Exclusive: JT Petty on Faces of Death Remake
Steve Barton
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Today we had the pleasure of speaking with director JT Petty about the release of his latest film The Burrowers on DVD April 21st, and he gave us the skinny on what direction his proposed remake of Faces of Death will be taking.
“It looks like Faces of Death will be the next project of mine to get the green light,” Petty tells Dread. “I’m not really big into ‘camp’. I think horror definitely wants to be funny, but I think camp is explicitly not horror. Making bloodletting safe is basically what camp is about. It’s a fine thing to do, but I’m just not interested. So basically what I’d love to do with Faces of Death is make something that’s as scary for me to watch now as a thirty-two- year-old as the original was for me to watch when I was twelve. I remember not watching that movie because I was so scared of the fact that you’re watching people really die. It’s impossible to have that feeling once you’re a grown, jaded horror fanatic, but the closest we can get is kind of what we’re all chasing.”
“What is still effective about Faces of Death is that all of that actual autopsy footage which is so obviously real leaves you so unbalanced that anything that they’re showing you around that has this weird kind of effect,” JT continues. “Being that it’s sharing footage with that honest footage lends it a unique kind of effectiveness. A lot of what we want to do with the remake is playing with what’s real and what’s not in terms of what you’re seeing. There is an interesting line to draw between real violence and fake violence. Like how much more perverse is it to sneak real violence into a big Hollywood movie and disguise it as a special effect than making any underground horror film that you can make? Or making people curious about if what they’re seeing is real or not.”
“The whole trick of Faces of Death is that there’s no reason to make the original Faces of Death now,” Petty adds. “Like if a twelve-year-old kid wants to watch people die, they can just go online. They can watch Saddam Hussein die, so you don’t care about some redneck alligator warden in Florida. The fact that that’s so easy for kids or anyone to see now — in fact it takes an effort not to watch people die now — seems so much more frightening than this original collection of so-called stuff.”
Interesting points. Look for the whole interview soon, and order The Burrowers and the original Faces of Death below.
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