Final Destination

"In death there are no accidents, no coincidences, no mishaps, and no escapes."

Usually, when people talk about movies that changed their life, they mean it in a positive, almost inspirational way. This franchise has changed my life in terms of dictating actions, like drive behind a logging truck or hop into a tanning bed, that I just straight up will never do.

Includes spoilers!

Full, upfront disclosure: I absolutely adore this franchise. It’s probably my favorite when it comes to horror movies. I love the creativity when it comes to the kills, I love that our overarching enemy is Death itself, I really love Tony Todd’s recurring presence as William Bludworth, and I especially love the big premonition set piece that happens at the beginning of each movie.

Since Final Destination Bloodlines is coming out this May, I thought I’d catch up on all of the others, starting with the very first one.

For anyone who has not seen the movie, the premise is very simple. Alex, a highschool student, is about to leave on a class trip to France when he suddenly has a premonition that the plane is going to explode and kill everyone on board. His understandable panic over this leads to him, a few students, and a teacher surviving the disaster, only for Death itself to start picking them off one by one through a series of freak accidents.

No matter what you do or how hard you try, you can’t cheat Death.

Final Destination has a very different tone than the rest. It originally started as a spec script for The X-Files, and you can definitely still see the bones of it. The two FBI Agents could easily be swapped in for Mulder and Scully. The focus isn’t on elaborate Rube Goldberg style kills (minus one notable exception) as much as it is on the emotional toll that comes with knowing that your death is right around the corner.

The time skip between the initial disaster and the rest of the plot means that the characters have a chance to live with the survivor’s guilt. We get Carter’s helpless anger and Lewton’s overwhelming guilt instead of the pragmatic adrenaline of trying to avoid Death.

It makes for a very somber movie where even sunny days are grey. There’s no glee in the kills or relishing the aftermath. There’s simply horror and trauma and grief. Honestly, it comes off as a little pretentious at times, mainly whenever Clear is onscreen.

Her name is literally Clear Rivers. It’s hard to not be pretentious with a name like that.

Still, it’s the kind of pretentiousness that I don’t entirely hate. The repeated flight numbers or John Denver makes for fun signposting, and helps to hammer in the idea of inescapable fate. Even if you manage to get Death to skip you, it’s always going to come back. And it will arrange things so that even if the main highlights are different, the tiny details remain the same. Honestly, it’s a level of petty detail that I aspire to.

There’s some really fun camera tricks and set dressing that add to this oppressive atmosphere of unease. It’s most noticeable when everyone is waiting at the airport following the explosion. Everything is just slightly skewed. Not enough to be obvious, but enough for your brain to pick up on the fact that something is fundamentally wrong. It’s a great way to put the audience in the mindset of the characters.

As for the characters themselves, they’re all well drawn. Devon Sawa is excellent as Alex, and makes for a very likable protagonist. Sure, I question his intelligence in places (Why would you ever pick up that knife?!) but I’m rooting for him to survive.

I wound up enjoying Carter, played by Kerr Smith, more than I expected. In my previous watches, he was just a dumb bully. This time around, I grew to appreciate the emotional journey that he went on. His insistence that he was the only one who got to choose when he died resonated with me.

Tony Todd was only there for a few minutes, but any scene that he’s in is immediately better for it. He carried a playful menace that very few actors could ever hope to match.

When it comes to the kills, there’s plenty to be happy with here. You get a wide variety of sudden shockers, dread-drenched tragedy, and continuously escalating ridiculousness without fully crossing the line into cartoonishness. While there’s blood and gore, nothing feels over the top or exploitative. Honestly, the one detail that made me the queasiest to the point of cringing away from the screen was seeing petitical hemorrhaging.

Tod’s death stuck with me the most out of any of the others. Honestly, it probably is up there for Top Three Deaths in the franchise for me. There’s something so incredibly tragic, but also very real about how it happened.

I’m never going to carry my cracked mug full of dripping alcohol over to my computer so that it explodes, sets my home on fire, and ultimately leads to me dropping a knife straight into my chest. (Yes, this is the notable exception that I mentioned earlier.) But I could very easily slip on a wet tile and get a cord wrapped around my neck.

Tod’s death and the build up to it is arguably the strongest sequence in the movie. We know that something bad is going to happen. We just don’t know what. Remember, the franchise rules haven’t been established yet. Tod is our introduction to Death as an antagonist.

And Death is patient. It’s subtle. It’s the wind gently closing the bathroom door so that Tod is isolated. It’s the tiny drops of water that slowly spread across the floor. All of this happens independently of anything Tod is doing, but his every action suddenly now carries the weight of a highwire act.

Even after seeing this movie multiple times, I still jump when he nicks himself with the razor. And then the scissors! Not only near his face but in his nose? No! Absolutely not! I was waiting for him to slip and accidentally impale them into his brain! And then he messes with the radio, and all I can picture is that one scene in Bride of Chucky with the TV and the bathtub and it’s all just very stressful.

And then the actual death happens, and it isn’t quick. The entire sequence is roughly three minutes, and we watch Tod struggle for about half of it. The camera lingers. It shows all of it. Death is subtle and patient, but it isn’t kind.

The part that always affected me the most, though, was how his family would spend the rest of their lives thinking that he had taken his own life instead of it simply being a tragic accident. This is the only time that Death cleans up after itself, and I’m glad that they dropped that moving forward. It was too tragic.

Thankfully, the other deaths aren’t as emotionally upsetting. They’re shocking, sometimes ridiculous, but more fun. That’s the direction that future movies embrace, so if this one was a little too dark for you, that’s okay. This is the most serious a Final Destination movie will ever be.

Random Thoughts

No, one of the FBI agents is not called Agent Shrek. His name is Schreck, after the German actor Max Schreck, who is most famous for playing Count Orlok in the original Nosferatu. Final Destination actually predated Shrek by a year.

Many characters are named after famous horror movie actors, writers, and directors. Billy Hitchcock is probably the most obvious one.

It was weird watching this in a post 9/11 world. Someone screaming that the plane was going to explode would have gotten a different reaction today.

My favorite trivia fact about this movie is that test audiences were so shocked by the “Drop dead!” scene that they literally had to add a minute of meaningless filler to give them time to calm down. That is why there’s that really weird scene of Alex and Clear drinking water.

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An Honest Fangirl loves video games, horror movies, and superheroes, and occasionally manages to put words together in a coherent and pleasing manner.

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