibalism.
In one famous scene, a group of diners sits down to a meal of fresh monkey brains, scooping them out of the skull after beating the monkey to death right at the dinner table.
As a movie, Faces of Death proceeds clinically, with a lot of emotional distance between the viewer and the footage—audiences aren't exactly being invited into an unfolding story here. Played over a sparse soundtrack, it doesn't have much structure—its one connecting thread is an onscreen host and narrator, a buttoned-down sort who introduces himself as Dr.
Francis Gross. The unrelated footage that makes up the bulk of the movie is stitched together under the pretext of being the doctor's long-term study on the different methods and manners of death. Sound like it might be up your alley? Don't be shy. A whole lot of people were on board for Faces of Death , and they paid for the tickets to prove it.
It made its money largely in less-reputable theaters, venues of the drive-in and the trashy grindhouse sort. But while the movie's theatrical success is astonishing to consider, the movie didn't really secure its immortality until after its VHS release in Snappy branding which claimed the movie was banned in 46 countries made Faces into something forbidden, an irresistible draw for any prospective viewer wanting a taste of the transgressive.
As the movie gained success, it also received pushback, with many commentators writing off the film as a monstrosity. Ironically, their outrage only served to cement the movie's reputation.
But it actually had the opposite effect. For all it purported to be an unblinking look at the real world, most of Faces of Death was total fiction.
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