THR is reporting that Legendary Entertainment has snapped up the rights to Faces of Death, the controversial cult 1978 horror which found itself banned in many countries including the UK, where it was one of the most infamous titles on the ‘Video Nasties’ list.
The original Faces of Death, directed by John Allan Schwartz, mixed authentic footage of accidents and deaths with fake sequences, presented in a faux-documentary style. Despite being savaged by critics, the original was a box offiec success grossing $35 million, and led to a host of sequels and imitators.
The new film is being written and directed by Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber, the duo behind 2018’s CAM, and will follow “a female moderator of a YouTube-like website whose job is to weed out offensive and violent content and who herself is recovering from a serious trauma, who stumbles across a group that is re-creating the murders from the original film. But in the story primed for the digital age of online misinformation, the question is: Are the murders real or fake?”
According to THR’s report, Legendary is looking to launch a new franchise with Faces of Death, and “hopes to make something more in the psychological horror field than in the slasher mold.”
