For decades, John Alan Schwartz’s mondo horror film Faces of Death (1978) has been a controversial entity, spawning countless rumors and restless nights. Now, Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei offer a new take on the notorious title shaped by content moderation and the current algorithmically driven hellscape we all can’t help but scroll through.

In this new reimagining, starring Barbie Ferreira and Dacre Montgomery, Faces of Death becomes less a straight remake and more a meta-horror update on how shocking images circulate, the toll they take, and why we still cannot look away.

This particular fusion of modern ideas and elements made choosing a composer to score Faces of Death (2026) a, dare I say, no-brainer. After successful prior collaborations with Goldhaber and Mazzei on Cam (2018) and How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022), composer Gavin Brivik was not only a natural choice but a perfect one. Once again leaning into the filmmaking duo’s fascination with digital unease, Brivik found his way into Faces of Death through the film’s most primal artifact: the tape itself. 

It is the kind of approach that feels like a natural evolution of Brivik’s work, which has long thrived in the spaces between found and grounded sound, human emotion, and digital dreamscapes. Yet here, with Faces of Death, that same instinct gets turned toward something nastier, weirder, and more haunted. 

Bloody Disgusting had the pleasure of catching up with Brivik to discuss how he built the film’s sonic identity, why VHS became the score’s secret weapon, and how he helped give this new Faces of Death its own corrupt little pulse.

Barbie Ferreira in Daniel Goldhaber’s FACES OF DEATH. An Independent Film Company and Shudder Release.

Bloody Disgusting: This is your third time working with Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei, but I have to imagine it was a bit surprising when they told you their next project would be a spin on Faces of Death. What was your first reaction to tackling this infamous property? 

Gavin Brivik: So we had just finished How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and Danny, literally a month after it came out, was like, ‘All right. We’ve got the next one — Faces of Death.” I was like, “What in the hell are they doing with that movie?” I had only seen clips and knew of its lore, but truthfully, I’m just so not the person to watch that film. In every capacity, it’s just not my thing. But I loved the idea once I had heard their take on it. It was such a great way into that world and, honestly, I got really pumped.

I was also just happy to work with them again. They’re my closest friends, and doing back-to-back projects was exciting. Obviously, this movie took so long to come out, but at the time, it was two great projects right after each other. 

BD: The original Faces of Death has such a unique musical backdrop. What was your initial approach and thought process for defining this new film’s score?     

GB: I immediately went to the sounds of weird, processed VHS tapes, like the foley sound of a VHS. I literally just went on eBay and bid for a few [VHS] copies of the original. There was a competitive bid, which was weird. I kept getting some person bidding against me, and I couldn’t tell what was going on, but I was like, “I gotta get this tape.” I needed at least one spare because my sampling process may or may not have destroyed one of them.

Before I had gotten the actual Faces of Death VHS tape in the mail, I went to Goodwill and got a copy of Terminator 2 or something to use. I had microphones right up to my little TV to record the rewinding and fast-forwarding sounds. I just wanted to see if Danny and Isa liked this concept. They immediately texted me and were like, “This is so haunting.” It inspired them, and we then started conceptualizing the idea of the VHS haunting the film.

After that, once we got excited about that direction, I knew I had to watch the original. I was very curious about the original music and the source material. It was painful to get through, but honestly, it has aged in a way where there are some very obvious fake areas. However, it took my mind a second to even process a fake thing or two, because it is still shocking, even in a modern context. There’s some really interesting stuff in the original, musically speaking, and we made some winks to it in our score. But also, there’s a modern context for ours with internet culture, so it was about finding that middle ground.  

Barbie Ferreira in Daniel Goldhaber’s FACES OF DEATH. An Independent Film Company and Shudder Release.

BD: Once you finally got those tapes in the mail, what exactly did you do with them?

GB: So many things. [Laughs] The first part was in pre-production, so I did all this personal processing. I recorded samples, and in that process, I did not destroy any VHS tapes. These were purely just putting the VHS in and out of the tape deck, rewinding, fast-forwarding, and shaking it weirdly because all the parts would rattle and make a cool percussive sound. A lot of these became the drum sounds. Like in the opening of the movie, there’s this big drum sound that’s happening, but it’s actually that literal VHS being pushed into the tape deck, and I just pitched it so far down that it ends up sounding like that, which is cool. 

Then I traveled to New Orleans to visit the production, and that’s where a lot of the destruction happened. I worked with my buddy Paris and one of the props department people named Corbin. There were a lot of prop tapes, so we took a sledgehammer to one of them and smashed it. It seems almost gimmicky, but when you slow that down, it sounds like some sort of weird soundscape drone. And I did post a video of that online, on my TikTok, funny enough. Another thing that we would do is break the actual plastic and wiggle the plastic around. It sounded weirdly like gears grinding, so it worked really well for Arthur, like the gears are turning in his head.

The other thing I did was I took apart the Faces tape, and I took the actual roll of VHS tape and wrapped it around the musician’s fingers. Then we hooked up these microphones that would record vibrations and connected them to the instrument. So, when the tape was on their fingers, and they were playing the keys, the tape made this weird, ASMR-like, tape-y sound, and the vibrations were being picked up. 

The other method was that I would take a piano, open the lid up, and hold the sustain pedal so that all the strings were resonating and able to vibrate. Then I took the actual Faces of Death tape and laid it across the piano bed so it was on top of the strings, so when the saxophonist would blow into the piano, it would shake the strings and start vibrating the tape on top of it. It created this reverb-y, resonant sound like tape in your eardrums. We did that a bunch, which was really fun and, honestly, super effective. 

Barbie Ferreira in Daniel Goldhaber’s FACES OF DEATH. Courtesy of Brian Roedel. An Independent Film Company and Shudder Release.

BD: There’s a meta-ness baked into the film’s narrative, and it’s fascinating to hear how you were able to bring that element to the score as well — taking these found sounds, creating others from physical, analog technology, grounded in physical interaction, and brought them into the digital space, blurring the lines between what is real and what is not. Which nicely echoes both Faces of Death films, right?

GB: It totally does. Taking a real sound and processing it through the computer, conceptually, fits the film’s identity. It’s like the idea that we’re watching videos of real events, but it’s still distorted through a social media lens. There’s a similar thing with taking a real sound and then processing it through a computer. You almost maybe subconsciously know it’s not completely a synthesizer, but it’s been heavily digitally manipulated. I think that is always a theme in Danny and Isa’s films, or at least definitely in Cam and Faces, so it just made so much sense to do that. It’s also such a big part of what I love about my own process.  

And then, the other truth is that we’re in an era where budgets for music are a bit smaller. But that being said, one of the things I did to reference the original was record a small string ensemble, which I think they did as well. In the original movie, I can’t tell what happened, but it sounds like there are children playing violin; horrible-sounding playing just wobbling in and out of tune. It feels like first-graders playing in orchestra or something, but in context, it was horrifying and actually really effective. 

I wanted to imitate that style and do my own thing with it, so I had this classically trained violinist named Jordan [Ann Martone], and I was like, forcing her to play bad. [Laughs] You realize it’s actually pretty hard to play bad once you’ve spent your whole life being good. I also processed those strings pretty heavily and ran them through so many cassette tapes, just trying to make them sound very old. 

BD: You mentioned how you’ve been utilizing TikTok to share about your creative process for this film. Do you ever feel added pressure as a professional creative to engage with social media? How hard is it to balance what is essentially another job you didn’t necessarily sign up for? 

GB: It’s so hard. And this is the first time I’m posting really on TikTok. It was just for this movie because I had so many weird behind-the-scenes videos. Both of the actors actually performed on the score as well. I don’t know if they could ever be officially credited, but Dacre did all this weird breathwork. He also did this stuff with the red tape. He would stretch it, and I have all these videos of that. 

Dacre is obsessed with film scores. Literally, one of his plus-ones to the premiere was Danny Elfman. I was like, “What the fuck, dude!?” [Laughs] Then, after the movie wrapped, I would get random texts. I think Dacre’s number would change here and there, and I would get a link to a random film score, and it’d just say, “Hey, mate. Check this out.” And then I’m like, “Is this Dacre?” Then he’ll be like, “Yes,” and then no response. Then, it will be a new number, like seven months later, with a different film score. When we would commute to set and back, I was in his van, and he would control the aux cable and just play scores and be like, “Check out this track from this movie!” So he loves scores. 

Then Barbie would do keyboard typing and some stuff for me to record, so I figured, I have all these weird videos, and Faces of Death has its own little TikTok following, so I just started posting them. But I’m going to tell you…I cannot keep it up. And you’re right, it’s just a lot. I think some people are more naturally into it. For me, it feels like it really exhausts my ADHD. Not even the scrolling part, but the idea that I’ve posted something, and then when I open it up, and there are all the comments and notifications, I get overwhelmed, and it just feels like too much to keep up.

To some extent, I think I’ll always be a person who uses social media in short little bursts, and then go back into the cave to really do the work. Because at the end of the day, I just need to do good work, and that’s way more important than making any sort of presence known. If anything, I have 20 videos for Faces of Death, I’ll post those, and then people just may not hear from me for a year or two. [Laughs]

Charlie XCX in Daniel Goldhaber’s FACES OF DEATH. An Independent Film Company and Shudder Release.

BD: Charli XCX plays a small role in this movie, but I couldn’t help but notice how the hyperpop, internet-music culture of it all runs much deeper. This is a very clever addition to this film and its commentary on internet culture. How did that element of the film come about? Did you have any influence or input there?

GB: I actually was the one who suggested that we do the hyperpop thing. Charli was announced, and I had been starting to become obsessed with SOPHIE. I was already very in love with noise music and was also starting to really get into 100 gecs, so my mind was opening up to hyperpop and its experimentation. So I suggested to Danny and Isa that we combine this late ‘70s horror aesthetic with hyperpop music, and they were like, “This is really exciting, and it fits!”

My initial concept for the score, along with the VHS, was: What does the movie sound like if the whole score is played on a VHS running in fast-forward while the tape is disintegrating? Like, it’s going so fast that the tape is starting to wear down and break apart, and hyperpop is aligned with that idea — the distortion, the super fast tempos, the maximalist textures, and the processed, high-pitched vocals. It felt so natural.

The vocalist on all of SOPHIE’s music is somebody I wrote two songs with for the movie. Her name is Cecile Believe. One of the songs is the end credit song in the movie, and it’s also the song that’s used in the train video. There’s also this whole curation of hyperpop producers who release royalty-free sound packs of their drum samples, snares, or processed vocals. And I started being like, “What if we bring some of these samples in?”

Sample music is the most internet-culture thing ever: working with samples, recutting samples, the glitchiness of cut-up audio. So we started using that with my VHS sounds, and it started working so well. Then I ended up writing a lot of the music for the keynote videos. So many of those background songs are things I wrote, actually. 

Then I got connected to the artist umru, who had worked with Charli on Pop 2. I got Danny and Isa to hire umru and Cecile to do another song that’s one of the needle drops earlier in the film. So Ceceile has three songs in there, and obviously connecting with umru, who curates all the hyperpop samples, it felt like an amazing marriage. I love Dorian Electra’s music. I love SOPHIE, Slayyyter, Kim Petras, and all these people who are doing music that feels so aligned with the darker, weirder side of the internet. But there’s also a lot of humor in that music. It’s really funny at times, and I think our movie has all of that. It felt so natural, but weirdly, we didn’t find it until we were in the edit. That’s when the hyperpop thing clicked. 

BD: Ok, I can’t have you leave without asking you about scoring The Pitt. What has it been like to work on this hugely popular, intense series?

GB: It’s funny because it aligns a lot with my found sound approach. I had pitched against a lot of people, I’m assuming, and then, when I watched the first episode, I was like, “I don’t know if this show even needs a score.” It’s so good, and it just works. So when I spoke to the showrunner and the team, I told them, “I don’t feel like this show needs a score.” And they were like, “We agree, actually.” And I told them, “What if the score is just like the medical machinery, almost pulsing, making sounds? And maybe there’s subtle drones, and it’s very tense, so people feel it subconsciously, but don’t notice the music.” 

So it feels funny, because I think with Faces and Pipeline, my scores with Danny and Isa are mixed so loud and right in your face, and The Pitt is like the opposite. It’s nice to have the contrast. I feel so lucky and honestly did not expect it to have the kind of social impact that it does. It feels a little out of body, but I’m just pumped that people love it. 

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me based on the people behind it. John Wells, Scott [Gemmill], and Terri [Murphy] have done so many iconic shows. It’s cool to see them work, and I love watching their process and the way they communicate their notes. I feel like I’m almost back in school to some extent, where I’m just learning. I feel like my role is a little bit more on the minimal side because it’s such a spare score, but I’m lucky I get to do the end-credit songs too, which are really fun. 

They also have an in-residence ex-doctor, Joe Sachs, who worked on ER, and was a legendary ER doctor himself. He actually gives sound notes on what machines actually sound like, and he’ll correct pronunciations and all that stuff. It’s really fun to watch him talk about stuff because he’s done all these procedures. He’ll also give VFX notes like, “The blood would actually boil like this.” It’s really cool. 

The other thing is, I think that The Pitt has some of the best practical effects. Like, whoever is doing those fucking effects needs to do horror movies. I miss practical effects in horror. I recently was on a Cronenberg kick, and I’m just so floored by the practical VFX. Sometimes I feel like we’ve lost that art form. Then I watch The Pitt and I’m like, “Oh, yeah. There are still people who can do it, they’re just all on The Pitt right now.” [Laughs]

Faces of Death is now playing in theaters nationwide. Brivik’s score for the film will be released both digitally and physically, with details announced soon.