CA Film Maker Introduces ‘Faces Of Death’ To World 46 Yrs Ago

In 1978 a film was released to select theaters in the United States that shocked viewers to such extremes it ultimately became banned in several countries. Those who grew up in the seventies and eighties might have owned a copy of the film on VHS and watched it with great anxiety among friends.

I remember my older brother introducing me to Faces of Death when I was about ten to eleven years old. Horror films weren't something my parents prohibited me from watching at a young age, so by the time I was in junior high school I had already seen movies like Friday the 13th, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, and others. Faces of Death was unlike any movie ever made when it hit theaters on November 10, 1978.

Faces of Death was directed by a California film school graduate named John A. Schwartz. The movie was voted in the top 30 most controversial films of all time, according to Cine-Excess.

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The trailer for the film is disturbing enough, which is why I opted to not include it in this look back on disturbing American cinema. Nowadays, movies like Terrifier are carrying the torch for the genre of gore. The thing that separated Faces of Death from other movies is that it featured footage of real humans dying, and some of the images are still hard to watch. I found the movie on ROKU TV recently and got about 30 minutes into it before I decided to turn it off.

Faces of Death was directed by a California film school graduate named John A. Schwartz. The movie was voted in the top 30 most controversial films of all time, according to Cine-Excess. Schwartz passed away in 2019 at age 66 but left an indelible mark in American cinematic history.