At the end of the 1970s, “Facing Death”, a compilation of violent scenes featuring the death of animals and human beings, caused a scandal when it was released. A look back at a sulphurous work that made many video club customers tremble.
Those who frequented video clubs in the 90s will no doubt remember this creepy film stashed in a dark corner of the horror aisle. A tape that we vaguely dared to watch, even less to take in hand and especially not, except the most daring, to reserve for the evening.
What movie are we talking about here? De Face à la mort, a sulphurous documentary censored in nearly… 50 countries! An extreme work prohibited for children under 18, Facing Death consists of a compilation of violent scenes featuring the death of animals and human beings.
Upon its release, the documentary is presented as entirely composed of real images, recorded by a certain doctor Francis B. Gröss as part of a thesis on death. Except that this Doctor Gröss does not exist (he is played by actor Michael Carr) and that in the end, many scenes in the film are actually fiction.
According to make-up artist and technician Allan A. Apone, 40% of the scenes in Facing Death are indeed fake, including a gruesome sequence that sees restaurant patrons tormenting a monkey before eating its brains. The rest (bombings, animals killed in slaughterhouses, etc.) comes from television archives.
Trash, gore, shocking, this documentary which is not really one cannot leave anyone indifferent. If the fact that it is partly untruthful is debatable to say the least, it cannot be denied that it manages to point the finger, to the extreme but all the same, at the voyeurism nestled deep within each of us. Not to mention that it offers an absolutely chilling panorama of the horrors of the world.
Directed for the trifle of 450,000 dollars, Facing Death, which will benefit from three sequels, will ultimately bring in… 35 million greenbacks worldwide! In 1980, in Hong Kong, it was the third biggest foreign success of the year behind Fog and The Empire Strikes Back (!). And in 2000, the American magazine ranked it among the 50 best cult films of all time.
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