Daniel Goldhaber once spent a summer in the 2010s couch surfing and watching the worst kinds of videos the Internet can offer. He was working as a content moderator for a small startup, sifting through a never-ending feed of traffic accidents, bar brawls, fetish content, ripped security cam footage, pranks gone wrong, drug use, and much worse to filter out the truly destructive videos from the low-grade, brain-damaging goods that all social media platforms traffic in.
Like many young Millennials who grew up alongside social media platforms, Goldhaber has a complicated relationship with the Internet. The 34-year-old filmmaker has devoted more of his time to making things happen in the real world than consuming them in the virtual realm, going all the way back to his teenage years when he was mounting plays and directing short art films with his longtime creative partner Isa Mazzei. But, in just three movies, Goldhaber and Mazzei have established an incisive and specific body of work investigating the friction between performance, violence, and digital worlds today.
So when Goldhaber and Mazzei were approached by executives at Legendary Entertainment about a remake of a legendary ’70s grindhouse picture, they were intrigued. Faces of Death is an artifact from the video nasty era, whose lore was built through whispers and furtively passed VHS tapes. It inspired a macabre fascination, rumored to contain footage of real deaths, prompting bans in the U.K., Australia, and Germany. Goldhaber and Mazzei see Faces of Death as a precursor to the world we live in today where the most bleak, terrifying imagery imaginable in 1978 was now available 24/7 on the App Store. Using Goldhaber’s experience as a content moderator, the creative duo began to adapt the nearly unadaptable project.
The film stars Barbie Ferreira as Margot, a young woman in New Orleans working as a content moderator in a drab office (Charli XCX tries an American accent on for size as one of Margot’s more jaded coworkers.) She’s still bruised from her own run-in with Internet infamy when she begins to encounter a series of videos that look an awful lot like the snuff scenes from the original Faces of Death. An ill-advised investigation pulls her further down the rabbit hole and into the orbit of the man behind the videos, played by Dacre Montgomery.
What Goldhaber and Mazzei’s Faces of Death excels at is capturing the psychological landscape of people who always have a camera pointed at them, even if it’s just in their head. Their first collaboration, Cam, is a doppelgänger thriller about a camgirl, inspired by Mazzei’s own experiences with sex work. How to Blow Up a Pipeline, adapted from Andreas Malm’s 2021 direct action manual published by Verso, explores what sabotage in the name of environmental justice might look like in an era when politics are all-too-often relegated to screens. The three films together make up a strange trilogy investigating what agency can actually look like when the fundamentals of life, communication, care, and survival have been handed over to corporations ultimately looking out for their bottom line.
I called up Goldhaber and Mazzei to get to the bottom of their thorny film adaptations, dating as teens, and Faces of Death’s long journey to the big screen.
How did you two meet and start your creative partnership?
Isa Mazzei: In high school. It actually started on social media, which I think is funny. My best friend posted on MySpace that she thought we should meet each other. So we met, and we started dating. We only dated for a year in high school though.
What was your first date?
Daniel Goldhaber: Oh, it wasn’t a proper date. We grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and there’s this cafe called the Trident, which for the better part of about 15 years was like both of our backyards. We went there, and I think I forced her to play this incredibly dumb card game that I had become obsessed with called Mao.
Mazzei: He invented the rules, so we were basically just getting conned.
Were you making art together back then?
Mazzei: Oh yeah, right away.
Goldhaber: I started a theater company with some friends, and I wrote and directed this play called Art of a Slow Death when I was 16 that Isa produced and stage managed.
Mazzei: We’d make art films and block traffic in town to shoot them.
What was that first play about?
Goldhaber: The first was about a man dying of insomnia. It had two sold out weekends, totally independently, not affiliated with the school or anything.
Mazzei: I was very drawn to his ambition, and I think as soon as we got together, it clicked that we were both willing to work extremely hard for whatever vision we were trying to achieve.
Do you think that provided the foundation for the way you work together now?
Goldhaber: We have a decent sense of what the other person likes and how they’ll respond, but I actually think that a lot of the fruitful nature of the collaboration is actually in the places where we disagree and where we see an approach from two different perspectives. Ultimately, trying to resolve that difference into a singular vision has often led us to more exciting, deeper, and more expressive ideas. The best and worst of the collaboration is in its conflicts.
In terms of Faces of Death, what was your relationship to the original movie?
Goldhaber: We were approached by Legendary and our producers, Don Murphy and Susan Montford, in the summer of 2019 after they locked down the remake rights for Faces of Death. We had not heard of it.
Then we watched it and realized that we’d seen clips and aspects of it on the Internet. When we were talking to the executive at Legendary, he had this idea that where Faces of Death lives right now is also on the Internet. He thought that we might have an interesting perspective in terms of telling a story about it.
We had independently been working on a project about content moderation because I’d worked for a summer as a content moderator, and we always thought it would make for a really fun psychological thriller horror film, kind of like Blow Out or The Conversation, but online. We realized that would actually make quite an exciting way into Faces of Death.
What was your summer as a content moderator like?
Goldhaber: I couldn’t afford an apartment, so I was couch surfing around with friends across the country. It was a startup, very unofficial. At the time, anybody who wanted to traffic in snuff films or really extreme images would found these little social media startups, and they would pop up on the App Store. They wouldn’t have a robust moderation team behind them. You didn’t have an immediate pipeline to law enforcement. And they would just use these platforms to swap stuff back and forth.
And so just to help out some friends, they had hired me to monitor the feed that was coming in and try to take down the nastiest stuff before they could actually build a proper content moderation division. You start seeing these images that are the worst things that humanity has to offer. What’s even worse is you slowly start to become, I think, normalized to them.
Did you have coworkers?
Goldhaber: Yes, but we were all working virtually.
Were they jaded like the characters in the film?
Goldhaber: No, because they were the people that ran the company. But after a few weeks, you start making jokes about stuff. It’s the best and most effective way to cope. More generally speaking, how we deal with the traumas of the Internet is with this dark, ironic detachment.
Watching the film, the scariest moments were often what is presented as real footage. Seeing half a second of something that might actually be horrible inspired the most dread for me. How did you approach putting screens onscreen?
Mazzei: For us, it’s very important to show the Internet the way it feels. All of the content on the screens is sourced from real videos that we licensed. Some of it is real violent videos. Some of them are our friends that we filmed. That experience of scrolling—a hot picture of my friend, an ad for a retainer, a recipe for some orzo, and then boom, a war crime. Oh, here’s a picture of your friend getting engaged—we’ve all had that experience. It was really important for us to make that feel as authentic as possible.
Goldhaber: Isa builds and writes all the comments onscreen, all those giant Reddit threads with the tonality and the voice of a hundred different people you see in both Cam and Faces of Death, which helps it feel real.
It was also really important to include new footage of real death in the movie. When the original Faces of Death came out, these were scarce images, so even these not very convincing special makeup effects that you saw in the original really were shocking because it was the closest to the real thing that you could get. Now this stuff is served to our phones 24/7, and the biggest companies on the planet sell ad space to profit off of it. We wanted to confront the problems of the small screen on the big screen.
I liked that the blood in the film is bright red like in a ’70s slasher flick. What else inspired you visually?
Goldhaber: To me, this movie is a shameless rip off of Targets, the Peter Bogdanovich movie. We felt initially there was a close spiritual kinship between the projects because Targets was an assignment that Bogdanovich got in order to use up a few days on a Boris Karloff contract and also try to use footage from this unsuccessful Corman production of The Terror.
But then he used that as a jumping off point to make a movie that explores the impact of violent images in suburban alienation in America and like the decay of empire. On a weird level like this felt very similar.
We were also drawing visual inspiration from everything from de Palma movies, in certain stylistic flourishes like the split screen sequence, all the way to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer to Silence of the Lambs. They’re movies that don’t necessarily go super crazy with their gore and their violence, but where the way it’s portrayed really gets under your skin.
Barbie’s character feels really specific too. A lot of filmmakers who are based in New York or LA have no idea what other cities and the people in them are like.
Mazzei: The Boulder we grew up in was very much like a small town in the mountains. When we grew up, the sense of violence was pervasive in Colorado especially because of Columbine and the Aurora movie theater shooting.
There was this grocery store that was less than a mile from Danny’s childhood home. We would walk from my high school down to the grocery store to get after school snacks and hang out in the parking lot. While we were writing this film, there was a live-streamed mass shooting there. We watched this bystander video of it on YouTube. And I remember texting each other with this sense of it almost [feeling] inevitable. It felt like we were almost waiting for this to happen our whole lives.
Whose idea was it for Charli XCX to do an American accent?
Goldhaber: Charli’s. She was a fan of Cam and saw a press release that the movie was getting made. She’s obviously a huge horror fan, so she just reached out and asked to do it. And we were like, “Please take it. We’d love to work with you.”
You engage a lot of the same ideas throughout all your films, about digital life, about how violence pervades in the modern era. When it comes to adaptations, is it about finding new, unique containers to get at that because studios will only make stuff that has pre-existing IP right now? Or is it actually exciting to take something apart and put it back together again?
Goldhaber: There’s always been different ways that the powers that be evaluate the market cost of an idea. And right now, the market has decided that seeing everything through the lens of IP is the way that it can determine the value of something. We’re very aware that if How to Blow Up a Pipeline was not based on a manifesto, if I had just written that script with Ariela and Jordan, people would’ve looked at me like I was nuts. The book almost gave us a sense of plausible deniability. These are other ideas that have already been published that have a clear audience. There’s already a discourse around it. You can totally get your head around the fact of exactly how this idea already exists in the cultural space. Without the attachment to the original Faces of Death, it would be very hard for the industry to understand where the market is for this conversation.
You said you had difficulty finding distribution or getting it out into the world?
Goldhaber: Oh yeah. The movie’s been finished for two years. We were originally invited to premiere the film at South by Southwest in 2024, but the film was pulled out of the festival at the last minute for some very complicated reasons. For the last two years we’ve been working to find the film a home, and we’re very grateful that IFC has taken it upon themselves to give this movie a real shot at life.
Mazzei: Our teaser trailer was pulled off YouTube. The MPAA wouldn’t let us put our posters in movie theaters. It’s been really difficult to get it in front of audiences.
Goldhaber: There’s something very interesting about the nature of censorship right now. The things that make this movie difficult to put in movie theaters are the same images that social media companies have propagated globally and profited off of. There’s a very interesting tension between who is allowed to address certain things in our society, what kind of position they’re allowed to have. It’s evidence of the lengths that certain corporate entities will go through to protect themselves.
You see that in the film too. Margot has to flag a video of someone showing you how to use Narcan because it technically promotes drug use. But then some other things like animal violence are allowed.
Mazzei: Ah, my amazing cameos! We took a lot of inspiration from when I was camming in my early 20s and I saw a lot of censorship within the sex worker community. Certain content that’s materially the same as things that someone else would post were taken down because we were flagged as sex workers. There is this double standard of who’s allowed to share what image. We hope the film forces people to think about the way we are consuming these images and these videos.
I won’t give away spoilers to it too, but the way the film ends ties in very specifically with that.
Mazzei: Someone pointed out recently that all three of our movies end with someone posting. And I think there is something relevant there to how we feel like we are able to have power or express ourselves in this era. It was completely unintentional, but now that we’ve had it pointed out to us, it’s definitely something we’re grappling with as well.
Goldhaber: All three of these movies are about people who are being driven insane by the modern world and who become radicalized to try to do something to claw back a sense of agency inside of it. One of the inherent futilities of that battle is that you can wage a private revolution, but how do you spread that message?
We’ve traded over human communication to private corporate ownership. If you’re texting somebody, calling somebody, even the way in which we’re communicating with each other right now is mediated by a multinational corporation who’s taking the data on this call and probably using it to train artificial intelligence. In a weird way, they are literally stripping the agency and ownership of this conversation away from us. And, yet that’s this kind of form of communication that we have all functionally consented to. And that’s really tricky. I feel like that’s something that’s best expressed by our work at the end of this film in that final shot is really special because she captures that sense of horrified futility unbelievably well.
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