The Horror of It All

by Adam Rockoff

  I’ve already detailed the relative permissiveness of my mother, at least in regards to my horror-viewing habits. There was one movie, however, that was absolutely verboten—the infamous Faces of Death. In one of the few instances where I thought the woman might be off her rocker, I distinctly remember her taking the cassette from me and placing it on the top shelf of our living room bookcase. Why in the world she didn’t think that her twelve-year-old son, a fairly accomplished athlete, could procure a stepstool and retrieve the offending video at a later date is completely beyond me. She was probably betting that my guilt at disobeying her would be stronger than my desire to see the film. Lousy bet.

  Less perplexing was why she didn’t want me to watch it. Faces of Death is a compilation of alleged real-life “faces of death,” from authentic autopsy and slaughterhouse footage to impressively re-created executions, animal attacks, and cult rituals. Although it was readily available in most of the local video stores, in a rather nondescript box warning that it was banned in forty-six countries,IV I seem to remember that my friends and I obtained our copy as a grainy bootlegged VHS—exactly the way it was meant to be seen. It was probably passed down to one of us by someone’s older brother, an urban legend come to life.

  We so badly wanted Faces of Death to be real. But even at that impressionable age, we had a sneaking suspicion that most of the carnage was about as real as professional wrestling, another one of our passions. The illusion was permanently shattered when, in college, I met a kid who claimed his father worked on numerous installments of the series (yes, there were sequels galore). Naturally, I branded him a bald-faced liar until we popped in the tape and there he was, instantly recognizable, standing in the background of one of the scenes.

  The general consensus is that audiences enjoy horror films because they allow us to confront our fears in a safe and controlled environment. The producers of Faces of Death understood that there is also a market for the real thing.

  In his commentary on MPI’s special edition DVD of Faces of Death, director Conan Le Cilaire explains that the film’s financiers were encouraged by how well an Italian film called The Great Hunt,V replete with graphic scenes of animal slaughter, had done in Japan. For anybody who knows anything about the seedy underbelly of Japanese culture, this shouldn’t be the least bit surprising. This is a society that fetishizes schoolgirls, elevated tentacle porn to high art, and produces some of the most depraved torture films in existence. They’re even perverted in their prudishness; because it’s illegal to show unblurred genitals in Japanese films, other forms of less crotch-centric pornography have sprung up, including bukkake, in which a group of men all ejaculate on a woman. Nor is it just their art that is lascivious. As a gift, I once received a coffee table book about the Japanese sex industry (don’t ask). Inside, there is a photograph of a menu from a Japanese whorehouse listing as many variations of rim jobs as there are types of sushi.

  Anyway, because Le Cilaire was a veteran producer of nature films, the investors hoped he might have footage similar to that found in The Great Hunt. But Le Cilaire had a better idea: instead of animals being killed, what about people? Thus was born Faces of Death.

  In its intended Japanese market, where it was released as Junk, Faces of Death did gangbusters. According to Le Cilaire, the film hit theaters the same year as Star Wars and even out-grossed (no pun intended) Lucas’s film in some locations.VI In the States, Faces of Death played the famous Forty-Second Street grindhouses before starting its run as a midnight movie around the country. But it was on home video, not in theaters, where the film would secure its legacy as one of the most taboo and highly sought-after titles. There’s no reliable way to determine how much Faces of Death has made over the years. Some estimates put the take close to $60 million. Whatever the real number, its $450,000 budget was money well spent. Three official sequels, incorporating much of the “talent” from the original, and the documentary Faces of Death: Fact or Fiction? followed. Faces of Death also inspired a host of similar films, with almost identical titles, that upped the ante in terms of explicit gore.

  As audiences became more savvy about special effects and filmmaking techniques in general, the focus on Faces of Death shifted from which scenes were staged to who was actually responsible for the film. Clearly, Conan Le Cilaire was a pseudonym, as were most of the names in the credits. But somebody had directed it. Then an interview with one John Alan Schwartz in a 2004 issue of The Dark Side magazine shed some light on the matter. Schwartz claimed that he was the codirector, coproducer, and sole writer of the film. His pseudonym, “Alan Black,” made perfect sense; “Schwartz” is German for “black” and “Alan” is his middle name. But that still didn’t explain the identity of Schwartz’s mysterious codirector.

  Plus, on the DVD commentary, Le Cilaire takes care to make the distinction between himself and Schwartz, foiling those who claim the two men are one and the same. He even points out both of them at various points in the film; Schwartz plays the cult leader, Le Cilaire plays an assassin. Although Le Cilaire calls Schwartz “a very big part of the film” who “helped direct and helped produce a lot of scenes,” he’s crystal clear that he alone was the driving creative force.

  In 2014, at a time when you can see practically any star’s pubes on the Internet, I found it astonishing that the real director had still not been named. I’m not saying it’s a secret on par with which A-list actresses were once call girls (trust me, way more than you think), but I couldn’t believe that any secret could be kept in Hollywood, even one as minor as this. So I channeled my inner Kolchak and set out to unmask Monsieur Le Cilaire.

  First, I reached out to a friend of mine who works for MPI Media, the company that released Faces of Death on DVD. Although he knew the actual identity of Le Cilaire, he was like a goddamn safe. The only thing he would confirm is that Le Cilaire and Black/Schwartz were two different people, which was already obvious. I then called in a favor to an old acquaintance who knew someone that worked on the film. Without much prodding, he gave me the answer I was looking for. By cross-referencing various sources and cryptic postings on Internet message boards, I was able, with some certainty, to confirm what I was told. Just to be sure, I downloaded a YouTube clip of this gentleman speaking at an industry conference. I then compared his voice to Le Cilaire’s voice on the DVD commentary. It was a match.

  But I’m not going to reveal his name.

  What I will say is that unless you’ve worked directly for this man, you’ve probably never heard of him. So it’s not as if I’m holding back a revelation like Conan Le Cilaire is, drumroll please . . . Francis Ford Coppola!

  From what I’ve learned, the real Le Cilaire is an accomplished reality television producer. Apparently, he either feels embarrassed by his association with Faces of Death or fears it could negatively impact future business. As ludicrous as I find this—his colleagues would probably be impressed or, more likely, have no idea what the hell Faces of Death even is—I’m going to respect his privacy. If he doesn’t want the world to know him as Conan Le Cilaire, who am I to out him?

  Some may feel this decision destroys my credibility as a journalist. Possibly, but I assure you, when warranted there’s nothing I enjoy more than exposing truths others would prefer kept quiet. I recently directed a feature documentary called The Blue Room. The film is about Hephzibah House, a boarding school for troubled girls in rural Indiana, founded in 1971 by a fundamentalist Baptist pastor named Ron Williams. Its stated mandate is to help young women find spiritual peace. In fact, dozens of girls have come forward to claim that Williams; his wife, Patti; and their staff ladies have variously beaten, starved, humiliated, and tortured them (both physically and mentally). In 2011, Patti Williams died from what I can only assume was some sort of stomach cancer. I was told in the last months of her life she walked around the house toting a huge colostomy bag filled with shit. There are many, myself included, who saw this as an appropriate metaphor for her life. So maybe God really does hav
e a sense of humor.

  Since I’m already off on a tangent, I have one more story that will bring us back full circle to Faces of Death.

  One of my closest college friends was an American Indian named John Orie. Since I was one of the first Jews he ever met, and he was the only American Indian I knew, we spent a lot of time discussing the particulars of our specific cultures. Understandably, John was very proud of his Oneida heritage. Although this pride was genuine, the reality was that he was a suburban kid from Green Bay, Wisconsin, meaning that his upbringing wasn’t worlds away from my own. He was as far removed from battling English colonists as I was from evading Cossacks in Eastern Europe. This is why I found it so preposterous when he claimed that, were he in the right state of mind and given the right mind-altering substances, he would voluntarily undergo the Sun Vow from A Man Called Horse.

  For those not familiar with the movie, Richard Harris plays the titular character, a white man who is initially kidnapped by and then tries to win the acceptance of the Sioux. To do so, he undertakes the Sun Vow, a ritual in which sharp knives are inserted under his pectoral muscle. He’s then hoisted high in the air by the skin of his chest.

  John became annoyed when I questioned his ability to endure the ritual. Never mind that the worst he’d had to endure thus far in life was two-a-day football practices during the heat of a Wisconsin August. Still, I figured I might as well drop it as he clearly didn’t appreciate my teasing. I was, however, vindicated a few months later when we watched the Faces of Death knockoff Traces of Death, which, like Faces, purports to show real scenes of death and violence. Traces is probably best known for its inclusion of the suicide of R. Budd Dwyer, the Pennsylvania state treasurer who blew his brains out during a live news conference.

  It was the genuine autopsy footage that really got to John. Some poor sap on the slab was having his face peeled off, starting from his forehead and down past his chin. You could literally see the sinew pulling away from the bone. “I’ll be right back,” John said as he walked out of the room. I figured he was either going to take a leak or, since it was an unusually warm autumn day, maybe smoke a bowl on our third-floor balcony. Instead, when I went to check on him a few minutes later, I found him in the bathroom hunched over the toilet. I left him to finish vomiting in peace and never mentioned it again. But the implication was clear: if he couldn’t make it through Traces, he sure as hell wasn’t going to survive the Sun Vow.

  Years later, I was developing a documentary series about an extreme tattoo artist in Michigan who also specialized in body modification. One of the services he offered was “suspension,” in which his victims (uh, customers) were lifted off the ground by large metal fishhooks inserted through their skin. Apparently, the practice is quite common in this subculture. Common, but evidently off-putting, as I couldn’t find a single network remotely interested in a show about human bait.

  * * *

  The precursors to Faces of Death were the mondo films of the 1960s and early ’70s. The best definition for “mondo” (Italian for “world”) that I’ve ever found comes, unsurprisingly, from Killing for Culture: An Illustrated History of Death Film from Mondo to Snuff, the most comprehensive study of the subgenre:

  A feature-length mélange of exotic sights and startling incidents, the mondo film professed to show the viewer genuine and spontaneously filmed events from around the globe. These often unrelated episodes would find a continuity in the condescending, haughty, repulsed, or excited commentaries of a narrator. Quite literally a sensationalist travelogue, the raison d’être of the mondo film was to shock the audience with its exposé of bizarre cultural behaviour, fluctuating from the exotic to the erotic to the undeniably repellent.

  Mondo has its roots, of course, in documentary filmmaking, which was then the province of cinema clubs, universities, and the mental hygiene films distributed in schools and churches. The first true mondo film was 1962’s Mondo Cane, pronounced “cah-nay” and loosely translated as “A Dog’s World.” In it, we’re treated to such sights and sounds as the force-feeding of geese to make foie gras; an upscale New York restaurant that serves fried ants, stuffed beetles, butterfly eggs, and other insect dishes; flagellants in the Italian city of Calabria who slice their legs to ribbons in a show of piety; and a Tokyo spa stocked with cutting-edge exercise devices that would seem at home in a medieval dungeon. What’s odd is that the strangest and most disconcerting footage comes from then-contemporary America, such as the lunatics at the Pasadena Dog Cemetery who have gathered to pay their final respects to Rover.

  Mondo Cane was the brainchild of Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi. Jacopetti was an extroverted and dashing journalist who viewed mondo as a natural extension of his trade. He was bothered by the Italian neorealist films of his youth, which he felt created an artificial realism. With Mondo Cane, he wanted to throw back the curtain and expose the darker side of life. His partner in crime, Prosperi, loved the idea. A trained naturalist, Prosperi was Jacopetti’s mirror opposite in terms of temperament; the two made for an imposing team. Although they only made a handful of films together, each of these was a pillar of mondo cinema.

  Internationally, Mondo Cane was a huge hit. Apparently, cultures all across the world have an innate desire to experience those even stranger or more barbaric than their own.

  Although he had no desire to retread the same material, Jacopetti felt an obligation to his producers and began work immediately on Mondo Cane 2. Even this early in the subgenre’s evolution, it faced the same issue of faux reality that would later plague Faces of Death. In one of the film’s most disturbing scenes, a Buddhist monk is doused with gasoline and set aflame. Not only does it look real (although the color of his robe changes at the last second), but since this exact same scenario was captured a year before in Malcolm Browne’s famous photo, there’s no real reason to doubt it. After all, isn’t this just what Buddhist monks did in protest? Turn themselves into human candles? But according to Mondo Cane 2 cinematographer Benito Frattari, the monk was actually a mannequin made by renowned special effects designer and Oscar winner Carlo Rambaldi.

  Years later, Rambaldi, who’s probably best known for designing the iconic creature in E.T., would find himself embroiled in a situation that would illustrate the unequalled realism of his creations. In 1971, Lucio Fulci hired Rambaldi to work on his early giallo A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin. In the film, Florinda Bolkan plays Carol, a woman plagued by disturbing dreams. Accused of murder and placed in a sanatorium, Carol wanders into a room containing a grisly medical experiment. Four dogs are lashed upright to a metal stand. They’ve been vivisected, their innards on display and their still-beating hearts fed with blood flowing through elaborate tubing. As the blood pumps and the dogs’ organs pulse, their jaws twitching in silent agony, it’s easy to understand how almost everybody thought the notoriously unpredictable Fulci had finally gone too far. After all, this was a good decade before films like An American Werewolf in London and The Thing started doing mind-blowing effects with inflatable bladders. Fulci was indicted for cruelty to animals and faced a two-year prison sentence. Until, in a scene reminiscent of a Hollywood courtroom thriller, Rambaldi showed up at the eleventh hour with one of the prop canines.

  Jacopetti and Prosperi watched with disdain as a host of mondo imitators flooded the marketplace. While plotting their next move, they became interested in the geopolitical changes occurring in Africa. The resultant film, Africa Addio (Good-bye, Africa), sought to document the continent’s upheaval as it threw off the yoke of colonialism. As Jacopetti explains in David Gregory’s illuminating documentary about the pair, The Godfathers of Mondo, “It was not a justification for colonialism, but it was a condemnation for leaving a continent in miserable condition.” During the film, in which actual atrocities are filmed, word spread that Congolese were killed by mercenaries either at the behest of Jacopetti or as the result of his camera crew’s presence. Although both filmmakers vehemently denied the claim—falling back on th
e convenient, but probably true, war correspondent defense—the progressive Italian press had a field day.

  Eventually, Jacopetti was acquitted of murder, but the entire experience left a sour taste. After being accused of racism, and worse, the pair decided to make a scathing critique of bigotry. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then Addio Zio Tom (Good-bye, Uncle Tom) must have secured the exclusive contract for the whole damn thing. The idea itself had merit: a faux documentary set in the antebellum South that unflinchingly records the horrors of slavery. But somewhere between the conception and execution, things took a hard turn for the worse.

  The scenes are legitimately excruciating to sit through. A slave who refuses to eat has his teeth bashed in with a hammer before a steel funnel is shoved into his bloody maw. Epileptic slaves are strung up naked by their feet to “cure” them of their affliction. And, of course, slaves are humiliated, beaten, raped, and murdered en masse. Even if these scenes are staged, the terror in the eyes of the babies and child “actors” is all too real, as is a pathetic scene in which multiple amputees are forced to grovel for food. American distributors forced Jacopetti and Prosperi to cut a particularly surreal fifteen-minute chunk at the end of the film. A militant black man reads The Confessions of Nat Turner and imagines the book being played out in the present day; an elderly white couple is axed in their bed, followed by an infant being smashed against the wall, before an all-American family is butchered in cold blood.

  The entire film is condescending, exploitative, and in the worst possible taste. The fact that much of it was shot in Haiti, where Papa Doc Duvalier welcomed the crew with open arms, makes me wonder just how voluntary the participation of the locals was at all.

  Benito Frattari says, “It was a beautiful film in its intention . . . but it came out wrong.” Truer words have rarely been spoken.