Video Nasty List: Faces of Death
Fair Warning: This article kills some of the mystique behind this movie. So if you haven't found time to watch this movie in the almost 40 years since it has been made, you may want to think twice about reading this review.
Infamous?
In its heyday, Faces of Death was banned in over 48 countries, including the United Kingdom the country with the infamous "Video Nasty" list. The movie follows the narrative of Doctor Francis Gross, a man fascinated and frightened by death. He travels the world to examine the phenomenon of death from all aspects. How different cultures deal with their dead, historical acts of genocide, how humans kill for food, and so on. What makes this movie so notorious is that it boasts that it shows actual depictions of death, which is... mostly correct, but more on that later.
Since I live in a day and age where I can go onto Live Leak and see all manner of horrific things, it is almost impossible for me to understand what is so terrible about this movie that it would get banned anywhere in the free world.
If you actually watched the movie, you'd see that it is a docudrama about the role of death in society. It's a really powerful film. At no point is it glorifying death in any way. It's the story of a man who is often times haunted by his own mortality and wants to understand death in all of its forms. How is this different from any of us? Outside of the people who don't want to think about their eventual demise, I think every human being is exactly like the fictional Francis Gross.
He's lots of fun at parties.
I think the main reason why this movie sparked such an outrage is not because of the story, but because talking about death is an incredibly uncomfortable subject in society, particularly in western culture. Gone are the days where we personally care for our dead. No more displays in the parlor, it's the living room now, so off to the mortician for you, dearly departed family member. We put them in an over priced box, paint them up to look like they're sleeping and then incinerate the remains or have some day laborers plant them in the ground. We have sanitized death to the point where it is such an emotionally charged inconvenience that we pay other people an obscene amount of money to deal with it for us. So it's no wonder that the people that would ban such a film, who likely had one foot in the grave already, would ban such a film.
But is it Real?
Yes and no. The magic of Faces of Death is that it blurs the lines between fiction and reality. Looking back at it now, some of the fakeries seems pretty obvious, but back in 1978 it had fooled plenty of people. Oh there is real footage of dead things: pictures from a morgue, cows being led to slaughter, stock footage of Nazi concentration camps, the aftermath of a train wreck, and so on. However, there is some fakery going on, and some of the most notorious scenes in the film were certainly staged, such as the electric chair scene, and the infamous monkey scene.
This scene is about as believable as that scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
But, They Still Film People Dying, Right?
That's another common misconception of this film. People seem to think that the people who made it actively filmed people getting killed. While there is footage of dead bodies, there is very little in the way of footage of people being killed on camera. You have to remember that this movie was made in 1978. Camera equipment was incredibly bulky and cumbersome, and portable cameras weren't exactly prevalent for the average consumer. In fact, portable video cameras didn't hit the consumer market until the early 1980s. My dad had one of the early Betamax camcorders. Not only did you have the camera, but you had to plug it into a portable Betamax player, and have carry a massive battery pack that didn't last very long. What I'm trying to say is, catching something on film in 1978 was incredibly difficult. Compared to the Smartphones of today, they might as well have stuck with cave painting.
Did the makers of this film actually film anybody dying? The answer is no. At least not directly. Glenn Turner, who edited the film explained how they put the movie together in an interview about the film that can be found on the 30th-anniversary edition DVD of the film. In those days, they went to TV studios and purchased raw footage from news broadcasts. They then scoured them for the most grisly stuff they could find. The problem was that thanks to the aforementioned technical limitations, all the footage was taken in the aftermath of an accident, or other fatality. This left them having to create the "before" footage. It was all done by using the same type of camera used to create the original footage, staging the scene, and a lot of creative editing.
I love the Disco-Boogie Action News Team!
The only on screen death is stock footage from nature and war documentaries.
Isn't This the Movie That...
No. Probably not. The funny thing about people I talk to about Faces of Death and most people tell me about scenes that were never in the movie.
After years of immitators and fakeries Faces of Death gets the rep for. like the similarly named Traces of Death these pale imitations lack the nuances that Faces of Death had. People who associate these movies in the same way idiots credit every parody song to "Weird Al" Yankovic.
Cultural Impact
It's funny looking back at this movie today and trying to fathom how it could put such a burr under people's asses. Today, if I wanted watch a person getting their head chopped off, all I need is Google.
The difference is that Faces of Death had a story to it. It was a man's quest to understand the nature of death. Anything else is basically porn.
Nasty Rating: 0
This movie isn't nasty at all. If you got a problem with it, enjoy living the rest of your fleeting mortaliry living in fear. Pussy.
