Apr 5, 2026 8:30pm PT

‘Faces of Death’ Review: A ’70s-Style B-Horror Movie Taps into the Growing Appetite for Horror That’s ‘Real’

Barbie Ferreira and Dacre Montgomery star in a halfway clever slasher-movie meditation on the 1978 mondo-horror cult film "Faces of Death."

Owen Gleiberman

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Owen Gleiberman

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Courtesy of Independent Film Company and Shudder

In the 1970s, when horror movies started to get more and more extreme, it wasn’t just the blood and the savagery that increased. So did the sensation that you were seeing something “real” — not mere “horror-movie violence” but violence as it really was, in all its existential terror. It was Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” in 1960, that sounded the original slasher chord of that era, but the event that truly ignited the reality-horror revolution was the Manson murders. They set off such a gruesome shock wave in the culture that they turned into a kind of movie of the mind, a psychotic nightmare made flesh. The slasher films of the ’70s channeled the Manson mystique — notably “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” which presented itself as a true story and served up its spectacle of slaughter with a documentary grittiness.

'Faces of Death' Review: A '70s-Style B-Horror Movie Taps into the Growing Appetite for Horror That's 'Real'