Okay so if you know me you know I have a deeply unhealthy fascination with cult horror. The weirder and more uncomfortable, the better. So when I saw that the Faces of Death reboot is finally getting a physical release, I was immediately like... yeah I need to talk about this.

The reboot is heading to Blu-ray and DVD on September 30. It's rated R and stars Barbie Ferreira and Dacre Montgomery. If you watched Stranger Things, yeah, that's Billy. The guy who somehow made an abusive mind-controlled jock charismatic. He's got range, what can I say.

For the uninitiated, the original Faces of Death from 1978 is one of those movies your weird older cousin would tell you about at a family gathering and you'd be like "that can't be real." And like... it wasn't, mostly. It was a mix of real footage and staged sequences that became this whole underground phenomenon because people thought it was genuine. Sold on VHS at flea markets and passed around like forbidden treasure. My grandma Elizabeth has stories about the moral panic around stuff like this, and the lore is almost better than the movie itself.

So the reboot isn't trying to just remake that beat for beat. It takes the concept and builds an actual narrative around it, which I appreciate because let's be real, the original is more of a curiosity than a genuinely good film. Ferreira plays a content moderator who's haunted by a viral tragedy. That's already a way more interesting angle than just replaying the greatest hits of the original. It's very meta, very now, and honestly kind of unnerving in how it maps onto our current relationship with shock content online and the stuff people have to look at all day for work.

Dacre Montgomery is in this too and he does that thing he does where he's simultaneously terrifying and weirdly magnetic. The guy knows how to play unsettling without tipping into cartoonish. Every time he's on screen you're just waiting for something to go wrong.

Dante would probably tell me this is the kind of movie that benefits from a packed midnight screening with a crowd of weirdos, and... he'd be right. I just admitted that. Don't tell him. The communal energy of watching something transgressive with a room full of people who showed up specifically for that experience is genuinely unmatched, and I'll keep saying that until theaters stop existing.

No word yet on what special features the physical release will include, but for a movie like this you'd hope they throw in some behind-the-scenes context. We'll see.

You can read more details about the release over at the original report on MSN.

Is this going to be everyone's thing? Absolutely not. But if you have any interest in the history of underground cinema, viral shock culture, or just want to see what happens when you take a flea market VHS oddity and give it an actual budget, this is worth your time.