Faces of Death

Lore & Background

The film follows pathologist Francis B. Gröss, who after performing an autopsy tells the viewer he is interested in the transitional periods of life and death due to a recurring dream. He has compiled footage to understand the many 'faces of death,' including a man killed by an alligator, assassinations, an electric chair execution, and the aftermath of PSA Flight 182 (using stock news footage, though the exact percentage of real footage in the film is disputed). Gröss also explores supernatural forces in death through a meeting with architect Joseph Binder, whose wife and son died under tragic circumstances; parapsychologists photograph apparitions and a medium communicates with the family's spirits, seemingly confirming life after death.

Reader's Guide

Faces of Death received generally negative reviews from critics but was a success at the box office, reportedly grossing over $35 million worldwide. It gained a cult following and spawned several sequels, the first of which, Faces of Death II, was released in 1981. Approximately 60% of the film was real footage purchased from news stations, medical researchers, witnesses to the Flight 182 crash, and other sources. Many sequences were recreations of news footage; special effects artist Douglas White stated the producers studied crime scene photos to determine whether their effects looked realistic. The film's inclusion of fake scenes makes its claim to depict death with 'an analytical view, rather than a purely exploitive purpose' debatable. The only real, unscripted part of the film features the body of a dead surfer who had washed up on shore as filmmakers were filming B-roll of litter for the pollution sequence.

Did You Know?

• The film's writer and director pseudonyms are often confused: John Alan Schwartz wrote under 'Alan Black' and directed under 'Conan Le Cilaire'.
• The PSA Flight 182 crash footage in the film is stock news footage, not footage purchased from witnesses, and the claim that 60% of the film is real is disputed.
• While much of the film is staged, unscripted real footage includes news clips of assassinations and the Flight 182 aftermath, not just the dead surfer scene.

The Mondo Genre's Italian Roots and 1960s Boom

The mondo film subgenre draws its name from the Italian word for 'world,' and it occupies a peculiar corner of documentary cinema. These pseudo-documentaries typically center on sensational subject matter—foreign customs, taboo themes like death and sexuality, and sequences that are actually staged but presented to viewers as authentic footage. While earlier works such as Alessandro Blasetti's Europe by Night (1959) and Luigi Vanzi's Il mondo di notte (1960) can be loosely classified within the tradition, the genre's true commercial breakthrough arrived in 1962 with Mondo Cane, a collaboration by Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti, and Franco Prosperi. That film's success triggered a wave of imitators throughout the decade, including Women of the World (1963) and Africa Addio (1966). During this period the word 'mondo' became so attached to the style that it appeared in titles across the industry—Mondo Bizarro, Mondo Daytona, Mondo Mod, Mondo Infame, and Mondo Hollywood all carried the label. By the late 1960s, however, the naming convention began losing its appeal, and fewer productions bothered to brand themselves with the term.

Faces of Death and the Birth of the Death Film

The 1978 release of Faces of Death marked a turning point in the mondo tradition, shifting the genre's focus from exotic cultures and taboos to a singular, visceral subject: the moment of death itself. This film is widely regarded as the peak of the entire mondo cycle, and it gave birth to a recognizable subcategory often called 'death films,' in which humans or animals are shown dying in graphic detail. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the broader mondo landscape moved in this same direction, with productions increasingly centering on footage of the dead and dying rather than the cultural curiosities that had defined the earlier era. The production methods were a mix of the genuine and the fabricated. Some sequences—autopsies, suicides, accidental deaths—were real, while others were staged and presented to audiences as authentic documentary material. Filmmakers in this space were driven by a competitive desire to outshock one another, pushing the boundaries of what would be shown on screen. The result was a body of work that, for all its ethical ambiguity, established a template that would be copied and expanded for decades to come.

A Proliferation of Imitators and New Voices

The shock of the original Faces of Death rippled outward through the exploitation landscape, spawning a long tail of imitators and successors. Titles like Banned from Television, Death Scenes, and the Traces of Death and Faces of Gore series all drew directly on the template it established. In the 21st century the genre continued to evolve: the Faces of Gore and Traces of Death installments leaned more heavily on genuine gore, reduced their reliance on fabricated footage, and frequently incorporated real accident footage sourced from East Asian news broadcasts. The late 2010s brought yet another wave, with filmmaker Dustin Ferguson launching the Bootleg Death Tape and Faces of Dying series, both of which enlisted independent directors from around the globe to contribute segments. Even a 12-minute short called Cibo Di Violenza ('Food of Violence'), written by Mike Lima and directed by Bazz Hancher—both English—demonstrated that the shockumentary impulse still had life in it as of 2015. Meanwhile, rights-holder Uwe Schier assembled later Faces of Death entries by repurposing footage from other mondo titles, blurring the lines between original production and compilation.

Parody, Pastiche, and Cultural Saturation

The mondo genre's visual and verbal trademarks became so deeply embedded in popular culture that they invited constant parody and misappropriation. The very naming convention that defined the 1960s boom spilled well beyond the genre's boundaries: Mondo Trasho, Mondo Weirdo: A Trip to Paranoia Paradise, Mondo Keyhole, and even Mondo Brutale—a German release title for Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left—borrowed the word without any connection to the documentary form. Studios themselves cashed in on the label, as when a retelling of Voltaire's Candide was released under the title Mondo candido (1975) purely to ride the coattails of the original trio's earlier hits. Dedicated parodies followed, including Ricardo Fratelli's Mondo Ford, Michael O'Donoghue's Mr. Mike's Mondo Video for Saturday Night Live, and the Abel brothers' Is There Sex After Death?. Mondo Beyondo took a different tack, spoofing the genre's titling style while actually satirizing satellite television. The term 'shockumentary' entered common parlance as a shorthand for the entire exploitative tradition, a testament to how thoroughly the mondo aesthetic had seeped into the broader film vocabulary.