The Strange Saga of Faces of Death
April 9, 2026 at 10:00PMSeeing this headline evoked some frenzied reminiscing among your friendly Longreads editors. Turns out we were all scandalized by the mere mention of the 1978 horror movie Faces of Death, even if we’d never seen the actual film. The fact that it purported to show actual deaths made it an urban legend nonpareil, a meme before we knew to call it a meme. Now, with the (acknowledgedly) fictional meta-adaptation hitting theaters, Sam Adams investigates the real story behind the VHS bloodbath that gave so many ’80s babies nightmares.
I can’t speak for the elderly or the squeamish. But that box, and the movie inside it, held an irresistible fascination to me as a child. Kids who’d seen it—or, even better, whose older siblings had—spoke in whispers about its contents, less because they were afraid of being overheard by an adult than because it felt as if even putting its terrible images into words might open the door to some unimaginable evil. There were plane crashes and beheadings, men and women getting run over by trucks and eaten by alligators, all portrayed in the goriest of detail. And to top it all off, it was all real. This wasn’t Hollywood trickery. These were people’s actual deaths, captured on film and available for rental—if you dared.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/04/09/faces-of-death-slate/
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