Also released as
- Las Caras de la Muerte
- The Original Faces of Death
- Rostros de la Muerte
- Gesichter des Todes - Das Original
- ジャンク
- ジャンク 死と惨劇
- JUNK
- Faces da Morte
Filed under
Faces of Death
Faces of Death is a 1978 American horror film directed by John Alan Schwartz. It is one of the 72 films on the Director of Public Prosecutions' video nasties list, and it was successfully prosecuted for obscenity.
A mondo compilation whose most famous scenes are staged. Sold as real and marketed on being banned.
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A mondo compilation sold as authentic documentation of death, presented by a fictional pathologist, and a substantial share of it is staged.
The monkey-brain sequence, the most notorious thing in it, was made with a puppet and cauliflower. Several deaths are actors. The real material is mostly stock news and abattoir footage, which is the part nobody talks about.
Its importance is entirely as a phenomenon. It made an enormous amount of money on video, it was marketed on the claim of being banned in 40-plus countries, and that claim did more to shape the video nasties panic than most of the actual nasties did.
As a film it is 105 minutes of narration over other people's footage.
Successfully prosecuted. Six sequels followed, increasingly composed of clips from the earlier ones.
Banned, seized, prosecuted
DPP 72 · successfully prosecuted
Sold as authentic documentary footage. Several of its best-known sequences, including the monkey-brain scene, were staged with effects.
Elsewhere
- Australia refused classification · OFLC · 1979 onward. Refused classification. Its reputation as the most banned film in the world was largely a distributor's claim and was repeated uncritically for twenty years.
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Trailer
The sleeves
The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.
Where to watch
USA
Legal sources only. Availability data from JustWatch via TMDB.
Checked 9 Aug 2026
Written about
- Video nasties still banned or cut in Britain
The video nasties still banned in Britain, the ones that remain cut, and the two laws that decide which of them can be sold on disc here.
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