FACES OF DEATH with Daniel Goldhaber & Isa Mazzei

This is a Head Gump podcast. Hacks is back for its fifth and final season and so is the Hacks podcast. Join the Hacks creators and showrunners Lucia and Yellow, Paul W Downs and Jen Statsky as they unpack the Emmy-winning comedy series. On each episode, hear stories from the set, what goes on in the writer's room and how these beloved characters close out their final season. Watch Hacks streaming exclusively on HBO Max and listen to the Hacks podcast on HBO Max or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Emily, Henley and Sammy and you're listening to Too Scary Didn't Watch. Hi everyone. Welcome to Too Scary Didn't Watch, the horror movie recap podcast for those too scared to watch for themselves. I'm Emily and I am too scared to watch scary movies. I'm Henley and I'm also too scared to watch scary movies. I'm Sammy and I love watching scary movies so I watch them so that you don't have to and this week we've got another new release, another exclusive interview with the filmmakers. Can we believe it? Who the heck are we? Who the heck are we? Are we cosplaying as media experts? Put us in charge of fucking anything. Oh but we're very excited for you to hear all of that. There are timestamps in the show notes if you want to jump around because first we are going to talk about if anything scary happened to us this week, Emily Henley, the floor is yours. Wow. Floor is lava. That would be scary. Now that would be scary. Oh you know, I mean look, I paid my taxes. I'm a fucking coward and I paid my taxes to the government. Yeah I was going to ask just like be chilling, coy about it. Like listeners are we paying our taxes this year? What's going on? I can't really say but I know like in the... I did pay them. Cash bag in the comments if you're paying your taxes. I told Tim that I wanted to do a tax strike and he was like no. He was like you can't go to jail. You have to take care of our children. See I'm really selfish and bad because I could go to jail. What? I think I couldn't go to jail. My cats would be fine. They wouldn't be fine actually. Look I hate it and I did immediately start to spiral about what I'm paying for. It's fun. I mean it's objectively fucked up. Really bad, really bad, really bad. But I'm a rule follower in nature and I followed the rules so pretty scary. Hate to report it. Here we are. Did you use an accountant? I did. So it's also like well some you know like technically you know she did it. Oh right yeah. I mean I counted. It's on her. It's not actually on me. Yeah Tim and I still haven't paid our taxes. We have three days. I've paid some through estimated taxes over the year because we're freelancers but I got a pretty handsome outstanding amount that I'm toying with. Well I think it's also like it was my outstanding amount was so much less than I thought it was gonna be because I also prepaid some and I have a husband and the government rewards me for being a good woman and so it was less than I expected. And so I was sort of like whoa free money but then I so then I paid it and I was gleeful like I can't believe I got away with not having to pay as much as I thought I was gonna pay and then I was like oh god oh god I did pay though I did pay taxes to the US government to do really bad things. And so that that's scary that's scary and I hate it. Anything scary happen to you guys? I'm sorry I have a really stupid one that is. I gotta hear it. I have to hear it. I don't really making me laugh but you guys know when you have like you step on like a piece of a candy wrapper and you can just feel like the little like piece of plastic in between your toes like you're barefoot standing on a candy wrapper or like between your toes. You know how many you're always just getting candy wrappers between your toes. Just any little piece of plastic. A toothpick wrapper. Yeah sure sure. Yeah yeah yeah. I feel a sensation of like oh there's something in between my toes. Yeah yeah yeah. I've had that sensation for three days and there is nothing in between my toes. No. This is actually like. Or silly this is actually fucking weird as hell. It's actually like yeah it's been. Do you remember when it started? Is it happening right now as we speak? No actually when I have shoes on it's. Is it between big toe and second toe? No it's between pinky toe and ring finger toe. Pinky toe and ring toe? Oh wait I have so many questions about this. You know actually I think the most common ring finger toe is the second toe. You know if you're looking at toe ring wise I do feel like most people end up with the toe ring on that. Oh she's thinking about ring finger from a hand point of view. No I know I know but it's just interesting to me that they're different. I know you meant hand to toe but I'm just thinking like that brings something up for me that I hadn't thought about before. Yeah it's different on the foot. It's different on the foot but that's really unfortunate Sammy and what are you going to do about it? It has made me feel scared in a way that's like a way that I think a lot of people are kind of losing their grip on reality a little bit. Like you need to have a nice cube in your hand. That makes me be like hmm am I in another dimension is there. Oh no that's interesting. That's the plastic between my toes and I'm slipping between dimensions right now. I've been that's how I feel about it. You know what I think try to explore that. Okay you guys this is like why I had to delete TikTok. I mean I keep redownloading TikTok and trying again but I was going to say like okay this time good to do this. No I'm going to keep trying but every time I get on it my algorithm is so intensely like you're jumping between timelines or it's like we're going to manipulate the source code of reality together. I don't have any of that in my algorithm I'm just like naturally experiencing it. I just it's just we're all we're not really we're having a really hard time. We're having collectively losing our grip on reality. We're having collectively as a species we are not right. Yeah and I think that is they're not going well. Things are not correct. That fits perfectly into my scary thing. Great. Which is so I'm interviewing someone at the church next week and in order to like promote it they asked me to send a bio and a headshot and I haven't gotten a headshot a never really but the last one I was using is from like seven years ago so I was like oh I should get a new headshot but I don't have time to do that. Also we like tried to get headshots for the podcast and we did a photo shoot that was zero headshots at all. Yeah. That was so stupid. I don't really what it is where we we did three separate costume. We did huge costumes. We were just having fun. We were just having fun. And those pictures are they're so fun but we've also like I don't think we've ever used them one single time. We just like the point was like oh we need some headshots and then we did a costume party. We literally just had fun. It was like my 11 year old. It was like I was turning 11. It was like I was turning 11. It was my birthday party. I had fun. And that's why my birthday party is a photo shoot. But they're not going to serve us any in any practical way. Wait can we do another photo shoot you guys? That's what I want to do. Just for fun. Only if there's nothing that we can use from it only if it's just money into from our pockets into someone else's food for just for fun. I mean everyone look at the photos. I think I've looked at them one time. Yeah. I don't even know where to find them. I don't even where are they. That's such a good point. Anyway so I decided oh this is when you headshot right. I decided oh I know I'll try one of those AI headshot generators. Sorry if that's terrible. I know that this is bad. I know it's bad. I know I should be paying a professional to take my headshot or whatever. Does it just like use your image and take it make it a headshot. Yeah so I learned about this because someone who I volunteer with showed me her headshots that she got from AI headshot generator. When people were doing the like AI like 80s yearbook photo AI thing. They would post like 10 different versions of like AI had created their like yearbook photo as if they were in the eight. That was like a big thing. Yeah that was like a tick tock thing I guess. I don't know but I never did that. I did do this though and I tried to find the best one. There's multiples. There's so many. Oh my god. Please show me all of them. You guys okay so the process is you have to upload eight pictures of yourself that are like in natural light. Different headshots. You know good you're smiling towards the camera so you can see all your face see your hair and then you're supposed to do one like a waist up photo and then it analyzes the photo and tells you whether they're like good enough quality or not. So I went through all of that did that. Then you pay $39.99 and then you wait two hours and then they and you also pick like vibe. You pick like casual you know business casual like. Costume party with your friends and then a background like cultural or urban or studio whatever. So what are they what's cultural and urban. Yeah so really like basically do you have like the city in the background or do you have like a library in the background like what's your vibe for a headshot. Yeah for a headshot. Yes. Yes. And so I picked like the most basic ones I was like I want to be wearing like a black or navy blue top. I want to be either in like a I don't know like a studio setting or a cultural. Headshots happen. And so I did it and let me just send them. I took them to me. I couldn't download them and I was even scared to take this screenshot because they don't refund you if you download anything. But what are you supposed to do with them if you just look at them. Well you're supposed to download you download them but I didn't download any because they were so so bad. Oh okay. Okay. I just sent you a screenshot. Oh my God I am so excited. I'm so nervous. I'm more excited. Here's the thing. None of them they're all it's all uncanny. All of them. It hasn't loaded. It hasn't loaded. This is killing me. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Look. Okay. First of all I'm in a I'm in a little boys sailor blazer. I'm in like a toddler sailor blazer in half of these. That's like for a baby. Oh my God. Oh no. Oh my God. These are freaking me out. Okay. My eyes are way too big and way too far apart. They made they turned my face into like it's like they mixed my face with like a Pixar Disney princess face. You're in an art gallery. I'm in an art gallery in a sailor blazer. Like looking like not me. That's not my face. That's not my face. That's not my face. It's also not my teeth. It's like what I uploaded so many photos of my face and my teeth. Why are you using not my face or my teeth and any of these photos. Also, I said no makeup. It was like, do you want to have makeup on? I was like, no, no makeup. I have full self tanner. It's full self tanner. Full glance. Is she I'm really upset. Henley, I am really upset. This is why I didn't have you in a windbreaker. Also, these are the best ones. These are the best ones. I didn't even take a screenshot of the worst one. This one looks like you're going to like safely detonate landmines with like the little rat guy. Have you seen this is like in my algorithm is the rat that finds landmines. Why are you in front of a pagoda? I know it looks like I'm in Kyoto, Japan. Like what am I doing? Why are the rest of them like museum curator? Although they did nail that you don't know what to do with your hands. That one that you have like a computer and your hand is just like floating above it. Henley, I'm really upset by these. This is scary. I will I do need to save this. Yeah. Well, and so to answer your question, this is why we do need to continue to hire real people to take real. 1000%. This is insane. Because these are wild. I was like, I was like, oh great. Perfect. Quick fix. I'm sure one of them will be like at least passable because I got 60. They do 60 versions. Oh, show me all 60. Are you fucking kidding me? You show me all 60. And then I could I can't. I can't. I only took this one screenshot and then trying to get your money back is like pretty easy, but you do have to chat with someone who's trying to convince you like, no, no, we can fix it. No, you like this. No, no, no. And it was basically like, what could we update? We update like what's wrong? Like your facial shape, your hair, your whatever. And I was like, no, I was wrong to think that this is a good idea. What's wrong is me that this is bad. There's so much like, I don't even know how to begin to tell you like just make it look like my face. Like it doesn't look like my face. Like I don't know how to explain to you what my face looks like, but this is not it. This isn't my face. So weird, and it's so weird. A lesson. A lesson learned. Doesn't hurt us all. We need a we need real people doing these jobs. Every time I am like, like, obviously there's some things that AI is is doing and jobs that it is replacing. But every time I I'm like, oh, AI is going to take our jobs. And then I see the job that AI does and I'm like, no, no, no, no, this is actually like really weird and bad and not not good. And obviously fake and weird and bad and not good. I saw a video this week of a guy like screaming at a cocoa or like the delivery little robot where cocoa got his attention and on the little screen. It said, can you press the crosswalk button for me? And the guy starts screaming. I'm like, are you fucking kidding? You took someone's job and you want me to help you do your job now? Like, no, fuck you. It's like, it is really funny that their job is like riding around town, delivering things and they can't press crosswalk buttons. Yeah, we have put in way too much stock in this AI stuff, which is I think a grift. It's a big old big old grift trains out of station. Unfortunately, I'm sorry, just I can't I can't stop looking at the but it's also just like wrong with like the fact that people keep using it to I know we've talked about this, but it's not even giving you correct information half the time. Yeah, God, who is she and it's ruined the Internet. Like I was looking for just like a I wanted to get a specific type of hair clip. Okay, don't make fun of me. I wanted to get a nice hair clip fancy silver hair clip and perfectly normal. I was I was like, where do I even find one of these? You look for it online and it's like AI generated pictures of like mass silver hair clips. You know what I mean? It's like, do you want to buy 50 silver hair clips that look like they've been AI generated? Like we took the word the keywords and made an image out of it like five seconds ago using AI. You know what I mean? It's like, no, show me a real store that sells real items. Yeah, I mean, yeah, you just got to go to a store. I know. Can you go to a in person store, but all the stores don't have inventory because everyone's buying stuff online. It's true. I really I'm one of those people. So I'm one to talk. It's tough. It's tough. How are you guys? Well, should we talk about this week's movie? We shall. And there's like, it's not irrelevant, unfortunately. So we might be all connected. We might be circling back here because this week's movie is faces of death in theaters now, not the 1978 version. This 2026 version was directed by Daniel Goldhaber, written by Isa Massey and Daniel Goldhaber starring Barbie Ferrera, Dacre Montgomery and Josie Toda. And we got to speak to Daniel and Isa. And that interview will be at the end of this recap. It was very cool getting to talk to them. I thought they we talked about some pretty interesting stuff. So yeah, I think they're both so cool. And I was so excited when I saw that we got to interview them because such huge fans and also Daniel specifically isn't like a horror person. And so it's also really interesting to talk to someone making a film who's not already a horror buff and clearly coming at it from kind of a different angle. So that was really fun. I'm so glad we got to interview them. It was really exciting. Yeah, we're just like freaking interviewers now. We're just like interviewers. I know I wasn't there for them. Interviewers. Should we like maybe we should break the form somehow? Should we start asking? Oh, that's interesting. Absolutely. And saying questions. Yeah, because we're so old had it. Regular interviews. No questions at all. Or how to send in silence. Oh my God, we say silence. Yeah, that's a great idea. Edgy. Edgy. We could become suddenly really edgy. That could be fun. So because we're trying to feed the algorithm, we want more clicks. We want more likes. We want more eyes on our. You won't believe these women said nothing in a whole interview. 30 minutes of silence. Whoa, shocking. Wow. God, I got those clicks. That's like a Mr. Beast, though. That's like how he got a lot of, he beat the YouTube algorithm by doing shit like that, like pulling. Let's be more like Mr. Beast. I told Emily this, but I signed an email accidentally this week, Beast regards. And I laughed for like 15 minutes. I was like delirious from working too much crying, laughing at Beast regards. Did you send it? Did you send it? I did. Yeah, I was to my cats. That's beast regards is really good. I doubt she'll even notice, but it really got, really got me. Uh, something kind of, something kind of strange about these ratings for this movie. It has a 69% on round tomatoes. Nice. 68%. Oh, that's the audience tomato meter. 63 on Metacritic, 6.5 on IMDB, 68 on Fandango and a 3.1 on Letterbox. It's just 62. I had to look up more of them cause they were all so similar that I was like, how is this rating just like exactly across everybody agrees. Everybody agrees. The budget was 7.4 million. And so far it's only made 1.7 million. Why isn't this movie making, I mean, it just came out as of this recording. Yeah. Two days ago, but that's, those aren't great numbers unless it's like a limited release, which maybe it is. Maybe it is. I hope you make more money than that. Joel was like, did you, like growing up, did you was faces of death a thing? And I was like, I like, so much not that I don't understand the question. Yeah. That's, this is like IP, but like no, I, nobody knows this. Joel said that growing up that it was like, I mean, it's before his time too, the original came out in, in 1978, but like by the time he was a kid or I guess in like middle school, it was like, if people got their hands on faces of death, VHS and it was like, oh my God. So, and so has a copy because they thought it's like trying to do the thing where it's like, it's real. And so it was like this urban legend of like, these are real snuff tapes. Oh my God. And it like theoretically got banned in 46 countries. And so the more taboo it is, the more people want to see it and it gets this like infamous kind of word of mouth happening. But I also heard that this, that the trailer for this movie kept getting like taken down. Oh, and yeah, I wonder if it actually like backfired on their own marketing that it's like based on a thing that's like previously been pulled from other markets. That's interesting. I don't really know. I don't really know what's going on there, but this is a surprising, I'm surprised it didn't make have a bigger opening weekend. I don't know if there's anything like nefarious going on, but I do feel like when I've Googled it personally, the 1978 information always comes up and the 2026 movie information isn't like the first thing I'm seeing. And this film, which is a commentary on our media's ever present ever growing ever increasing discussion with like eyes, clicks, keeping people hooked, keeping people addicted to the algorithm. That means like upping the stakes. That means making things more extreme. Then the media that's doing that, that's complicit in it, then has to be responsible for, you know, spreading it and supporting it and marketing it and pushing it. And part of me is like, I wonder if they didn't want to. Right. If they're like, we don't want anybody thinking too critically about this. Yeah. Yeah, it's not so, it's not so, it's not so. I do wonder, I do wonder if they were, if there's something like that going on. I watched, this was almost going to be my scary thing, but I was like watching my algorithm change in real time. I had like a big, a real spiral into social media earlier this week that then I was like catatonic for an hour after. It was so bad, but like it was the first time in a while that I had had that first hand experience of like, oh, the algorithm is like in real time learning what I'm clicking on. And now it's 100% of the things that I'm seeing are this. I was just having this conversation with you. You've got to just quickly go into that Explorer page and you got to search something else. Anything else. Totally different. And then like I had this happen where I was like looking for nail colors and then immediately that was literally all I was seeing, which was totally fine. You just have to be like, actually I want to look at like birds in hats. And then it's like, that's all. Just get a bunch of birds and hats and you just have to, you just got to fuck with the algorithm. Yeah. I do want to see birds and hats. I'm gonna see what happens when I search that later. And bringing it back to AI, I saw this in the trivia I thought was interesting and makes total sense is that this movie is set in 2024 because part of the like being able to like be exposed to media violence, even that has like really dramatically shifted in the last couple of years. Cause now we're like, well, that's probably fake. That's probably fake. That's probably fake. Not that that like totally didn't exist before, but now it's like truly everything you can question the reality of it. And birds and hats are going, birds and hats is such a good one. There's so many. And some of this might be AI totally. I bet a lot of it. Birds and hats is so AI coded. But like look at her gorgeous and a wig. Just saying it's, you know, you have the power. Yeah. So a lot to chew on with this movie and this topic and really interesting. And I, yeah, I'm like still thinking about it. I don't think we mentioned that Daniel and Issa, they're creative partners and work together previously on cam, which we covered on the podcast and how to blow up a pipeline, which is an excellent, excellent film, not, not horror necessarily. So we haven't, I do feel like they have a thing too creatively of making things. It's like, is it, wait, is this real? Is this, did this really happen as a documentary? Is it a narrative? Like, yeah. So that is fun to like have that kind of be in their style as filmmakers. Yeah. I feel like they're definitely interested in that. And that was faces of death thing too, which in, in 1978, it presented itself as a documentary. And yeah, I was reading a little bit about that too. And then how like Texas chainsaw was kind of doing that too. And anyways, some other trivia, I have this, I just wrote down because it's relevant to us, but Daker Montgomery, who plays the villain in this, I was reading some of how he was like getting into the mindset of this character, like creating this villain. And I guess he has like pretty debilitating OCD. And he was like, I'm just going to lean into my own like OCD. And he like brought a lot of texture into his performance and his costume. Like he felt like that would be important to his character of like having specific textures in his clothing. And so for, for every scene underneath what he's wearing, he is wearing a skims cat suit. What? What? And we never see him in the skims cat suit. Do we? Do we ever get a shot? I think we might get glimpses of it. I actually am not like entirely sure what the skims cat suit is, but you can kind of guess, you know, interesting, interesting. So I think we can think about that if we're ever feeling a little scared of him. Remember the cats. Just remember that he's wearing skims and that can. That's helpful. That can really. Ground us and bring us back to something. Grounded in skims. Bring us back to something comforting. Also feels very 2024 serial killer in full skims. That's very 2024. Hallmark of the year 2024. This is real period piece. Should we watch the trailer now? What do you guys think Emily? Kind of want to leave it to you. How much do you know about this? I want to see the trailer. I want I want I want I want some tone. I want some vibes. Okay, great. Let's take a look. Let's take a look. Let's do it. This is a fucking red band trailer. I immediately regret my choices, but I suppose I'm like nothing to be done. I watch I know you did. I'm really, really proud of you and I'm really sorry. You can do it. Well, okay. Okay. Okay. Fine. Let's do it. This past weekend, I did my annual spring closet reset and I just feel so much lighter after getting rid of all of the items I had that aren't the best quality. 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Go to quince.com slash to scary for free shipping and 365 day returns Quince.com. Slash to scary. You protect your health, your car, even your phone. But what about your home? It's probably your biggest investment. And when things go wrong, the cost can hit hard and fast. That's where HomeServe comes in. If I was a regular homeowner, I would definitely use HomeServe. Regular homeowners insurance usually doesn't cover a lot of the day to day wear and tear, plumbing failures, HVAC breakdowns, electrical issues. You're often on your own for those. So that's where HomeServe comes in. It's like a subscription for your home. For as little as 4.99 a month, they've got your back. Repairs can hit fast and hard. You could be searching for a contractor in a panic, or you could already be on the phone with HomeServe's 24 seven hotline scheduling a repair. With 4.5 million customers of 4.8 out of five post repair ratings and an A plus triple B rating, they are the real deal. Help protect your home systems and your wallet with HomeServe against covered repairs. Plans start at just 4.99 a month. Go to homeserve.com to find the plan that's right for you. That's homeserve.com. It's not available everywhere. And most plans range between 4.99 to 11.99 a month your first year. Terms apply on covered repairs. Here at Kino moderation, we protect people. The young. The innocent. When you come across content that violates policy, flag it and move on. You may be tempted to look into it outside of work, but don't even think about it if you can help it. Now it is time to look for some more. Now it is time to witness too many faces of death. What's up? I've been seeing these videos. All based off this old horror movie called Faces of Death. You think this could be real executions? Leave it up. Support the trend. That is the first rule of content creation. Give the people what they want. You may have any faces of death. You need to listen to me about these videos. I need to do something. It is the attention of comedy and baby-matching. Comedy and baby-matching. Business is booming. What are you watching? Want to see? Uh-oh. Gross. This is really not what I love to see. Yeah, it is. You know what? I agreed to see this movie before I knew anything about it. Then I googled Faces of Death. Yeah, I'm so sorry. I was like, holy shit, I made a huge mistake. What the fuck was I thinking? And then I really psyched myself up. I was like, you can do this. I got this. We're gonna do it in the morning. We're doing the morning coffee. We're doing it. Bright sunlight. Bright a day. And then it was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. So again, everything is expectations. Like I felt like it was, I could handle it. That being said, it's definitely gory and gnarly. And that's happening. But it wasn't as extreme as I originally thought it might be based off of what the 1978 film was like. Yeah, it's just a really upsetting, real thing. That's the bigger thing that's upsetting. It's just very upsetting to think about that we're all trapped. Yeah, we're all trapped. We are trapped. Also really interesting that Dacre, Monk Armies of Illin, and you only see him for one quick little moment in that trailer. He really scares me. He really freaks me out. He freaks me out too. Even from Stranger Things. That's the only things I've seen him in. He's scary. But yeah, Dacre's great in this. Barbie's great in this. Barbie's great in this. So fun to be... Her name's probably Barbara, probably, right? Probably. Very fun to choose to go by Barbie. Very fun. Really just really like that for her. She's great. Yes, she is born Barbara. Confirmed. Born Barbara. Yeah, that was... I mean, also that trailer was perfectly fine trailer. I don't really have much to say about the trailer itself. It definitely gave me vibes. Definitely gave me tone. Haven't thought much about the fact that there are people whose job it is to do that, and that is really upsetting. Of course it is. It would have to be. And I hate that. Yeah, I hate that. Yeah. But fascinating world to explore. Yeah. Well, shall we? Shall we get into it? Let's explore it, shall we? Let's do it. Let's do it. And Henley's going to kick us off, because yeah, as we said, Henley, watch this movie. Wow, proud of my girl. I did, I did. And also we got a screener link that then expired, so I saw it once. I think my notes are pretty good though, because I got to see it at home, so I got to shake notes while I did it, but I didn't get to go back and watch it again. A little disclaimer. Yeah, only saw it one time. Not quite perfect, but that's okay. We open, we're just hearing audio at first, and you know this audio. The thing that's actually really creepy about this is like, you know what this is, before you even see it, it's just someone scrolling, you know, that audio of a scroll through the videos of the internet. We're hearing singing, we're hearing ads, we're hearing screaming, we're hearing crying. And then it cuts to like a POV video of someone shooting a gun, then swipe, a woman falling out of a tree, swipe, a man being run over by a truck, swipe, a naked woman chasing someone around with a pool cube. Someone's called Pool Stick? Pool Cube, not a cube. I think. I'm not the person to ask though. There was something the other day that I saw it written for the first time, and I was like, it's that, that's how you say it. Happens all the time. I'm always getting phrases wrong, so there's no way to know. So just continue with whatever feels right to you and you're good. So Pool Cube, people having sex in the shower, etc., etc. So we're just, we're just scrolling. The video pans out, we see that these are videos that Barbie, our main character. Her name is Margo in this movie. I will be calling her Barbie, however. Another good name. She is clicking through these videos rapidly. This is her job. She's a content moderator. She has, you know, big headphones on. She's focused in on what she's doing. When we pan out, we see that she's in a horrible office situation. Fluorescent light, cubicles, everything is gray. It's, you know, a typical standard bare bones, sad, modern office building. Drab. Very drab. She's surrounded by other people and cubicles clearly doing the same job as her, looking at these videos. We get a close up of what she is clicking on, either allow to let the video go through or flag to remove. And then she has options of, you know, why either assault or graphic violence or whatever. And then there's like a place where she can type in a note if it seems like it should be removed. She flips to a video that makes her kind of pause. And it's a highly stylized, well produced video. I also just want to flag because I really enjoyed this, that flag, flag for removal. That it shows her like stopping on videos of like someone showing how to administer it in our can to someone that's like having an overdose. And she flags it for removal as like drug use and is like allowing all the violent ones through. And it's like anything that's drug use. And there's one of like, this I think comes later, but of like putting a banana on or a condom on a banana, like teaching how to use a condom flags that for removal for like sexual content. So it's like, I thought those were clever little moments to include of like not just deciding what we can see, but like the things not just like allowing the violence stuff through, but actually withholding the like useful information as like inappropriate. Right. That's deeply frustrating to see that that's like a teacher putting a condom on a banana and she's like remove. So she pauses at this, you know, what looks like it could be a clip from a movie. It's a man being led to an electric chair. There's a voiceover in the background saying something like public execution deters crime. And she leans in kind of confused trying to get a better sense of what this video is when she is tapped on the shoulder by her work friend slash manager slash real life friend. And I can't remember his name. Do you know his name? His name in the movie is Josh. It's he's played by Jermaine Fowler who was in. Oh, he was in the blackening and he's so funny in the blackening. And I just was really happy to see him in this. Okay, great. He's great. So then we're even we're pulled out even more. She takes her headphones off. There's like a big audio shift. You can, you know, she was really like sucked into this world of online content creation. And then she's in the real world, the buzzing fluorescent light office world where her manager slash friend Josh is asking if she can cover for him doing a training with new hires. He's telling her, you know, it's the perfect opportunity for you to prove yourself, for you to, you know, move up the ranks in the company. She says, you know, sure, happy to do it. And as she's saying that her computer dings and she looks back at it, there's a little notice saying that she's idle and she needs to get back to work, which is another fucking horrifying thing. It's like they've been talking for maybe, I don't know, 45 seconds. Um, and it's telling her, what are you doing? Get back to work. You need to be doing this constantly. So she's, you know, she looks at the computer. She's like, Oh, gotta get back to it. So she goes back to watching the video she was watching before. Um, this is the video of someone. It looks like they're being beheaded. And I guess we should say we have not, neither Henley nor I have seen the original faces of death, but maybe some people were immediately like recognizing this. I don't know. Yeah. And she in the movie has not seen faces of death. She in the movie, we're just like her. So we're just like her. It's actually an artistic choice that you both have made to be present with the character. Yeah. A thousand percent. We're all on the same page here. Um, but I would say the thing that is making her pause is that it clearly looks like it's a movie. Do you know what I mean? Like it looks like a, it looks like it's a production. Intentionally shot and lit. Yeah. Yeah. I framed in such a, in such a way. In such a way. In such a way. Um, and so someone's about to be beheaded. Then they are beheaded and she laughs because she's like, that's not real. Like this kind of got me for a second, but like this is fake. So she approves it. She writes a little note that says likely fake. Then we see her leaving the office at the end of the day. She has to walk through a metal detector passed by a security guard. Um, the metal detector goes off. This is clearly a common thing. She has a little joke back and forth with a security guard with him being like, what company secrets you stealing today, Margo? And she just laughs and like takes her shoes off and then goes through it again. And it's fine. Um, in my head, I'm like, what are they worried about them? Actually, I guess they're worried about them. Hard drives. Hard drives in and out. That's why they're doing this. Yeah. Like taking content from what they're reviewing in and out of the office. Um, so she goes home. She lives in an apartment building that is pretty freaky. I gotta say, I don't know. I thought so too. I thought her house was really scary. This is, and actually Daniel and Issa brought this up in our interview too, just like the locations of where these people live are very normal. They're not unusual in any way. There's just something off about them and kind of sad. When she goes into her apartment building, she passes by a neighbor who I was certain was going to become a character who would come back. I don't know whether you notice this or not. She makes eye contact with this guy who like looks very scary. It doesn't come back, but it gets probably mood. Yeah. It's probably just to add to the feeling of like being disconnected from the world around you completely. Like the people who are your neighbors that you live next to are actually strangers and you have like closer connections with strangers online than you do with like the people in your immediate vicinity. Yeah. How I would interpret it. And not just strangers like that feels like dangerous. It feels like this person is like threatening to a certain degree. So she lives with her friend, her roommate. They have a really cute relationship. He she comes home. He is painting and watching a horror movie. That's his like, you know, he's, oh, he loves horror movies. He's the type of guy who has a ton of VHS's watches them all the time. Just like me for real. Yep. He is Sammy as a boy. Got to get into painting. Got to get into painting. She's, you know, telling him about her day. She's saying she's, she's saying she thinks she could be really close to promotion. She's talking about how she's like proud of the work that she's doing. She really wants to make a difference. She really feels like she's close to making a real difference. You know, she kind of has this like rose colored glasses on a little bit about what this job is being a content moderator. The roommate. Sorry, you can't remember his name. Ryan. Ryan. Ryan. He asks if she wants to go to a party tonight. He's saying it's going to be really chill. It's just a housewarming. Come on, like let's get out there. And she's immediately hesitating. She's not wanting to go. She's nervous. You're getting the sense that either she doesn't like the person who's hosting the party or she doesn't really want to be social right now. But you know, Ryan is pushing back. He is a good friend. He says, come on, like it's okay. It's time, like it's time. You can do this. Meanwhile, she's opening a package and can't open it up. And so he hands her a lipstick and she's like, what is this for? And then he takes off the top of the lipstick and it's a little knife on the inside. And he's like, use this to open it. So now we've got this little lipstick. That's a knife. That's important to know. She ultimately agrees to go to this party. So they leave. They are at a convenience store picking up, you know, supplies. When immediately these two girls clock Barbie and start whispering to each other. And you can tell she sees them do it. And this is something that happens in movies that does kind of bother me where I'm like, no one is that if you see someone that you recognize, are you this obvious? Like the two girls immediately are like whispering. So, you know, I guess that does happen in real life. But like, I mean, I guess I am waiting to find out why they recognize her. Well, we don't determine if it's realistic or not. Well, we don't find out yet. And this is part of what I find to be a little unrealistic to. But whatever, who cares? This is a movie. It doesn't matter whether it's realistic or not. Who cares? Who cares? Who cares? Anyway, so Barbies clocking them, they're clocking her. Everyone's clocking each other. I wonder too, if it's also a little bit like how she's seeing it. If this is her biggest fear, like maybe the reaction isn't that big, but it's like, you know, she's on the lookout for it. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the girls says, are you the girl from that train video? And she's immediately like very triggered and she doesn't go to the party. She just goes back to the apartment, goes back to her room. So that train video. Don't like to sound like that. From the train video. She is back at her apartment. She has a flip phone, which I love to see doesn't have an iPhone. So 2024. So 2024. A time capsule. I love a period piece. She's flipping through pictures, like grainy old pictures on her flip phone. And then she, I guess maybe this is, does she have two phones then? Is this just her old phone? Yeah, maybe. Because then she listens to a voicemail. Oh, I guess it makes sense that she would be keeping an old phone for this reason. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. That's exactly what's happening. I just put that together. Sorry. Sorry for making a joke. Sorry. You don't know what it means yet, but yeah. So she, but you, you get a sense pretty quickly that her sister has passed away because she's listening to old voicemails. Something related to a train maybe? Something maybe. Really putting things together. Then we're getting little glimpses of a flashback. We're seeing her sister screaming, reaching out for her. That's it. That's all we got right now. We cut to the next day. She is giving the work training that her boss slash friend asked her to do. We learned more about the company where they work. This is Kino moderation. She is, you know, spouting the corporate propaganda full chest, like really believes in it. Telling the room full of people, you know, we're here to protect the young, the impressionable, the innocent. She's telling them when you come across content that violates company policy, you just flag it, you move on. You might be tempted to look at it outside of work, but that's a violation of your NDA. Don't discuss it. Don't Google it and don't even think about it if you can help it afterwards. Training's done. She goes to eat lunch on the stairs all by herself and she hears people having sex in the stairwell and she kind of like goes down and sees two people having sex. I don't think we know who these characters are. And then it flashes to a sign in the stairwell that says no sex in the stairwell. Yeah, that kind of that bummed for me a little too. I don't really know. It's funny, but it's also totally like this is a different movie for just a second, I guess. Right. For everything being like feeling very grounded in the world that we live in, this felt like more of a joke about, I don't know. What is the joke? So what's the joke? I kind of am like, why do they keep it in the movie, I guess, because they really didn't need it, whatever. It's a movie. This is really funny. I did kind of laugh. I think the pictures of a squirrel or something saying no sex in the stairwell interesting. Yeah, I don't get it. Then she goes up to the roof where Sammy, you forgot to mention the other star in this film. I didn't forget. Charlie XCX. I intentionally. Oy vey. Charlie XCX is. She's not great. She's hanging out on the roof like a bad kid. You know, she has the posture of the school bully. Who did you say it was like from The Simpsons? She reminded you. She reminded you of Nelson from The Simpsons. She prepared for her performance by watching Nelson in The Simpsons. It felt like that to me. She's a cartoon. Some of us wear skimmed body suits. Some of us watch The Simpsons. And to be clear, I love Charlie XCX. Oh, me too. Me too. I love it. You two should do a lot of things. This is the only thing. You don't have to be able to do everything. This is the only thing I've seen her act in. I did hear some things about the moment, but I can only say she's not good in this. I'm sorry. But that's just the truth. It really surprised me actually how bad she was just because it's it's an over the top. It's unbelievably bad. It's like it's crazy. Well, it shows you how I mean, I've never acted. I don't know. Well, are you going to? What's up? Are you going to finish that sandwich? Can I like eat that sandwich of yours? What's happening? Have you ever seen a real person? How a real person talks? She has her knee up. She's like leaning on her knee and her one leg is swinging. And she has the posture of a bully too in a way that's like no one actually sits that way. You need that sandwich or what? And she's smoking a me. Yeah, she's doing it. An American accent also. She's smoking a marijuana cigarette. She asks Barbie. She would like a puff of her. She's like, you want some? Barbie says she doesn't because she wants to have a clear head when she does this job. And Charlie XCX is like, I would fucking blow my head off if I had a clear head when I did this job. And Barbie's like, why do you even do this job? And Charlie X says because it's a thrill when you get a really good one. Plus they have dental. So those are the kinds of one liners we're getting from Charlie XCX. And it's very 2024 of her. It is. It's actually, that's why she's in it to place us in time. It's very Brat summer. Very Brat summer, which I do think was not 2024. It might have been. It was 2024. I think it was actually. Was it? It wasn't 2023? No, it was 2020. Wait, what year are we in? 2026. 2026. It was 2026. I thought we were in 2025. See, this is why Charlie XCX is in the movie because otherwise we would get confused. You're right. It is a period piece. You're right. It's a period piece. They were so smart about that. All right. So she's back to work. This is when we get the Narcan tutorial that she doesn't allow through. She then gets another video similar to the video that she saw earlier. Same kind of stylized vibe, same high production. This time it's the video of a man being led to an old school electric chair. It's looking like a movie, but the man looks genuinely scared. Like he looks like he's not acting. Unlike Charlie XCX. Sorry. If he was acting, I'd be able to tell. They cover his eyes with tape. They put the electric helmet thing on him, turn it on. It's really disturbing. I mean, it's really disturbing that this is even a thing that this country does at all. It's so fucked up. Do we still do that? I don't think we still do. I don't think we do the electric. Although I think that people are trying to bring it back. That doesn't surprise me. There's constantly headlines of like Alabama House of Representatives wants to bring back the electric chair. Is it why on earth would they? Is it cheaper than an electrical injection? I don't know. I don't know. I really don't like. Oh, wow. Yeah, it is still legal in a couple states. Yeah. The last reported execution via electric chair was in Tennessee in 2020. Not that long ago. Yeah, not that long ago. All of it's bad. All of it's bad. We shouldn't be. We shouldn't be killing people. No, we should not be killing people. Well, we definitely, there's no better way to kill people. No, we should not be doing it at all. Via the justice system. So they turn on the electric chair. He's being electrocuted. It looks really real. He's foaming at the mouth. It's taking a long time. It's horrific. And Barbie is noticeably disturbed. She's watching this. She's like, this feels real. So she pings her manager to come over, Josh. He's like, what's up? What's going on? And she's, you know, look at this video. I thought it wasn't real at first. I saw something similar earlier. The earlier one I really thought wasn't real, but this looks like he's actually dying. And Josh couldn't care less. This is another day in the life of a content moderator. He's like, DIY horror is trafficking. People love this stuff. Give the people what they want. This is what people are into. He couldn't be less bothered. He's also wearing like a little vest and like a button down. And he's so, you know, like, I'm just a boss in a corporate office. I think that that's a huge part of the, kind of the distressing nature of the film is the dichotomy between like the very bland corporate nature of their environment and what their actual job is, which is reflective of so much of our culture right now, including the people who are sitting in an office like that, fucking like putting drones on people, like sending drones all over the world. Okay. Anyway, so he's her boss. There's nothing she can do about it. So she leaves the, she leaves the video up, but the second she says approve, well, she also then right after she says approve, she looks up this man's username. He hasn't posted any other videos. So she's like, okay, this might be, maybe this is nothing. She proves it immediately has a panic attack, starts hyperventilating, runs to the bathroom, hysterically sobbing. Cut to new location, wireless store. The other worst place to ever be, I mean, spending time in a wireless phone store. It's never, never a good time. We've got Dacre Montgomery. He is wearing a neon orange polo greasy hair pushed back. You call that pushed back? I didn't say it because I knew you were gonna say it. I can't not quote. I think you should leave if it comes up. I call that slicked back. Okay. So I don't always know when you're quoting that. And yeah, that's fair. It's not fair for me to do. It's, it's, I can't help myself. I know. And so it's, that was enjoyable for 25% of our listeners who have listened. If that, I doubt it would have that high. A quarter, maybe 25, it might be 25 listeners. That was enjoyable for 25 listeners of which I am one. Do it for the 25 of us. It's your podcast. You can do whatever you want. I just won't understand the half of what's coming out of your mouth. You know what, I think you should leave. Actually, that should be mandatory for all the listeners of this podcast. It should be mandatory. So we've got Dacre Montgomery. He is also flipping through videos. He's scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. And he scrolls upon a woman who is a, you know, trying to be an influencer. She's talking right into the camera about some nonsense. He's intrigued. He clicks over to her profile. We see she has 230,000 followers. He starts watching and liking all of her videos, figures out her name, goes into the wireless phone store database, looks her up, finds her address, all within. This whole process takes like, yeah. This whole process takes like 90 seconds. This stuff freaked me out the most, just like how available our information is in this day and age, which obviously- This day and age being the- 2024. Long past of 2022. Yeah. I really didn't like it too. And also just how fast it was. It was like, clearly he was just like, scroll, scroll. This person will work. Look her up. Okay, done. I think I said this to you, Henley, when we were talking, but I remember looking up, just googling Graham Platner's wife for one second, because she popped up on my feet. And I was like, oh, Graham Platner's wife, what's her deal? Google her. The first thing that popped up was her home address. And I was like, what the fuck? Hopefully that's changed now because I don't want to, I guess, don't want to like, dox her. Blow her up. Well, that's the thing that's so strange about doxing in a way is that, what about the yellow pages? We used to be able to just look people up and figure out where they lived all the time. Did the yellow pages just have a phone number, not an address? Is that what? I can't remember. I think you might, maybe you got to like choose. You could decide. Yeah, I think you could decide if you're... Okay. This is like less creepy, but it ran through the other day. I was trying to pull, you know how sometimes when you search for someone on Instagram, unless you put in their exact handle, it doesn't quite give them, you just like click and then click? Yes. So I was trying to look at my friend, my good friend, Lisa. And so I had to like just like put her name in and it took me to, I'm doing it right now, I like you click on her. But right below her profile is like the AI summary of who Lisa is. I hate this stuff. All of the images are like her with her husband, like her wedding photos, pictures of them when they're really young in a way that I was like, what? Yeah, you're like, that's not it. What? No. Why are those the first like, it should be Spencer from Very Important People, her as a baby. And it should be like her public, her, like I don't know, just freaked me out. So Lisa just, just so you know. Yeah, it's freaky. Yeah, the idea of privacy. Why is it all baby photos of her and her cutie? Like I hate it. Yeah, it's not good. And I think that like house purchases are public information. So yeah, if you buy a house with your name, people can look that up as you, as you are want to do. Yeah, I'm buying so many houses with my name. So then we get to spend a little bit of time with this influencer. She's I guess attending a college nearby, her and her friend are making a TikTok video at a pool. People are being kind of dicks about it, but she's also being a dick, making a video in public, acting, you know, someone walks by her and she's like, ah, can't they tell him we're working? And her and her friend are doing a TikTok dance. And we pan over and we see Dacre Montgomery in his car, his car of course is like a 1985 Oldsmobile tan, idling, sitting in the car watching her. Then we've got our classic locker room scene. This was in the trailer. We've all seen it before. This is in, you know, I know you did last summer. This is in so many, so many movies. This is in one of the Friday the 13th as well. But yeah, we should make a list of them. Where she's alone in this locker room. It seems to be after hours. None of the lights are on. She's taking a thousand selfies of herself. Can't find one she likes. Suddenly she hears a noise in the background, in the shower. She thinks, ah, she gets a little spooked. She goes to investigate. She hears something in one of the showers. She pulls back the curtain. There's a phone taped to the shower. It's playing a video of her talking. She's going, who did this? What's going on? This isn't funny. She goes to leave a man in a black suit, skins, cat suit, and an all white mask stops her. He hits her, chokes her, injects her with something. And red contacts, freaky, freaky. Oh yeah, the red contacts. Full eye contacts take up the whole eye. That was, yes, that's, oh, that was really. Is that for real? Can you do those? You see him in the movie, take them out at one point. They're like almond shape. Like it's like full red and pupil. I think they make his entire, yeah, there's no whites of his eyes. It's all red. I'm pretty sure. Then we are back with Barbie. She's back at work. She is popping mysterious blue pills, straight from a plastic baggie. So Barbie is supplementing her content moderation with a little pharmaceutical help. She's flagging a video about how to safely put on a condom. Then she gets another video, another video that's highly stylized, similar to the look and feel of the other two videos. This one is even worse than the first two. Oh, I really didn't like this one. This one is a reference to the infamous monkey clip, the monkey murder from the 1978. Film that I saw referenced a few times and didn't understand what that meant and didn't want to look it up and didn't want to know any more details. Basically in the 1978 version, I think they bring out like a monkey and they, there's a table that can close around the monkeys that leaves the monkey's head up. So it looks like the monkey's head is just on the table. And then the rest of the body is obviously under the table. And then people are sitting at the table and people have hammers. And in the 1978 movie, they, I guess, kill the monkey with their hammers. Oh, God. Oh, no, no, no. Yeah, I know. I know. I don't know if like any of that's real. I didn't research any of this. This is all stuff I... It's kind of hard to get clear information because they like pretended it was all real. And then I've read some things that said it's about 60% fake and 40% real. But then actually in this movie, they say that it's 100, it was all 100% fake. So I'm unclear on that. Yeah, I don't know either. But in this movie, instead of a monkey, it's a man. It's a human person. And they beat him with hammers. This is like the worst part, I think, of the movie for me. This was horrible. And then they... This is really gross, Emily. You're not going to like this. Then they remove his scalp. And then they open up his skull. And then they eat his brain. Or they maybe feed the brain to him? What do you said? Also, I thought a consistency of a brain, I guess it's like Jell-O. But like, again, can we get the right consistency of a brain? Somebody tell me. Good, we got to do it properly because this brain was looking hard as rocks. So... It's not hard as rocks. It took me out of the movie immediately. This is why we were confused before, is that we've been... Shown fake brains. Hard brains. Show us the real brain. We go straight from that clip to a close-up of crawfish. She's at a crawfish boil. Oh my God. Whenever crustaceans are in a horror movie, it's always the grossest part. Crestaceans are sick. They're so gross. I'm thinking of the substance when he's eaten all the shrimp. Yeah. So Barbie is at... I guess it's a work event. She's at the beach. She's with her friend Josh and other coworkers. She's staring at these crawfish that are about to be eaten, clearly thinking about the video that she saw earlier. She's... You can tell she's trying to not say anything, but then can't help herself and says to her friend, slash boss, listen, I saw another mannequin video. I saw... She calls them mannequin videos because there are mannequins in the video pretending to be humans, dressed up like humans. Like an audience or whatever in the movie. And he's like, stop talking about this stuff. And he pulls her aside, clearly like, don't say these things here. Well, it's against company policy. Exactly. And he's like, shut up. This is not appropriate. Just talk about this stuff. Shut up. Shut the fuck up. And she says, what do we do? It seems like someone is actually killing people. Like, what if this is real? And he says, we can't escalate this to law enforcement. Escalating anything to law enforcement brings negative attention to the company. We are not the morality police. We are not here to tell people what's right and what's wrong. Censorship is a slippery slope. That's not our job. And Margot is, you know, pushing back. And then he says, you're sounding manic. Are you okay? He says, I vouched for you, even with your history. I'm the reason you have this job. Don't let me down. Don't make me look bad. And don't let yourself down either. Not a great friend. So she's in a tight spot. Then we're immediately having more flashbacks to what the incident that got her here to begin with. She's taking a video with her sister on some train tracks. Her sister's saying, it's too dangerous. We shouldn't be doing this. And Barbie's laughing and saying, no, it's no big deal. I think she says like, the danger's the point. That's why we're doing it. Yeah. I think I had a hard time. I feel like I didn't really watch this because I was like so upset by it. But basically a train then comes, her sister gets stuck and gets hit by the train. And it's on video. I guess they were live streaming, I suppose. That was my question was like, and how did this video get posted? Right. Right. But exactly what they were live streaming. Yeah. Wouldn't you go to jail? Oh God, I don't know. Maybe. I mean, I guess they are both do it. I guess we, yeah, she knows that she convinced her sister to do it. But I guess I'm like manslaughter, but I guess. No, I don't think so. You're both. They're, it's. You didn't force her to be there. Yeah. I don't know, but it's so sad. It's really dark. So this is why Barbie has this job. She has this job because I think that she became famous after this train video. And she, I'm pretty sure wants to stop videos like this from being on the internet. And that's why she's in content moderation. Also clearly she's been struggling since this horrible traumatic thing happened. So hasn't had a job, really needs a job and has been struggling with her mental health. So that night she is popping more pills and googling how to tell if a snuff film is real. Her friend, Josh is not going to help her. So she's like, I'm going to figure this out myself. She's going to Reddit. Very realistic. The use of Reddit in this, in this film is deeply realistic. She creates a username. She adds the video, which I can't remember how she, I guess she left it up. So she can just Google the video. She adds a link to the video saying, does this look real to you guys? And just sees if anyone responds almost immediately. There's a comment that pops up that says, friends, a scientist here, that's 100% real blood spray about the hammer video. And then a bunch more comments immediately start coming through, including things like nice find, like, whoa, like super cool. You know, people are going to say like, uh-oh, look what you did. Then someone posts another comment saying, with a link to an article saying, whoa, is it just me or does he look just like this guy? Oh, sorry. I guess the one that she posted was the electrocution one. I'm sorry. I can't remember which one it was, but I think she posts multiple. She posts multiple. So someone notices that in the electrocution video, the guy who's being electrocuted looks exactly like an award-winning filmmaker who has been missing. Oh, the internet's a really crazy place. The internet, no one should be on it. We're back with Daker Montgomery. We didn't know that yet in 2024. Yeah, in 2024, we're so naive. We learned so much. We were still on the internet then. He is stalking a man this time. This is a nondescript man. He's out doing some shopping. The only thing that's noticeable about him is we see some people stopping him to get his, take a photo with him. Clearly he's well known to some degree. Daker follows him home. He cuts his hand with a knife and pretends he needs help. Again, you should never help anyone. Never help a person in need. They will just murder you in the worst ways possible. This guy, the guy who's being stalked, says, oh yeah, I can help you. Come on into my house. Offers him a bandaid. Daker Montgomery's been in a tale about being his neighbor. I'm like, this guy is clearly lying, but okay. He takes, he steals his keys. He tells him that his job is making videos. And then the guy's son comes in and Daker Montgomery seems freaked out that the son is there. And so quickly leaves. So then we keep following with the man. He sits down to watch TV. He's hearing some noises. Then he goes to turn the lights on. The lights are not working. He goes to get his phone. Phone is gone. He grabs a flashlight. He's trying to figure out the electrical situation when, bam, Daker Montgomery drops down from the ceiling, attacking him in his own house. Oh my God, it's like in the attic. I was like, this is so funny. Like the examples of serial killers, like how did they do this? Like it seemed like, I guess he was in the attic. It seemed like he was like holding himself on the ceiling. He was in the attic. It showed him coming out of the attic. Oh, okay. See, I don't know. I missed that part. I was like, what is happening here? So he's just like spider manning in the corner of the ceiling. Drums down, attacks him. That son comes out to help. He attacks him as well. Bummer. How old's the son? I'm a teenager. The next day, Charlie XCX is even more radicalized by all the content she's been seeing, even more Nelson-like than she was before. She's laughing at this corporate office surrounded by people showing them a video. Barbie walks by. She's like, what are you guys looking at? Charlie XCX shows them the video. It's the man being beaten with the hammers. It's the brain video. Funny. And Barbie is like, what the fuck is wrong with you? You're sick. And then she runs out of the office because she's embarrassed. She made a scene. Then she's back on Reddit at home doing more research. She's looking at everyone's opinions about the videos that she posted. People are questioning, how did this make it past the censors? People are claiming that it's just an art piece. People are saying someone needs to do something. Someone needs to call the police. These seem real. Then she sees a comment that says, these are reminding me of that movie, Faces of Death. And she's like, oh, huh. She goes to her roommate's VHS collection. Thank God, saved by physical media once again. Sure enough, her roommate has a copy of Faces of Death on VHS. She pops that bad boy in. Watches. Fast forward. We are seeing clips from Faces of Death that are mirroring the clips she saw. Clearly, these are remakes. Someone is remaking Faces of Death. Her roommate comes home and he's like, why are you watching this? She's like, and then he tells her about Faces of Death. He says, his description of it is that it was supposedly a doctor showing super dark images of how people died. It was supposed to be a documentary, but then it turned out that none of it was real. And it really pissed off a lot of people. So that's the lore of the movie in this movie. And then I just wanted to flag that I found an article about whether this, the original was real or not. This is from an article that says, the truth was somewhere in the middle. It was technically a mockumentary and nobody were told was murdered for the film. And the doctor, Dr. Gross, was played by the actor Michael Carr. Some of the deaths were staged, but some of the footage was real. Purchased from news stations, medical researchers, other documentaries and other sources, which is a relief, but still unnerving any way you slice it. Which is the case with this movie too. There is real deaths in this film as well. When they're scrolling through, they licensed videos from which other social media? Reminded me of when I got my forklift training. By the way, remember how I was certified to drive a forklift for a year? Yeah. When we did that training, they showed us videos of people being killed in forklift accidents, real deaths. And it was disturbing. It was like, oh, I didn't know I was going to watch that today. Yeah, in my third training in our medical class, they were like, today's going to be intense. And then proceeded to show us so many of the gnarliest things I've ever seen. But yeah, after we found out that there was real deaths in this movie, I was like, the bear one, there's one where a man is being carried by the bear. I was like, that one has to be real. I mean, I don't know. I really don't like this. So she shows her roommate the video. She's saying, I think someone's actually doing this. Everyone thinks I'm overreacting. He's saying, you need to go to the cops. And she's saying, the cops aren't going to do anything. Then I'll get fired. I'll get fired if I tell the cops. And then she says, I need to do something. She says, I know. I'll figure it out, which is, what do you think? She makes some big choices here. But we see, she's not like coming from a healthy mental headspace. So she says, if I can get my hands on the metadata of these videos, then I can figure out where this person lives. And then maybe I can. I know, I know metadata, metadata. So she comes up with this plan to, she gets her boss slash friend tickets to a concert. She comes in the next day with these tickets saying, I got these tickets, but I can't go or like, do you want them? And he says, oh my God, yeah, but it's tonight. I have to work tonight. Like, but I really want to go to this concert. And she's like, oh, well, perfect plan. I'll cover for you. And he's like, okay, I'll have to give you access to all the secret profile stuff. And I'll have to give you the passwords for everything. But I guess. But I really want to go to the concert. I really want to go to the concert. And she's like, okay. Well, I guess I'll do. Well, that's great. Because it's not a trap. So bada bing, bada boom. Everyone goes home. Bing, bing, bing. Bing, bing. Bing, bing. Bing, bing. Bing, bing. It all works out. Apologies. Bing, bing. Boom. Everyone goes home. Like to turn it off. She's in. She's in. Because this is a 24 hour job. She's she's in his office. And she's she's closing the blinds. You know, she's twisting the blinds. She's like looking around. She pops some more pills and she gets to work. She adds this video information to a hard drive. Then we got to the creepy killer, Dacre Montgomery. We see, well, where he's holding these people. I fucking hate this shit. They're in cages, he's zapping on stuff. He's feeding them pizza. They're screaming, they're trying to get out. It feels so bad. I know, the pizza looks good. He's telling the influencer, like you're gonna be famous. Like the first rule of content creation is we give people what they want. This is what they want. So then he takes the dad, the man he was stalking. He takes the dad out of a cage. He sets him up in front of a bunch of cameras and he's given a bunch of mannequins guns. The man is blindfolded, standing in front of all the mannequins with guns. Dacre Montgomery is being the insane lunatic filmmaker guy who's saying like, do a great job for the cameras. I would hate to have to recast your role. Like it's time for you to shine, like that kind of vibe. He gives him a gun. Kind of Mickey Mouse-esque. Yeah. Kind of the cadence about Mickey Mouse. Yeah, this whole movie really reminded me of Mickey Mouse. I couldn't stop thinking about Disney. Oh, I'm going to die. This all does, it started with Disney. It all started with Disney. Yeah, so he gives the man a gun and puts one bullet in him. One bullet in him. And like it gives it to him in his hand. And but the guy's like shaking so much that he, and he's tied up. And so he like can't load the gun, but he's really trying. He's just fucking with him. He's just playing with his food essentially. I, yeah, I really didn't. I really obviously had a hard time actually watching these scenes in particular. And then I guess he presses a button and all the mannequins shoot him a gazillion times. And Dacre Montgomery gets like a little bit of blood on him. And really is not liking that. We get the sense that this is a germaphobe or hates blood or really does not like having any blood on him so immediately runs and scrubs it all off. Is that another line of work? Yeah, it's an odd combination. And he's looking at the comments on his video. He sees one comment that's kind of critical of the filmmaking acting like it is a real film. And he's defending it in the comments like using a burner account being like the lighting. I think it's expressive actually in this film. You know, playing the role of the Looney creative. And then back with Barbie, she's researching. She's uploading the raw data to some website. Again, what are these websites? How do you find them? She's asking if anyone can tell her where this video was uploaded from. Somehow Dacre Montgomery immediately sees that she's posted this on Reddit. I guess it's on Reddit or on another forum. Yeah, I mean, yeah. He sees immediately that like she's posted something saying I think this is real. Can anyone figure out like where these are coming from? Obviously he's the first person to see that because like who's monitoring this the most, the person putting these videos up. He clicks on the link where she posted and- He's gonna metadata her. 1000%. This man is the king of metadata. He tracks her down in no time, finds out literally absolutely everything about her. Like again, this is like the freakiest part to me. Sure. Yeah, why are we on the internet? Why do we have this podcast? Like shut it all down, shut it all down. Shut it all down. He finds a train video of her sister dying. He replies to her post with a link that she sees and then clicks. And then when she clicks the link, he immediately is able to track where she is. So that's a fun thing. So we have like a split side by side where she and her roommate are like reading all this information about something while he's looking up exactly where she lives and Google mapping how far it is from his house basically. In no time. It takes no time at all for him to do this. And then she does go to the police. She goes to the police and she tells a female police officer what she knows. And the female police officer is like, okay, in order for me to do any kind of murder investigation, I need a body. There is no body. I need any kind of like consistent pattern. I don't have any evidence. You need like more evidence in this. And also then kind of thinks that she's just making up the whole thing. So that doesn't work. She tried to go into the police. She goes to work. Guess what? She's getting fired. Oh no. Yeah. And Sammy, this is where you pick up, right? Yep. So she's left her little baggie of drugs in her boss's office. I don't know what they are. They're like some sort of stimulant, Adderall or something. I don't know. Yeah, I think they must be Adderall. Cause they're keeping her awake. They're not calming her down. Right. Yeah. And she is getting, she's spiraling for good reason. As you would, yeah, yeah, yeah. She is seeming more and more kind of like unreliable from someone who wouldn't, you know, understand the full situation. She's looking like, no, it's fine. Like you don't understand. And they're like, oh no, well, you're fired. Like you are doing drugs at work. So we're gonna have to let you go. So she goes back home and she is just glued to red. And trying to figure this out and get to the bottom of this. And she's taking it all into her own hands. She's got to find this killer. Little does she know he's literally pulling up outside her apartment as her roommate is kind of going to be, I think her roommate is also like kind of telling her to pump the brakes and stuff. And it's like kind of trying to- That's like not good for you, whatever is going on here. Yeah, like this isn't great. And again, I think she's connected in her brain that she has to do this to like redeem her sister's death, which is a bit of a leap, but I guess I see where she's coming from. But she's not thinking clearly, I guess, is what we're taking away from that. But she does go to bed. It's nighttime, it's dark in the apartment as we see. Daker putting on his outfit. It's like a stocking mask with a white plate, hard plastic in the front, putting in his contacts as he's walking into her building. He just like dials someone randomly on the keypad, they buzz him in, he just like makes a noise. Just, you know, it's easy, it's easy to- Too easy. Too easy to break in somewhere. And I believe this is all in like a single take. This is a like a one shot, it's following him like up the stairs as he gets to their apartment door, and he's picking the lock and the camera kind of goes through into the apartment. We see that the roommate is still awake or like getting water or something in the middle of the night. Daker comes in, attacks the roommate first, just as he's right there, stabs him a whole bunch of times. Oh shit. No, not getting drank, getting full on stab. Getting full on stab, I don't think he even tries to drink him, I can't remember. But I think he might not like anticipate he's there. So he's like kind of maybe caught off guard, I can't remember. But yeah, it looks pretty clearly like he's, well, he's dead, but as he's being stabbed, he calls out to Barbie. She's like music playing too, it's loud. And so Barbie kind of hears it, but takes a little while to come out and she has headphones on too, I don't know, I can't remember. But she comes out of her room to see Arthur, Daker's name is Arthur, sorry, confusing. And he pretty quickly like grabs her and injects her with the fentanyl. Maybe he only had one dose. Maybe he only had one, yeah, he didn't know. And as she's like passing out, she sees Ryan bleeding out next to her, she like passes out next to him and sees her friend dying. Real bummer. Really bad. Like this is kind of the opposite of what she was trying to do. Kind of the opposite of redeeming, because now that's kind of your fault too. Also why is it your fault that this guy's- And you can't have known, but that is- Yeah, it's not entirely your fault, obviously. It's more Daker's fault. Way more his fault. We're not saying it's more your fault than his, it's mostly his fault, obviously, but not 100%, just kind of mostly. Oh, so now Barbie wakes up in that little basement area where everyone's in cages. We see- Is it pizza time at least? I don't remember. There might be some cold slices lying around. We see the influencer in there, her name's Sam, and the son of the news anchor guy is still in there. The son is really out of it, but Sam's pretty, she's been pretty consistently like trying to break out. I think she's like really tied up though, because of how much she's been like trying to get out. So Barbie's surveying the scene, it's looking really bad. This is- He also has the video of the train video playing on repeat. Train video is playing on loop right next to her little cage. Well, that's just mean. It's just claiming. That's the meanest thing out of all of this. But she notices her sweater kind of draped over a stool that's just two-ish feet away from the cage. And even though her hands are tied, she's able to kind of reach and pull the sweater slowly and pulls it, tugs it, gets it all the way through. And in that pocket is the lipstick knife. Lipstick knife. Yay, lipstick knife. So she is able to free herself. She's cutting through the bindings and using the little knife to unscrew the screws of the cage. Smart, smart. So she's able to get herself out. Dacre is obviously not, he's somewhere else in the house. But we don't know when he's coming. So it's pretty stressful. She goes to Sam's cage, same thing, unscrews it, gets her out, and then they're hearing footsteps. And the other guy is basically a catatonic, slumped down. So they do a quick evaluation and they're like, we'll come back for you. Which I was like, oh, it's four fucking guys. But also I do think it was the right call. Like we'll get help if we get out of here. Otherwise all of us are dead. Yes, which is I think the smart thing to do. And very much what Sam, they go upstairs and Sam is like, all right, let's get out of here immediately. And Barbie is like, no, we need to get evidence. We need to find the raw video. Walk outside and look at the address. Yeah, bring people back here. She's making some big choices that I don't know I would make. But the evidence is us having been here. Right. But she's dead set on finding this raw footage. And Sam is like, fuck that, I'm not doing that. She's running, looking for an exit. And this is like a very cookie cutter, what do you call, tract house looking place. Like it's very... It's like a McMansion, but like a, but like a, you know, copy and paste McMansion. That all looks, it's so typical of the type of house that a lot of Americans live in, but the house they chose to represent it is particularly sad because there's no landscaping around it. There are no other houses around it either somehow. And it just like stretches out. This is a type of house that would have the exact same house right next door. The way they film it, you don't see that. It just is so eerie and lonely, but also familiar in a way that's like... It's like, make me think of the houses in Fright Night. Like that little like Vegas cul-de-sac where it's like every house is exactly the same. Yeah, it feels like that. And... You also had people in cages. Yeah, it just, it gives you a feeling of like, these types of houses have cages with people in the basement. Yeah, people in the basement. 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all of them do. So Sam is like panicking, trying to find a way out. It's a big house, it's disorienting. She like can't tell where she is. She sees a back patio area and just smashes a window, gets out. And I think Arthur hears this and it's now like, okay, something's going on. While they were doing all of this, what Daker Montgomery was doing, what he was distracted by is he was live streaming himself. With the roommate's body all cut up in a bin, pouring acid all over it. He's live streaming this while people are watching, people are commenting, being like, this is crazy. Like someone being like, is this real? And other people being like, no, obviously it's not. He's in his little mask and with his contacts in and he's vamping for the camera. He's really doing the most for the camera. Being like, look at what I'm doing. It's, look at this, you know, he's obviously not talking, but- Very breaking bad. Very, yes, very breaking bad. The house is very breaking bad too, honestly. That's true. Yeah. So you know that they're either disintegrating people in bathtubs or keeping people locked up in cages in the basement. That's why he was distracted and didn't hear them at first. And this is also when you see, when he does realize something's going on, we see him take out the contact lenses. Ugh, ugh, sick. Gross, very gross. But he hears something, but we're back with Sam. She's running, it has like pretty high brick walls around the patio, but she pushes some patio furniture and is able to climb over the wall into just wide open grass field in every direction. Like nothing- That sucks. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to go. Which was, yeah, my stomach just dropped. It would be so horrible. Like you'd think you're getting away and then it's like, fuck, god damn it. And Arthur comes out, grabs his shotgun. He still has one contact in, freaky, and he's using his other eye to look through the scope of the shotgun. He sees her running and calls out to her and is like zigzag, Sam. So she starts swerving back and forth, Game of Thrones style. Oh, fuck, you hate it, hate it. And he does shoot her, it takes him a couple tries, but he shoots her. It looks like in the stomach area and like the abdomen, she falls. And downstairs, I think Barbie hears some of this, but it's not really sure what's happening. She's found his computer station and his hard drive and has grabbed that, but then here's footsteps coming and this room is filled with creepy mannequins and sheets of plastic hanging all around a reel, like murderers, dungeon. And she hides behind the plastic because she just doesn't know where to make a run for it. She might run straight to him. So she hides behind the plastic and is trying to stay super still. The room is filled with mannequins, so it's kind of like you're blending a little bit in behind this plastic. And we see Daker come in and he's scanning the room. And at first, he's not really seeing anything and you're thinking, okay, maybe she's fine, maybe he's not gonna see her, but then he sees her and we see him for sure look at her. But from her point of view, the sheet plastic is making things blurred, so she can't see that he's seeing her. And he just decides to play it cool and act like he hasn't seen her and he leaves the room. And I don't know if he goes back to his bathtub or something, but she is able to get out of the room and I can't remember exactly how, even though you'd kind of suspect that he would just be waiting directly outside the door. I think he has his sniper rifle waiting for her to just shoot her, I don't know. Yeah, he's having some fun enjoying the hunt of it all, it seems. He doesn't want it to be easy for himself. So she runs out of the room eventually and follows Sam's same path, jumps over the wall, has the same horrible realization that she does, but she runs the opposite direction that Sam ran and there is like a wooded area at some point. And Dacre's chasing her, but she's got a pretty good head start. She's like actually making, she's getting away. And she goes through these woods into a, it comes out on the other side into a parking lot and there is a mom with two kids and she's just like, please help me, help me. Covered in like blood and looks absolutely terrifying. And the mom and the two kids are somewhat understandably like get in the fucking car, go, go, go and drive off. This makes me also feel very sad because it is just like, everybody's just so scared of everything. And so it's like, because I feel, I'd probably do this too. I don't know. I'd like to think that I would help the bleeding woman asking for help, but I'd be fucking terrified too. Like you just don't know. I know. If I was in that situation with my kids, I know the only thing I would care about is like getting my kids away from whatever the hell was happening. And then you call the police. Yeah, call 911, but. And I think somebody does because the next thing, she is with the police somehow. And she takes them straight back to Arthur's house to be like, this is like, this is guy we've got proof. I think she does have the hard drive too. I think she brought it with her. But she again is like, seeming pretty manic, seeming pretty like, reliable at times. The cops are like, okay, let's go see. Let's go talk to this guy and see. And she's like, yeah, we need to go down in his basement. There's people in his basement. So they knock on the door and Arthur is back in his like kind of little dorky persona dressed up in his buttoned up shirt. And he's telling the cops that this woman has been stalking him and threatening him. And he, like as soon as she got away, he called the police preemptively saying like, a woman in a purple shirt is trying to kill me. And he's like, I just called the police. And so they are kind of like, okay, we need to, we're just gonna take you, like sorry for disturbing you, sir. We're gonna take her back to the station. They end up taking her to the hospital because she has a head wound. And so she's getting treated in the hospital. The nurse is really feeling for her. She tests positive for fentanyl because he's injected her with fentanyl. And the nurse is like being really sympathetic with her. Like if you need help, like I know we can get you places that need help. Barbie's like, I'm not a drug addict. Like this is like, she's obviously like very angry and scared. But again, not doing herself any favors in this. She just got fired for drug use at work. So that's not gonna help. Yeah, so the nurse sees that she's not really open to getting help. And the nurse just gives her some Narcan as like, okay, we'll just take this at least. And Barbie takes the Narcan and then gets a text from Arthur saying, bring me back the hard driver. I'm gonna kill this guy that's still in my basement. And she's also seen people at the hospital watch these videos and like laughing. I feel like she's like watching other people watch this content. Yeah, also I'm so sorry you guys, but I have to go. So I know, I know. Can we finish it? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yes, I can finish it. Right. I love you. Love you. Okay, so she gets the text saying, return my hard drive or they die. So she goes back to the house, you know, she. I mean, this would be a great time to show that text perhaps to the police. I think the police. The police will bring somebody with you, but I guess nobody, you know, you can't really trust them. They don't really trust her. Yeah. Real tough spot. And I don't know whether she's like escaped the police. I don't know whether the police are gonna like bring her in for questioning. I'm not really sure. Oh true. Yep, yep, yep. So she goes back to the house. Dakin Montgomery opens the door. He's got a gun on her immediately. Of course. But being very cordial, he says, hello, Margot. Welcome to my home. Then he says, empty your pockets. She does, she just has the lipstick. He's like, give me my hard drive. She says, I will. It's as soon as the people are, as soon as you release everyone and he brings her downstairs and he's doing the whole like, you know, serial killer. Kill and monologue. Monologue stuff, yeah. He's going, would you say you're a fan of my work, Margot? Would you, are you a fan? Now he's, who's this? Who's this? Lauren Michaels. Would you say you're a fan of my work, Margot? I don't know what he sounds like, I can't remember. Seems like Lauren Michaels to me, yeah. And she's like, sure, I'm a fan. You know, she's so fucking like gone, gone at this point. And he's saying to her, you know, he's bringing her down into like the murder basement area. And they're surrounded by mannequins. They're surrounded by this plastic sheeting. And he's saying, you know, when I saw you were the train video girl, I thought she gets it. She's going to get me. Everyone loves me. You see how like Kino loves me, advertisers love me. The government loves me. Even the cops, the cops love me. I'm giving everyone exactly what they need. The economy is an attention economy and business is booming, baby. And if it's a remake, you can get away with murder. People love remakes. So commentary on commentary. We reveal that what he's been doing while she's been at the hospital is taking all everyone's head and putting them on the mannequins. So he, Ew. Yeah, chopped off the influencer's head, put it on mannequin. I guess everyone's head is on mannequin. And then he's saying, I don't want to hurt you. I don't want to hurt you. I want to work with you. I want to work with you. But also like he wants to kill her. So he gives her the fentanyl. They're screaming at each other. He's like, drug yourself, telling her to drug yourself. She's resisting, but then she finally does. She drugs herself and she passes out. He continues talking. He's saying, you know, Margot, your sister, she was the real face of death. And now, now you get to join her, you and your sister. Wow, what a real family business it is. And he's like leaning down to start killing her when she, surprise, wakes up. Because she had the Narcan. Or didn't actually like drug herself? I don't know, but she wasn't drugged. Wakes up, she quickly undoes the lipstick, stabs him a gazillion times in the stomach, takes his gun away. He's covered in blood, which, you know, is his least favorite thing. Sure, particularly if it's his own. Yeah, it does not like that. So he's like trying to get the blood off of him. She grabs another knife, she stabs him in the leg. Then they're fighting over the knife. He gets on top of her at one point. He's gonna try to stab her, but then she finally gets the upper hand, gets the knife, stabs him a bunch again in the stomach. She's screaming. She's covered in blood, he's covered in blood, blood absolutely everywhere. She's screaming, screaming, screaming, like out of her mind. She rips off her shirt. And you see that she was wearing a wire that whole time. And she says, I have your confession. And then she says, my name is Margot Romero, AKA Trane Girl. No one would listen to me, but now they will because I'm giving the people what they want. And then she goes to the computer and starts uploading the video. I guess there was a video of everything that just happened in the room. So she starts uploading the video. She is covered in blood, hyperventilating, eyes wide, absolutely manic. Meanwhile, Daker bleeding out on the floor, watching his comfort film, he's watching Faces of Death on his phone. Interesting. He's like on the phone dying, like watching Faces of Death. She sees him doing this, takes the phone, stomps on it, sits down next to him. He's gasping for air, like on the brink of death. She's laughing hysterically, she's crying, she's watching the video, slowly get uploaded, 97%, 98%, 99%, 100%, uploaded. It's online, immediately comments are coming in. We should help her. Whoa, this chick's insane. She unalived him for our pleasure. Like that's fucking awesome. RIP, LOL. She's watching the comments. There's a closeup on her face, blood smattered face, eyes wide open, like reading the comments, kind of realizing what she's done, or realizing like, kind of taking it in. She became, yeah. End of movie, that's the end. Damn. So, yeah, quite a wild ride. I liked what they did with it. I mean. It's a lot to delve into for sure. Yeah, I don't know. What did you think, Em? It doesn't make me feel good. No, I know. It didn't make me feel good either. Yeah, I'm so glad we got to speak to the filmmakers because it's like such, it's a, there's so much to unpack, and like, I would imagine it felt really treacherous to make this film and make these choices. Well, I think that something that we are barreling towards very quickly as a society is the logical end conclusion of an entire economy that's set up towards more and more and more and more and more and more and more and extreme, extreme, extreme, extreme, extreme. And we have to figure out how to pull that back. And it seems impossible. I mean, it just feels like everything needs to be incentivized differently because now the incentive, it's everyone's just incentivized to like get eyes on things. That's the whole thing. And it's not, that's not gonna end well. So I don't know what anyone's doing about it. I don't think anyone's really focused on that right now. It feels like we have a little other problems that we're trying to deal with. There's a lot to do and a lot that's not being done. Yeah, the people in charge know this very well. That's why they're in charge. Right, right, right, right. And we're seeing the consequences of people having a lot of power who have no fucking idea what to do with it. So. And like no moral center. Well, for me, what I'm gonna take from this is I'm going to spend less time on my phone. At least for a little bit, which is nice. Same. That's nice to keep in mind. Same, I'm gonna do the same thing. This episode does come out on tax day. So, you know, do what you gotta do. You know, tough moment here. Thankfully this movie is set in the deep, deep past of 2024. And we've since learned and grown. And this is really more of a historical horror piece about things that don't affect us anymore. So at least there's that that's really nice to have. And, you know, here is a lovely interview with the filmmakers that hopefully definitely will ease all of our anxieties. Enjoy. Enjoy. Daniel, Issa, thank you so much for joining us. Sammy and I are huge fans. Thank you. We did Cam on the podcast. We both love how to blow up a pipeline. And so are very excited to cover this film. We're gonna start with the first question we always ask our guests, which is, what's your relationship to horror and has it evolved over time? And specifically, was there a horror movie you saw as a kid or a younger person that kind of shaped your relationship to it? Oh, 100%. So I was the horror fan of the two of us growing up. I think the first movie that really scarred me was Saw. I was not ready for it. I thought I was. Like I hung out with a cool kid to smoke cigarettes and pierce ourselves. So I was like, yeah, I'm tough. I can walk. I was so scared. And I caught myself for years after that, whenever I would say something like, I fucking hate my life. I'd be like, no, no, no, no, don't say that. Like, Jigsaw will come for you. You know, he's gonna teach you a lesson. Squeaky out on his little tricycle already. Yeah, I was like, I love being alive. I love being a teenager. I love my period. Everything's good. Let's do it myself. It like really, really got to me. That's the thing that people forget about Saw. It's like a morality play. It's really nice. Right. I think the scariest villains are always the ones that you kind of agree with. Mm-hmm. You know, and that's what was so scary to me about Jigsaw is I was like, well, like, you're not entirely wrong. Like, we get it. Jigsaw, we get it. Fair. Janine, what about you? I didn't, I grew up in a super movie household. My parents loved film and we'd watched several movies a week together, but my parents hated horror movies. And so it was like a real steady diet of like, you know, international art house movies and like, they like popcorn movies, but like sci-fi movies and like, you know, stuff like that. And this both hate horror. They're both dreading coming to the premiere of this. And so I actually didn't really get seriously into horror until I started working with Issa. Like that was, I think, something in many ways that she brought to this collaboration. Like, there were horror movies that I'd seen and loved. Like, I love The Shining and Silence of the Lands and had since a young age, but it wasn't honestly until after we had already made Cam that, you know, I realized like, okay, like I have a little bit now of a stake in the horror industry, even though we didn't really make Cam thinking it would be received as a horror movie. We really thought of it as like, just like a kind of surreal thriller. And then all of a sudden people were like, no, it's a horror film. And we were like, okay. So like, actually in the year after Cam, I went and watched, like I'd never seen Saw. And I'd never seen, you know, the Halloween movies. I'd never seen, you know, like a bunch of things. And so I spent about a year, if you look at my letter box, like 2019 is the year that I was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna learn a lot about horror. And so- But first of all, I had that him list. It was great. Yeah. Which was really interesting. It's an interesting, I think, genre that kind of come to a little bit more is like a fully formed person, you know? And so, but I think as a result, like I think in my heart of hearts, like it's always been a little bit more weirdly of like an academic pursuit for me than necessarily of like a kind of filmmaking that as much I have like in my bones, which is interesting. And I think something that, you know, I want to continue to like, you know, learn more about and get better at, especially because like, I love the horror film community so much. Like I think it's really like, it's the most tried and true like film fandom community that we still have. And it's like, it's like the bedrock of cinema are horror fans. And I have so much gratitude and respect for that. And, you know, I think as a result, like it's a community that I really just, I want to do right by, you know, as much as I can. It's true. I mean, I think that it's one of our last communal spaces is people actually going to see a horror movie together in a movie theater. Yes, yes. We don't tend to congregate as groups that much anymore. So we have to hold on to the moments we do. They bring the people together. I think we're doing like, like don't see faces alone, bring a friend promotion at some point, which I'm very excited about. And I will say that I made this movie in part also for my mother in particular, knowing so well how she reacts to like gore and like, in particular, like final fight scenes in movies, she always starts screaming at the protagonist to just like, just get it. I think he's just seen a bunch of movies with my mom. So she gets, so like really, I've always had her like sitting by my side, like yelling at the screen while making this, this, so I'm very excited to show up to there. Everyone will be watching the movie and I will be watching Danny's mother. Yes. It's like a full context sport. It's like your entire body is involved. Wait, okay. So also you two met when you were in high school, right? So you guys are a long time collaborators. How can you talk a little bit more about that, about your part, your creative partnerships specifically and like how you guys divide responsibilities and also what makes it work between the two of you? Yeah, we met via, I can't remember if it was Myspace or Facebook, but it was an internet post, which I think is relevant. And my best friend knew him, we went to different high schools, but my best friend knew him and posted on my wall or something, I think you need to meet this guy. And I was like, why? Okay. And I mean, props to Ariana, shout out, because it's an enduring, going on almost 20 years now, friendship that I- We know 20 years in May, 20 years May 4th. 20 years in May. Oh, that's beautiful. How do you know the date that we met? I mean, I'm touched. I'm touched. I'm sure you can look up the Myspace post, I'm sure. I remember because we dated in- We dated for a year. For a year. And I just remember that we had something about May the 4th be with you. And that was the thing that interface with our relationship. I forgot about that. That's like one of those buried memories. But yeah, we dated for a year. I had a theater company that I'd started with a different friend, but I had a play that I was writing and directing. And Ysie came on and kind of became the creative producer stage manager, of that play. And then just kind of everything that we made, she ended up being a part of, and then working together on. And then when we went to go make our first film, it was something that we just developed from the ground up together. And the division of labor in terms of the formal crediting ended up kind of being written by her and directed by me. But I think that's just because, generally speaking, I think that's most reflective of the process, but I think it doesn't reflect the ways in which Ysie's on set and giving notes on performance in the editing room and giving thoughts on set design and sending over costume ideas. And I think that that's how a lot of people in film kind of, I think, often do work together. But I think for us, it's been really important, I think reflect the fact that, yes, I might be the director on the movie, but it's as a vision for Cam and faces of death. And I think that's something that we really built as a team. I'm just curious about your guys' relationship with the original Faces of Death and how this project came to be. Was this something that you wanted to remake or did this come to you guys? How did that process work? This came to us actually from this awesome exact John Silk, who was that legendary, and he kind of reached out to us and said, oh, we have this IP, and I'm sure you guys are interested in this. He had seen Cam and kind of knew that we would have kind of a like out of the box idea. And so we actually hadn't heard of the original that we knew of, we went and watched the original, and that's when we realized we had actually seen parts of the original kind of online, you know, ron.com or on some message boards or forums over the years. And kind of realizing that all of these little pieces were from the same source, but we had consumed them online, you know, as like millennials growing up. We thought that was kind of, you know, a cool way into the project, you know, because when we're talking about where we see death now, of course it's online, and of course it's everywhere online, and wanting to dig in and kind of tell a story about our relationship to violence, our relationship to violent imagery was something that we kind of already wanted to do. And so it seemed kind of like the perfect avenue to find a way in. And ultimately we were excited too, because you can't really just do a straight remake of the original, right? It doesn't have a plot, it's not like a narrative. And so it was also this opportunity to tell like a completely original story, just kind of about this cultural phenomenon, really, of faces of death. And I also think that like it was an exciting opportunity because like, because of the nature of what face of death is, because it's not a remake or a reboot, it's like just a movie about faces of death. It also got to be about a movie. Like the movie is about being a movie that a major studio was like, hey, we should try to like turn faces of death into IP, which is like kind of an insane idea, and like not necessarily in a great way. You know, it's like, why are you, why, like you're trying to squeeze value out of everything you can, including like this fake snuff film compilation. Like what does that say about like the media landscape in 2026, that that's how big company is thinking. And so I think for us, it felt like also an interesting opportunity to make a movie that was I think also like, I think able to kind of very nakedly reflect the like commercial filmmaking circumstances of the time, which ultimately I think made the movie a little bit harder to get out into the world at the end of the day, because you know, but I think that there is a fun opportunity that that also presented to us. I'm so glad you guys are bringing this up, because when I first agreed to watch this movie, which was a big, it was a big jump for her. I looked up obviously what the original was, and I was like, no, this is gonna be the worst. I picked the worst possible one to be watching. So when I watched the film, I was so relieved to see what you guys were doing with this idea, because genuinely, this is like what draws me to horror to begin with is not the shock and value of it. For me, what draws me to horror, and I think for a lot of our listeners, it's kind of the way that it can have a commentary on what we're going through day to day and reflects back to us like the reality of being in the world right now, and maybe a way we haven't been truly thinking about it. And so I was like, in watching this movie, I was thinking about the message and how important it is. And I was also thinking about both of you as filmmakers. How do you think, you're clearly, you're so interested in how the media that we consume shapes us. How do you, where do you find your own responsibility in creating content? Is that something you guys talk about with each other in terms of what kind of content, if audiences are impressionable, which they are, I think we're figuring that out. Like, is there a responsibility that filmmakers have when creating things for us to consume, basically? I think that it's a big question because I think that like short answer, yes, every individual has a responsibility to, I think, engage with the world around them in a moral capacity. And so filmmakers are not, for some reason, exempt from a sort of need to be moral stewards of the world. I think that there is often a conflation of making a kind of like a piece of media that conveys a moral idea with itself being a moral act to have consumed or created that work of art when in reality the vast majority of kind of moral questions that confront you as a filmmaker are not necessarily just in regards to the story that you're telling or the film that you're making, but the fundamental process that exists in creating the thing. And so I think for us like 100% every step of the way with me and ESA and any other collaborators that I think either of us work with, we're always just first and foremost, wanna be good people with how we are working and with who we're working with, who we're choosing to work with, how we're choosing to work with them to the best of our ability. And then obviously, yeah, we also wanna tell stories that we feel like are reflective of not just the world that we live in, but on some level, I think hopefully like, I think film can do a really good job taking abstract ideas and making them concrete in certain ways and certain narrative ways and helping you see or visualize something that otherwise is kind of like an invisible idea. And I think a lot of the time, the stories that were driven to tell are stories that are ultimately about like, for us like, okay, I'm trying to get my hands around something that's happening in the content creation ecosystem, something that's happening in time to change, something that's happening in online sex work. There's something that's a little out of reach that I can't quite say, but if I make a movie about it, if I go through this process of telling the story with a group of people and we do it the right way, then maybe we've actually helped make something concrete that was not concrete before. And I think the things that we choose to do that with are often ideas that we do think have on a personal level, a certain amount of political relevancy, but I also think it's just really, really, really important to not have to get too high on your own supply when it comes to like the good that you're doing in the world by making or consuming a movie, because it's just a movie. Yeah, it's dangerous to think that way to a certain degree. Wait, that actually makes me think a little bit about how this movie focused on content moderation and kind of like the complications there. And in the movie, we see dozens of, you know, social media clips, violent or otherwise. What was the process for you guys? Like, were they, were any of them real clips? Were they all, yeah, he says, notting. Were they, did you create any of your own clips or how did that kind of process work? I mean, I think this ties into nicely into the point we were just talking about. We had a lot of discussions about sourcing some of these videos. Some are created, most of them are licensed, and a lot of them exist in the world and some of them are real death. Like, there is real stuff in our movie. There's probably more real stuff in our movie than in the original. And I think that that was a conversation that we had, you know, a lot with a lot of people to figure out where do we stand on this. But ultimately, I think that, you know, when I open my phone, I see dead people. Right, period. And we're served this stuff over and over and over again without asking for it, without seeking it out because we are engaging with algorithms which are designed to maximize engagement and have kind of no other process beyond that. And they know that things that shock us, that scare us, that make us angry, are going to keep us engaged. And ultimately, we wanted to kind of recontextualize some of this imagery by putting it in a movie theater, by putting it in a major studio movie, by you're sitting at the AMC, you're watching this, and you're saying, is it okay that I'm watching this? Like, why am I watching this? And those are the exact questions that we want you to leave with so that when you pick up your phone, a context in which these images are now normalized and are every day, you're also hopefully taking some of that questioning with you when you look at your phone and you're like, wait, why am I being served this? And what am I doing by engaging with it? What is this tech company doing by serving it to me? You know, ultimately that recontextualization is kind of what we wanted to do. And so you couldn't really do that without showing genuine death because ultimately, I mean, you guys probably grew up on the same internet that we did, like, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. And it would be somewhat disingenuous to not include it in the film when I can pick up my phone and see it every day. Totally. Yeah. On that note, do you guys have any, like social media rules for yourselves in terms of like limiting some of the engagement with that just as like a, you know, from your own personal standpoints? Stand points. I, generally speaking, my rule for myself on social media is you probably shouldn't post. Like, generally speaking, don't. Yeah, for sure. And then, you know, and like, and still, because I have a really snarky sense of humor and like I'm just a sarcastic person and I even got in trouble recently because I like, there was like a really great image of Daker in the movie that was put up by like Bloody Disgusting or something. And it was like, first look of Daker Montgomery in Faces of Death. And I quote tweeted it and I said, this is also the first I'm seeing of this, which I thought was very funny because it's like, obviously I've seen Daker in the movie. But then like a bunch of people were like, oh, the director is mad about the film. And like, oh no. And then I got a call from the distributor being like, did we do something wrong? And I'm like, no, that's just me. So generally speaking, I just shouldn't say anything on the internet because it's a great recipe to get yourself in trouble. It's a crazy place. I feel like also that specific example is really illuminating how deeply we need just more media literacy to begin with. Probably in this country in general. But this is, I think, to Issa's point about like, at the same time, the context by which we see stuff, the way that it's put into our feed, it's like, this is a computer delivering stuff to us saying like, look at this. And it's like, it knows that if it buries this little retweet of mine inside of like three other passive aggressive angry posts, it's actually more likely to be misinterpreted by the person. I also think it's very interesting that like, there's been like a lot of like, there's been a lot of kind of like little mini scandals within the film industry as of late. People just like don't comment on stuff anymore. Like people get super angry about something that somebody did. And now no one just, no one says anything. No one tries to do like the Instagram apology. No one like tries to like give, con pics or explain. They just say nothing. And then within 48 hours, it's like gone. And like, it's as if it never happened. And like on some level, it's like, I'm equally as disturbed by that, right? You know, but I think it's the thing is like, the internet has engendered so much empty anger about nothing that it's also harmed our ability to get angry about the stuff that really matters. It's just constant overwhelm. Just one thing after another. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what was your guys' favorite part of making this movie? Or like a favorite memory from set or something? My favorite memory was the one that we did. It's like over three and a half minutes long. We shot- It's all practical. There's no stitch. All practical. There's like a wall. We go through a wall. Like we built a removable wall. There's a crane. So like the camera off goes through a window on a crane, lowered down. And I think we did, I don't remember how many takes, not enough. Nine takes, nine takes. Yeah, it was like, it was the middle of the night. And because we shot on film, we had this like digital monitor where we could see what the camera was shooting, but it was the only one. And so we had to follow. Like it was like, Daker going up the stairs, camera off with the monitor, and then me and Danny like following in this line, like to chase the camera so that we could see the feed from the camera. And it was like, it felt like an Olympic sport. Like it really, like it felt like the closest that I think I will ever feel to an athlete is what orchestrating that felt like. And it kind of honestly reminded me of our theater days back in high school, it's just like you have a massive group of people focused on one thing and everything is choreographed. And there's a fight scene in the runner, there's a stunt in the runner. It was crazy. And I think like watching that, I was like, this is the coolest thing in the history of anything ever. You know what I mean? Like I was just, I was high, I was high on that runner. And also the tension of not knowing if you're gonna pull it off, not knowing if it's actually- Because the entire production schedule, like the entire production was built around that shot. Because when you think about like where Margot's apartment is, right? Like that, we, because we wanted to always do it practically, it's like, okay, so you have to get a building that looks like an apartment building, but that's actually a guy's house. And then we built a hallway into the house that was like Margot's apartment. And then that's the hallway that has the removable wall. And also then, and then it was a whole thing. Like we got into something about the homeowner because we had to remove the windows. So the steady cam op can go through it. And like he didn't want us to take out the window. And then our locations manager had to like spend two weeks begging and pleading with him. And like, you know, and so you, it's like, and like so the entire schedule, you know, of this whole movie is revolving around getting this shot that like it's unclear if it's any piece of it is gonna work, you know? And yeah. And so anyway, that's that. For me, I think like my favorite, like, it's, there's not like a singular moment, but I think that like there's a way that I really had always wanted to shoot the suburbs in a horror movie with this kind of like, this like hyper saturated like fakeness, you know? That is still very real, right? It's not like Tim Burton suburbs. It's not, you know, Blue Velvet. It's like these contemporary suburbs that I've seen very like rarely this kind of like McMansionville with these like giant expenses houses that like look like they're built out of plastic. And like how unnatural that is as like a place to live. Like it's like, this is not a place for people. This is a place for dolls. Like, you know, and, but this is like what we've built to kind of be the like aspirational living in America. And I find that so, and like even as a child, I found that like deeply, like I was always so disturbed. And like I would love to continue setting movies in those, in that world because it feels so dystopian to me. Like these are homes. And so I think just like, there's just like, like some of these images of like during the kind of like house escape sequence, you know? I feel like that's the closest I've gotten to like a particular vision that I've had for myself since I was young as a filmmaker of kind of like a particular mood that I've been trying to create. And I think as a filmmaker, like you're always compromising. You're always like further away from the vision that you want to be. It's hard to get there. It takes a lot of experience and a lot of good luck. And a lot of in this case, good weather, you know what I mean? For these things to like collide in the right way. And they did for those images. And so I just, you know, I think like that image of like Arthur screaming with the different colored contacts. And this guy, you got this like Nazi in the suburbs and he's got these contact lens. And you know, it's an image that could only come from this movie. And I think from this experience that he said I had together growing up. So yeah. Yeah. And I think one of the scariest parts of the movie to me is after jumping over that fence and just realizing it's just like flat nothing all around. Just like perfect eye line in every direction. I'm like, no, fuck. But yeah, it's a really normal and yet deeply unsettling setting. I agree. Yeah. Well, congrats you guys. This I'm very excited to tell all of our listeners to go see this movie. Henley watched it. If Henley can do it, you all can too. Bring a friend like we said. Communal spaces. It's no worse than what you see on your phone every day. Yeah, literally. It's just more entertaining. There you go. Literally, yeah. Yes. And thank you guys so much. It was such a pleasure to get to talk to both of you. Thanks for having us. Ah, thank you so much. Thanks guys. Well, Hen. You know, the thing that's gonna save us all is talking to real people. Talking to your friends. Talking to our friends. So honored to get to do that. So go talk to somebody for real if you can. Or like pet a cat or breathe. Look at a tree. Smile a flower, look at a tree. Think about birds with hats on, but don't Google image it because it looks easier. Don't Google it because you can imagine what it looks like. It's better in your mind. You could pick any bird you like and any hat you like and that's up to you. Wow, your mind could do anything. If you need to get some headshots done, hire someone, hire a professional. Use a real person. Use a real person. They'll take a picture of your real face. That's nice. So take care of yourselves and we love you. We love you and from all of us here, I too scared you didn't watch. Goodbye. Goodbye. We did it. We made it. Thank you all for listening to another episode of Too Scary Didn't Watch. If you enjoy the show, please remember to subscribe and rate us on Spotify and Apple podcasts. Five stars only or we will haunt you. And if you simply can't get enough of us, we have good news for you. We have lots of bonus content available on our Patreon at patreon.com slash TSTW podcast. You'll get access to video trailer reactions, two bonus episodes a month, the power to vote for upcoming episodes and more. And last but not least, you can follow us on social media at TSTW podcast. We'll be back next week with a new episode. We love you. That was a headgum podcast. Hi, I am Mandy Moore. Sterling K. Brown. And I'm Chris Sullivan. And we host the podcast That Was Us Now on Headgum. Each episode, we're gonna go into a deep dive. Yeah. From our show, This Is Us. That's right. We're gonna go episode by episode. We're also gonna pepper in episodes with different guest stars and writers and casting directors. Yeah. Are we gonna cry? Yes. A little bit. A little laugh. Are we gonna laugh? A lot. A whole lot. That's what I'm hoping, man. Listen to That Was Us on your favorite podcast app or watch full video episodes on YouTube or Spotify, new episodes every Tuesday.