With Final Destination: Bloodlines on the horizon, we look back at The X-Files spec script that eventually became the first movie.
Arriving in May 2000, Final Destination immediately struck a chord as an inventive teen horror. Rather than a hulking, silent monster stalking pretty young things, the villain here is Death itself, whose design purposefully stalks until perpetuating an array of ghoulish, even outlandish deaths.
What’s less well-known about director and co-writer James Wong’s film is its origin story. The concept was initially pitched as an episode of The X-Files, Chris Carter’s iconic paranormal investigation series that captured the 90s zeitgeist. Jeffrey Reddick was an emerging writer at the time who, as he told Bloody Disgusting in 2011, had the idea for what became Final Destination following a spooky personal experience.
“I was actually flying home to Kentucky,” Reddick said, “and I read this story about a woman who was on vacation in Hawaii and her mom called her and said, ‘Don’t take the flight tomorrow, I have a really bad feeling about it. She switched flights and the plane that she would have been on crashed. I thought, that’s creepy – what if she was supposed to die on that flight?”
It was the perfect concept to pitch, at the time, to Carter’s show as a ‘spec script’, and Reddick did just that in 1994. The episode he wrote was called Flight 180 – a name that remained when it was initially reworked into a movie.
Reddick’s X-Files script thankfully survived and is available online – and in comparing the two, it becomes clear that writer Glen Morgan, who with director Wong worked to reshape the script for a cinema audience, retained plenty of its ideas in the eventual film.
Flight 180 features a ‘cold open’ – a pre-credits sequence which establishes the central paranormal event agents Mulder and Scully will investigate. It’s something that was kept in the opening act of the Final Destination movie.
In Flight 180, we’re introduced to its central characters, including Monica and Josh, a warring young couple, a 30-something chap named Aaron, and older couple Thomas and Elizabeth. There’s also Charles Scully, one of Dana Scully’s brothers who The X-Files only ever characterised in the background during their father’s funeral scene. Charles is the Alex character with the vision that Devon Sawa portrays in the movie.
Once Flight 180 crashes, the old couple die in a house fire and the script describes Monica’s sinister death on a train line. Mulder and Scully arrive and the traditional structure of an X-Files outing begins – car journey, establishing set up that makes Mulder start to think something weird is happening, a cantankerous local Sheriff grumpy at the FBI being involved, and so forth.
Naturally, by virtue of being an episode of a series with a traditional structure, ‘Flight 180’ scales back on the depiction of the plane survivors in favour of Mulder and Scully’s investigation. Reddick’s reason for including Charles is largely to suggest a possible psychic ability in the Scully family and to see Scully ponder leaving Mulder and the X-Files behind, worried these investigations are destroying her family. That places this episode during the third season, given that it references the murder of Dana’s sister Melissa at the hand of the sinister conspirators, which occurred at the start of that season.
Not to get too bogged down in dates, but this placement makes Reddick’s claim to have written Flight 180 in 1994 as unlikely, given the third season didn’t begin until the autumn of 1995. Nonetheless, Flight 180 wants to be as much a ‘mythology’ story within the series as it does explore the idea of Death’s design – an aspect that only truly materialises in the final act with any specificity. Indeed, Reddick almost wrong-foots his reader in suggesting a sinister ‘FBI agent’ (in fact working for the mysterious Cigarette-Smoking Man) might be causing the deaths.
Read more: The X-Files | What could Ryan Coogler do with a new series?
You can on some level understand why the script never made it into production. It would have needed a re-write to fit the nature of Carter’s show, probably to phase out Scully’s fraternal link and the mythology aspects so it could focus on the idea that Morgan and Wong eventually saw the potential in: Death not just as an inevitability, a ‘final destination’, but a malign force. Though Reddick was ultimately tickled pink to be developing the idea with two of his favourite writers from The X-Files, Wong made the point to Variety of why the approach for a movie needed to differ:
“Exploring [this premise] as an X-Files episode, you would be concentrating on Mulder and Scully and how they react to [a series of deaths] – and they had to survive,” he said. “But as a movie, the main thing is that you had the time and the budget to make something spectacular that really drew the audience in and give them the surprises you want. In a TV show that’s almost impossible.”
Though multiple drafts transformed the idea into the Final Destination movie that kickstarted a 25 year-old (and counting) franchise, Morgan and Wong ensured the resultant film includes nods to both The X-Files and classic horror of old. The film is festooned with actors who appeared on the TV show, such as Kristen Cloke (Morgan’s real-life wife), who appeared even more memorably on Chris Carter’s lesser-known but equally brilliant 90s esoteric thriller, Millennium.
Then there are the two FBI agents who end up hunting Alex, one of whom is considered ‘spooky’ in his nature (a soubriquet often landed at Mulder’s door). Morgan and Wong name almost every character after a horror director or actor of legend – Browning, Hitchcock, (Valerie) Lewton, Waggner, Murnau, Scheck, the list goes on. The movie was even filmed in Vancouver, the spiritual home of The X-Files, even after the plot’s setting was relocated to New York The legacy of the show and the horror credentials within are baked into almost every frame of Final Destination.
And though The X-Files never made Flight 180, Vince Gilligan – he of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul fame – later wrote Tithonus, a melancholic hour about a crime scene photographer who tries to capture Death just as it takes a soul. That way, he can finally die, Death having missed him the first time around over a century earlier.
It’s proof that the Grim Reaper will always be fertile ground for horror and, in part, why the spectre of the Final Destination franchise has never entirely moved on to the next life.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his podcasts and books, via Linktr.ee here. Don’t miss him on The X-Cast: An X-Files Podcast and Modern Horror on the Film Stories Podcast Network too.
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