Faces of Death rating explained – is the horror remake explicit?

One of the most controversial and morbid horror movies is getting a remake, with Faces of Death’s rating tackling what made the movie so infamous.

Faces of Death is either well-known by horror fans as a classic or a movie many refuse to watch due to its explicit content. The 1978 movie by director John Alan Schwartz became a cult classic for a few reasons.

Pathologist Francis B. Gröss, played by actor Michael Carr, narrates the documentary-style movie to explore the many ways a person can die.

Everything from shootouts, a man being eaten by an alligator, the electric chair, and open heart surgery to some of the world’s historical deaths like the Holocaust. With this in mind, will the Faces of Death remake have an explicit rating?

Is the Faces of Death remake explicit?

Yes, the remake will have an R-rating.

According to Bloody Disgusting, the Faces of Death remake gets an R-rating for “Strong bloody violence and gore, sexual content, nudity, language and drug use.”

This movie is from the creative minds of filmmakers Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber. Charli XCX will make her grand on-screen debut in this film, but she’s not the only big name. As for the rest of the cast, Stranger Things’ Dacre Montgomery will star alongside Barbie Ferreira, Josie Totah, and Aaron Holliday.

The question is whether the remake will hold up to the original gruesome scenes that made it so infamous, given it now has an R-rating. Per IMDb, the original 1978 movie was banned in Canada, Norway, Finland, and the UK, with some countries like South Korea heavily editing the movie. Most countries gave the film an 18+ or R-rating.

MPI Media Group/Faces of Death (1978)

The film’s gruesome deaths were controversial at the time, though they don’t hold up quite as well today.

Though many of the practical effects are clearly fake by today’s standards, the documentary style of filmmaking, heavy grain, and tone made it a visceral and controversial film when it was released.

Based on the storyline description, there’s a clear tie to the original that leads to blood and gore galore.

“The new plot revolves around 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, that stumbles across a group that is recreating the murders from the original film. But in the story primed for the digital age and age of online misinformation, the question faced is are the murders real or fake?”

Faces of Death has more than enough footage for the storyline to recreate. Pathologist Francis B. Gröss catalogs the various ways the world experiences death, like cannibalistic rituals, a man murdering his family, a dead body found at the beach, and paranormal deaths.

Faces of Death is in the works, and you can catch some of the year’s other great horror movies.