Isa Mazzei is a writer and filmmaker best known for Blumhouse’s hit Come and Neon’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Her memoir “Camgirl” was named one of NPR’s “Books We Love.” She is the co-writer and executive producer of “Faces of Death,” which was just released by IFC Films. Here, Mazzei shares “Tetris,” an essay he wrote about millennials, the advent of digital violence, and what it means to be a bystander to trauma. – Matt Donnelly
The man slowly bled out, and a metal fence protruded from his ruptured abdomen. His mouth opens and closes like a fish, and there is a small drop of blood at the corner of his lips. I go to the DM thread, which I have open in a tab.
“Hello, I’m a producer of a feature film. I’m licensing content for use in the film, and I would like to know if you own this video and if you know the victim’s name.”
No, it’s not. Remove the word “victim” and replace it with “man.” I turn to my friend and production assistant Paris Peterson. Is he a curator of snuff films? The title has not been decided yet.
“Is this person a man? Can you tell?”
In early 2023, Daniel Goldhaber and I will be adapting the 1978 cult hit The Face of Death. Our film adaptation centers around a content moderator who spends his days cleaning up the worst of the worst content on the internet. I’m tasked with procuring what it is.
People start to associate me with snuff. Two years later, after Charlie Kirk was shot, multiple friends would send me uncensored videos. The day after it happened, I received the Charlie Kirk video – September 11, 2025. I find this useful because the latest virus deaths parallel the anniversary of my first encounter with the virus so closely. Like many millennials, my relationship with digital death began when I was 10 years old and saw people jumping off the World Trade Center. A few inches away from the television, I tried to understand what was being said. Each and every one of those stains was a human being.
Years later, when I was in middle school, I watched my first beheading on LiveLeak. Those images were truly shocking. My friend and I asked quietly. “Why don’t you check it out in the library during your lunch break?” We watched the painfully slow process of cutting through the bone with a knife, horrified at how excited it was. “I always thought it would be easier to decapitate people,” we said, as if this was something we had thought twice about. I grew up in Colorado during the aftermath of 9/11 and the site of the Columbine school shooting. I grew up scared. As I watched people die huddled around my old, clunky desktop, it felt like a necessary ritual, a talisman to protect me. I remember searching for monsters in the corners of dark rooms at night. “If you can see it, you can’t hurt me.”
Isa Mazzei, co-writer of “The Face of Death.”
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The original “Faces of Death” claimed to be a documentary and ushered in the rise of viral video. A narrator in a lab coat leads the viewer through a collection of snuff films. The VHS release was extremely popular, despite the warning (promise?) on the cover that it was “banned in some countries.” There were whispers about it at sleepovers and various rumors, but when I first saw it, I thought it didn’t live up to its reputation. I’ve seen a lot of real snuff, so I know that most of the videos are staged, which was confirmed by the film’s producers, but at least one video includes an actual corpse.
While researching this film, Daniel and I listened to a podcast about people hired by social media sites to review content that was flagged as explicit. The podcast investigated whether watching this content on a daily and weekly basis could cause actual PTSD, even though the host remained safely behind a screen. DSM says yes, but only if the job is done. The DSM-5 criteria for PTSD clearly states that the diagnosis of PTSD “does not apply to exposure to electronic media, television, movies, or photographs, unless this exposure is work-related.”1
In 2021, a year after writing the film adaptation, I’m sitting on the couch when my phone vibrates. “Are you seeing this?” text comes from many places at once. I’ll be livestreaming from the parking lot of a King Soopers grocery store, a half-mile from my alma mater. It’s the grocery store where my first boyfriend bought me my first Cherry Garcia ice cream, and it’s the grocery store where I was once bitten by a little Chihuahua. That’s the grocery store where my friend’s parents and several of her neighbors are about to die. I feel like I’m doing something wrong even though I’m just watching the witness’ live stream. I can’t take my eyes off you. I think something worse would happen if you did that. I don’t think anything worse could happen.
“When you think about it, it’s a mess,” Daniel said two years later on set in New Orleans. “You have to go through all the legal loopholes to show a real death in a feature film, but on Instagram you can show it. What is that?” He’s right. In order for a movie studio to make money from real-life violence, it first has to be discussed in a room full of lawyers, contracts written, and disclaimers drawn up. But social media companies make money from ads, not videos directly. They can hide their responsibilities. In many ways, I realized, this is what we mean by “the face of death.”
I’m thinking about the most violent video I’ve seen online. U.S. Army veteran Ronald Merle McNutt is sitting at his desk. He has a dark leather jacket, a long curly beard, and a rifle. His last words were harsh. He put the rifle to his chin and pulled the trigger. The technical definition of snuff is a death video made for profit, but this is not it. But the fact remains that companies are profiting from it. Daniel and I decided it was important to confront people with the nature of online snuff by changing the context. I want to talk about the depersonalization that screens can cause. We want to create a feeling of being complicit in something bad. I want the audience to leave the theater feeling mixed and maybe even a little angry.
We have to find the real dead.
I start with Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and 4Chan.
I found a video of a man with his mouth open like a fish.
Paris barely looks. “Is that the Russian Impaler? I already emailed him, and he’s dead.” If the person dies, it’s even harder to release him. I would have to hunt down my next of kin. “I think you can blur his face.” I remove the part in the message that says I know the victim and simply ask if @username is the rightful owner of this video. I close my laptop.
Sometimes I think it’s better not to know whether the person is alive or dead.
Driving home through the rainy streets of New Orleans. In the dim dusk, everything looks like a corpse. A man was electrocuted in the third fence, and the current is causing the corpse to convulse. A small child thrown between the bear’s paws. A woman lying face down, covered in blood and mud.
I wonder if it’s possible to create a monster story using monsters. I watch these videos at work. Does that mean that DSM-5 applies to me as well?
The next day, while waiting in line at craft services, Paris told me she had found a website called NewsFlare. Its collection includes videos of violent accidents. Being a news website, everything is legally licensed. There’s a train wreck, a car crash, an animal attack, an industrial accident, a fire, and I fill my plate with scrambled eggs, hash browns, and hot sauce. I don’t have any trouble eating because I’m no longer shaken by death. I decided this wasn’t a good thing, but I don’t have time to think about it because I have to finish the movie. As long as everything is legal, you can say you just did your best. right?
Around the time I was hired to make “The Face of Death,” a study was done that imaged the brains of military veterans before and after they played Tetris. The results showed an increase in hippocampal volume, suggesting that playing Tetris could be an effective adjunctive treatment for PTSD. This builds on previous research that found that playing Tetris in the emergency room immediately after a traumatic accident reduced the amount of traumatic intrusive thoughts after the accident. The theory is that it works by disrupting the integration of the sensory components of a traumatic memory. Subsequent research has suggested that it may not only influence the formation of traumatic memories, but may even be therapeutic.
In the summer of 2025, our film finished production. I’m visiting my hometown. My mom and I stop at the King Soopers grocery store. I haven’t been there since the shooting. As you walk through the door, you are greeted with cold air and the chemical smell of bread in plastic bags. The store is busier than expected and you end up shopping in a hurry. Back in the car, I tab from YouTube to Instagram on my phone and scroll through the stories. “The sixth mass extinction is worse than previously predicted, and this time it’s entirely human-caused!” Scroll. “The perfect night for beetroot gnocchi.” Scroll. “POV: I found the bikini of my dreams.” Scroll. “A Belarusian tourist attacked an Iranian toddler at a Moscow airport, leaving the child in a coma.” A blurry video shows a man slamming the child onto a hard, shiny floor. As I pulled out of the King Soopers parking lot, I realized that I had forgotten to have a profound experience.
In Feminist Tech, Nima Gizeh uses the term “data trauma” (a term first coined by Olivia Ross) to describe the impact of scrolling through your feed and encountering images of violence alongside memes and selfies. That’s the palpable feeling you get when you watch a mass shooting under a YouTube banner ad for Dove deodorant (“Aluminum-free now!”). I remember scrolling through my Twitter feed a few years ago. I saw my favorite artist’s suicide note written under a meme about eggs. “I’m away now, thank you.” Githere envisions a framework for recovery from this particular type of trauma, and thus offers a sign of hope. “We may not normalize this.”
I think of all the people I paid to license videos of accidents, dismemberments, deaths, etc. In the end, we decided not to show the faces of the people who actually died, but instead to mainly show accidents in places where people live. We would have debated the ethics of this for hours as well. King Soopers was closed for several months after the shooting, and balloons, flowers and stuffed bears were lined up on the side of the road. When they renovated and reopened, they described it as resilience and strength in the face of adversity.
Don’t give in to fear! Avocado is on sale for a limited time today.
You may not want to normalize this.
(Do you have one?)
Today we will watch the video of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I think of the hundreds of images I have seen over the past few years, of starvation, of genocide, of brothers carrying their dead brothers in plastic bags. I am not paid to watch these videos. This distinction is absurd. I saw death every day. I have seen death taken out of context, cut from its roots, placed in neat square boxes between advertisements and pictures of friends. I watch Charlie Kirk videos over and over again. I can’t take my eyes off it, because watching it is magical. What monster am I trying to protect myself from? I finally close my phone and open my laptop.
Open your browser and search for the game.
I’ll play Tetris just in case.
