10 Horror Movies That Are All Too Real
7. Faces Of Death
One sure-fire way for a horror film to shock audiences to the core is to blur the line between fact and fiction; and one film that does this to extreme levels is John Alan Schwartz’s 1978 “shockumentary” Faces Of Death (also known as The Original Faces Of Death).
Drawing influence from the Mondo exploitation films of the time, this disturbing cult horror begins with an introduction from one Dr Francis B. Gröss (Michael Carr) explaining to audiences that he’s “compiled a library of many faces of death” from around the world. From herein begins a grim collection of gruesome and macabre clips.
Ranging from a man being electrocuted, an alligator attack, and a plane crash, Faces Of Death was so shocking that it was banned in several countries and was even the subject of a lawsuit.
The documentary style of the film has led plenty of viewers to believe that what they witnessed was all real. But while some of the footage is genuine (the plane crash is real), a lot of it was faked – including a notorious sequence in which a monkey is butchered and eaten. Regardless of its authenticity, Faces Of Death is a deeply unsettling film.