Editor's Note: Scary Movies

If you’re of a certain age—I’m looking primarily at you, Gen Xers—you will recall the 1978 film Faces of Death. The pseudo-documentary purports to show real-life fatalities, homicides, and accidents, presenting a series of disturbing scenes ranging from animal slaughter to human executions to footage of a skydiver hitting the ground when his chute fails to open. Though its authenticity has been questioned, some of the scenes were clearly real and Faces of Death sparked controversy and ethical debate about depicting such graphic content on screen.

I was not yet 10 when the shockumentary was released. The videocassette, kept behind the counter at the local video store, became a dark talisman for me and my friends, an alternative form of pornography that was even worse than pornography. But how could that be? Wasn’t porn the most dreaded form of content there was, despite the fact that most of our dads had collections of skin mags stored somewhere?

When we found out that Faces of Death was referred to as a “snuff film”—and had the term explained to us—it was all the more thrilling. What if we saw the film and it sparked a bloodlust in one of us that turned him into a serial killer? Jinkies! Well, that was the kind of chance we were ready to take. We were okay with those odds, because clearly if anybody was gonna go full psycho it would be weird Stephen Remdy, who wet his pants in class the year before.

We spent the next five years conspiring to watch Faces of Death, trying to come up with ways to outsmart the teenage video store clerk who refused to rent us R movies like Blazing Saddles and seemed to take a perverse delight in denying us access to the embargoed material we deeply desired.

It was Kevin Dumont’s older brother Moley who ultimately snagged it for us. (I couldn’t tell you what his real name is anymore; he’s frozen in amber as Moley to me.) Moley had a large mole on his right cheek and was big for his age, a 16-year-old with a Tom Selleck mustache who wore sleeveless T-shirts and spent most of his time underneath a beat-up black Camaro with racing stripes that never left the Dumont driveway. He looked like he might be 20 if you squinted hard.

As for the film, it was as gruesome and gross as advertised. The kind of thing you wish you hadn’t seen the instant you saw it. Nothing prepared us for it. Especially not what happened to the baby monkey, whether that scene was real or faked.

(Certainly not the one dead body I had seen up to this point, that of Duchess, our border collie who was the spitting image of Lassie. I must have been four or five years old when I found her in the kitchen one morning, a halo of blood framing her head like a religious icon in one of those pre-Renaissance paintings that lack proper perspective. The color of the blood was deep crimson, almost black. I would remember years later while reading The Odyssey and coming across Homer’s description of the Aegean: “the wine-dark sea.”)

My friends and I made it through the film—barely. Stephen Remdy gagged a few times but didn’t wet himself. When it was over, we stumbled out of Kevin Dumont’s dank basement into the bright afternoon, twitchy with unease, gulping lungfuls of wholesome summer sunshine. We’d done it. We had seized the dark talisman, seen what we should not have seen, watched a snuff film. Something I hoped not to repeat.

This episode came back to me recently as I was editing an article for the current issue, “Can We Fix Mental Health Crisis Response?” by Steven Yoder. Over the past decade, counties across the Hudson Valley have been rolling out mobile mental health teams, clinicians paired with an emergency medical technician or peer caseworker to respond to people in crisis. This is an alternative to the old model of mental health response: Police attending to all 911 calls. Which leads to inevitable outcomes: nationwide, there were 104-police involved shootings of someone in the midst of a mental health crisis in 2022. When mobile mental health teams are allowed to respond, shootings drop dramatically. Eugene, Oregon has been deploying two-person crisis response teams since 1989. In 2019, police were called in as back-up on just over one percent of the 24,000 calls they responded to.

Ulster County mobile mental health teams date back to 2014, but they still respond to a fraction of the calls police do, like in the case of Ellenville resident Daniel McAlpin on September 9, 2022. Yoder’s article goes into detail describing the tragic events that followed the police entering the McAlpin house that day.

While fact-checking the piece, I read that New York State Attorney General Letitia James was conducting an investigation into the death of 41-year-old McAlpin. I then made the mistake of Googling “Daniel McAlpin Attorney General investigation.” This took me to a page on the AG’s website with two videos of bodycam footage from officers involved in the shooting.

I clicked on one of the videos without thinking and watched a tense standoff with an unstable civilian turn increasingly dire and then deadly. I saw the police shoot McAlpin five times. I don’t encourage you to watch it. It’s frankly shocking to see. So was the eight minutes and 46 seconds captured on video of police killing George Floyd. And the footage of police killing Tyre Nichols. And. And. And. The list goes on. Say all of their names. We’re all consumers of snuff films now, whether we want to be or not. Unlike Faces of Death, it’s a moral imperative not to look away.