With its latest sequel in cinemas, we look back at the dark concept that has turned Final Destination into a 25-year-old franchise.
NB: The following contains spoilers for Final Destination (2000).
There’s a scene early in Final Destination where protagonist Alex (Devon Sawa) gets on a busy plane to Paris, and his best friend Todd (Chad Donella) looks around at the other passengers. In a misguided attempt to ease Alex’s fear of flying, Todd nods to a baby and says something to the effect of, “That’s a good sign – the younger the better. It’d be a fucked-up God to take down this plane.”
It’s a disposable-sounding line that, in retrospect, sums up the terrifying universe that Final Destination has built up over its 25 years as a film franchise. From the earliest scenes in director James Wong’s horror, released in 2000, it establishes a plane of existence where there is only the illusion of freewill – and where the supreme being that controls everything is indeed pretty fucked up.
If you’re reading this, you probably know the premise by now: Alex has a premonition that the plane he’s on is going to explode mid-flight, killing everyone aboard. He’s dragged off the plane shouting and raving, along with a handful of other teens (plus one teacher) caught in the fracas. As they bicker in the airport lounge, the jumbo jet promptly explodes in mid-air, prompting a mixture of fear and suspicion among Alex’s classmates. Does he have supernatural powers? Was it a coincidence? Or, as the FBI suspects, did he have something to do with the explosion itself?
While Alex is both ostracised by his peers and scrutinised by grown-ups, his fellow survivors begin dying in what seem like freak accidents. By getting off the plane, Alex disrupted Death’s plan, and so the unseen force is now targeting the passengers in the exact order in which they were originally supposed to die. Final Destination’s suspense then springs from an underlying question: can Alex and his friends avoid death, or is their fate inescapable?
As AJ Black’s piece already explored, Final Destination began life as an unused spec script for The X-Files, written by Reddick. One of the smartest things Wong and co-writer Glen Morgan did, in adapting the short script into a feature, was recast most of the characters as teenagers. With this one move, Final Destination becomes an allegory for a particular moment in a young person’s life when they realise that the grave is inescapable. If, as Stephen King once said, horror is a “rehearsal for death,” the Final Destination turns it into a bleakly amusing game of cat-and-mouse.
Death is a common enough subject in slasher horror, but here, the transformation of the killer from a physical entity to an unseen force shoves Final Destination into a more metaphysical arena. It is, in essence, The Omen for a younger generation, with that earlier film’s gory, absurdly elaborate deaths ported over as part of the mix.
Behind those bloody deaths, there are a set of rules, as laid out with brilliant matter-of-factness by Tony Todd, who guest stars as a mortician named Bludworth. Death has a plan, he says – an unseen pattern which determines how, when and where everybody dies. “The risk of cheating the plan, or disrespecting the design,” he warns, “could trigger a fury that would terrorise even the Grim Reaper. And you don’t even want to fuck with that mack daddy.”
Alex and his friends, of course, witness that fury themselves as their deaths become more bizarre and more frequent. But Bludworth’s warning also highlights a seeming contradiction in Final Destination’s story: if Death’s plan is meant to be hidden, then why is Alex having his premonitions? Like Neo in The Matrix, Alex has the unique ability to see flashes of the pattern behind his version of reality. But as Final Destination nears its end, it becomes clear that the premonitions serve no real purpose – they simply prolong a survivor’s life by a few days in which they live in fear and paranoia, before they’re killed in a slower, more grisly way than Death originally planned.
The suggestion, seemingly, is that Death and the entity that gives Alex his visions are one and the same. Whatever name you choose to call it, the being that oversees the Final Destination universe is the ultimate slasher killer – hinting at the reality of freewill, toying with its victims, before mercilessly killing them in the most grotesque way it can think of. Let’s face it, Death could easily bide its time and let its victims die of old age; instead, it has the seeming compulsion to kill them almost right away and then make the whole scenario look like an accident. It’s the Grim Reaper as a Mafia-style assassin.
Final Destination emerged during a cycle of self-aware slasher movies popularised by Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and, in particular, 1996’s Scream. Those films revived a flagging genre by injecting a sliver of post-modernism: Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson not only wrote his story for fans who knew a lot about horror movies, but populated the script itself with characters who knew they were in a slasher.
Whether they did so consciously or not, the writers of Final Destination turned this concept on its head: the film’s characters are entirely unaware that they’re fictional characters who exist to be terrorised and ultimately killed by a godlike screenwriter. Said screenwriters even leave clues as to their world’s artificial nature by giving all their characters the same surnames as famous film directors – Murnau, Hitchcock, Shreck, and so forth. Alex may see glimpses of what fate has in store, but he never quite sees the whole truth. That’s probably for the best.
Critics were dismissive of Final Destination in 2000, but the response from audiences was enthusiastic enough to turn it into a franchise with five sequels and counting. Perhaps younger audiences warmed to the blackly comic way it handled weighty, even existentialist themes: the inevitability of death, fate versus free will.
For movie-goers in their late teens and early 20s, facing an uncertain future of work, adulthood and the distant spectre of death, Final Destination may even offer a weird sort of comfort. As terrifying and uncertain as our existence might be, we can at least be grateful we aren’t Alex and his friends, trapped in a dimension where its god terrorises and murders its inhabitants for kicks.
Bludworth himself puts it best, perhaps. “We’re just a mouse a cat has by the tail,” he rumbles. “It’s all part of Death’s sadistic design, leading to the grave.”
Final Destination: Bloodlines is out in UK cinemas now.
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