This week, a new remake of the infamous 1978 shocker Faces of Death hits theaters. Yes, that Faces of Death — the faux-snuff curiosity that convinced a lot of people it was real back in the day. The update stars Barbie Ferreira (Euphoria ), Dacre Montgomery ( Stranger Things ), and Charli XCX, which is not a cast combo I had on my bingo card. Since the reboot is rolling out now, let’s look back at five horror movies that didn’t just ruffle feathers — they caused bans, walkouts, legal trouble, and more than a few upset stomachs. And yes, we start with the original Faces of Death.
-
Faces of Death (1978)
The original blends staged death scenes with actual archival material, all narrated by a fictional pathologist named Francis B. Gross (Michael Carr). After we watch him perform an autopsy, he basically tells us he has compiled footage to study that slim window between life and death — because he’s become numb to the ugly stuff.
Here’s the twist: a lot of the splashy moments people remember were reenactments, but the movie also drops in non-staged footage from concentration camps and slaughterhouses. That mix got it banned in multiple countries, including Germany and the U.K., where it was slapped with the dreaded "video nasty" label. One especially wild footnote: in 1985, a mathematics teacher who played the film in class faced legal action after two students were traumatized. Yes, in a math class.
-
Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
A documentary crew heads into the Amazon to film indigenous tribes rumored to be cannibals and then vanishes. Anthropologist Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman) goes looking for them, finds their footage, brings it back to New York, and discovers — the hard way — what actually happened to the team.
Notoriety came fast. Ten days after its 1980 Milan screening, authorities seized the film, and director Ruggero Deodato (along with some crew) was charged with obscenity. It escalated into a murder case when rumors spread that the actors had been killed on camera; those charges were dropped once everyone proved very much alive. The movie was banned in several countries for its violence — and yes, the animal killings are real. Like it or hate it, its raw, found-footage presentation helped lay the groundwork for later hits like The Blair Witch Project.
-
The Exorcist ( 1973)
In Washington, D.C., actress Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) watches her daughter Regan (Linda Blair) go from sweet kid to something far more sinister. Doctors are stumped, so Chris turns to Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), a priest battling his own doubts, to try a last-resort exorcism.
William Friedkin’s classic is now canon, but the rollout was messy. The controversy around its religious and graphic content came with reports of viewers fainting, puking, the works. It drew heat from religious groups and ratings boards, and parts of the U.K. kept it off shelves until the late 90s. In the U.S., even the trailer got yanked after test audiences had seizures and vomiting triggered by its strobe-heavy cutting. Still, the noise helped it make history as the first horror movie ever nominated for Best Picture.
-
Possession (1981)
Mark (Sam Neill) and Anna (Isabelle Adjani) implode after Anna admits she’s cheating. She leaves Mark and their young son (Michael Hogben), and things get progressively more violent and surreal between the estranged couple. Mark hires a private investigator (Carl Duering) to tail Anna to a grimy, abandoned apartment, while he grows fixated on his child’s schoolteacher — also played by Adjani — who looks uncannily like Anna.
It wowed critics at Cannes in 1981, then the U.K. slapped it with the "video nasty" tag for its extreme content. America didn’t get it until 1983, and even then it was hacked down to an 81-minute cut that lost about a third of the movie — critics promptly trashed that version. A 4K restoration bowed in New York City in 2021, and the film’s reputation has since swung all the way to "masterpiece" in a lot of circles.
-
Martyrs (2008)
After surviving brutal abuse as a child, Lucie Jurin (Mylene Jampanoi) lands in an orphanage and bonds with Anna (Morjana Alaoui). Lucie grows up haunted by a terrifying female figure and convinced she must take revenge on the people who hurt her — now seemingly a normal, suburban family. She massacres them; Anna shows up to help, suspicious they might not be the right targets... until she finds a hidden passageway in the house.
Part of the New French Extremity wave, Martyrs provoked walkouts at its 2008 Marché du Film premiere and allegedly triggered vomiting at a Toronto screening. It initially received a rare 18+ rating in France — reportedly only the second time that had happened since Saw III — before a successful appeal lowered it to 16+, a fight chronicled in the doc Martyrs vs Censorship. The Weinstein Company picked up North American rights, but Bob Weinstein was so rattled he dumped it straight to DVD; the film never got an official U.S. theatrical release.
If the new Faces of Death has you curious about where the real boundary-pushers live, the titles above are the ones that kept censors, ratings boards, and, apparently, math teachers busy.