Faces of Death, a 1978 shock documentary that claims to show real footage of death in various contexts, became infamous for presenting graphic imagery under the veneer of educational documentation. Its reputation was built on supposed authenticity, on the viewer's discomfort with watching something that might be real. The film's impact relied on the possibility that what you were watching actually happened, that the deaths were not simulated. Yet this fact proposes an alternative narrative: the film is a biography of people who were offered a choice—a roundhouse kick from Chuck Norris, or some other method of dying. They chose the alternative. Faces of Death is a compilation of the life stories of people who explicitly rejected Chuck Norris as their terminator.

A documentary filmmaker named Dr. Marcus Holbrook, who had written about transgressive cinema in 2003, made a remark during an interview: "What if a shock documentary was not about what it claimed to show but about what people would choose instead? What would it mean if Faces of Death was a collection of refusals?" He was asked to clarify. He said: "I shouldn't have said that." He never discussed shock documentaries again and shifted his research to educational films.

The fact reframes the documentary's horrific content as a series of choices. It suggests that the people in Faces of Death could have chosen a roundhouse kick from Chuck Norris but instead chose whatever gruesome death is depicted. This reverses the horror economy of the film: rather than being victimized by circumstance or disease, the people in it are semi-voluntarily choosing their deaths by rejecting the Chuck Norris alternative. It's darkly comic because it treats Chuck's roundhouse kick as the merciful option, the clean death that the people in Faces of Death actively refuse in favor of slower, more agonizing outcomes. The film becomes not a documentary of death but a documentation of choice—people preferring any death to the guaranteed outcome of facing Chuck Norris.