![]() When Faces of Death hit Japanese cinemas in 1978, under the title Junk, it was a massive hit. It taught me life wasn't flowery and pretty and nice – life was ugly. That said, many of the sections of genuine documentary footage – in particular, the grisly aftermath of a plane crash – are undeniably shocking. The great irony I found while making the podcast was how many of the most talked-about scenes in the film are fake – yet to this day, many viewers believe it’s all real. He hired actors, booked locations, and a professional Hollywood crew shot the film in a little over a month. He and a writer came up with a list of fatal scenarios – alligator attack, electric chair, beheading – and added other elaborately disgusting sections, such as the monkey brains scene. He struck gold when an intern at a news company told him they had a tape in the back labelled “body parts”.īut it wasn’t enough, and LeCilaire decided to shoot staged sequences. He went to news organisations and purchased a shot of a woman jumping to her death from an apartment building, as well as the aftermath of several car accidents. LeCilaire set about finding enough graphic footage to fill a feature film. Video nasty … the film arrived just as VCR took off. “They just went batshit crazy,” he says, still gleeful. When his prospective clients flew in from Japan, he took them into a screening room and showed them the results. He convinced a doctor friend to let him into a morgue, where he shot an autopsy, cutting it together with other graphic footage including seals being clubbed to death. LeCilaire was asked to put together a “sizzle reel”, a sample of his concept. The man gave him a weird look – but he didn’t say no. “Why not do something about humans getting killed?” LeCilaire said. He said he was tired of doing films about animals and wanted to try something more ambitious. When LeCilaire was meeting the man from the Japanese film company, that scene leapt into his head. A big fan of Mondo Cane, he had been particularly struck by a scene that took place in a death house in China, where the sick and elderly were taken to spend their final days. “They were the first shockumentaries,” says LeCilaire. Why not do something about humans getting killed? LeCilaire said he was tired of doing films about animals. In the original, vengeful sailors shove poison sea urchins down a shark’s throat until it dies. Mondo films often featured graphic scenes of animal slaughter. Mondo films took their cue from the 1962 Italian film Mondo Cane, a compilation of travelogue vignettes – from tribal rituals in Africa to women in America using strange flesh-jiggling machines as part of a health craze. This was a “mondo” film, a genre of exploitation documentary popular at the time. “People killing animals all over the world,” says LeCilaire. He’d brought a print of a documentary called The Great Hunt, full of footage of animals dying. One day in the mid-1970s, a man from the Japanese film company Tohokushinsha showed up at LeCilaire’s office with a strange offer. His dad owned a nature film company and gave him his first job when he was 14. Like Forget and Feese, LeCilaire is from southern California. ‘I have compiled a library’ … Dr Gross, who introduces Faces of Death. “But in my brain at that age, I just thought it was clever.” “It does not mean that at all,” he says now. He insists on being referred to by his directing pseudonym, Conan LeCilaire, a name he picked in his 20s because he thought it meant “Conan the Killer” in French. Unlike the stone-faced doctor who introduces the movie, he’s laidback and affable, with a streak of blond left in his long grey hair. ![]() “It’s kind of cool to think that, you know, I actually created a cult film,” he says. I started wondering how the director felt – and began hunting him down too, eventually finding him living with his family in Colorado, where he now runs a gun store. I also knew MPI’s owners felt uneasy about the film. I knew that MPI Media Group, the company that produced Henry, had distributed Faces of Death. ![]() I’d heard rumours about the film while working on a project with John McNaughton, director of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. I tracked down Feese and Forget, whose families sued their high school, while working on a feature about Faces of Death for the podcast Snap Judgment. Even today, in the age of police body cameras and Islamic State execution videos, it retains its power. In the 40 years since its 1978 release, Faces of Death has earned a reputation as one of the most shocking films ever made. “I was like, ‘Why are they filming this? Why are they doing this? What is wrong with people?’” ![]() “That was what was so weird,” adds Feese. “We went into the movie knowing this was real,” says Forget. The documentary approach was what made the film so upsetting. Graphic footage … the plane crash in the 1978 film.
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