It would be one thing if death was content to just go about its business with a sense of cold and clinical professionalism but the Final Destination movies suggest that instead, it takes a great level of glee in constructing a series of elaborate and macabre traps.
Death would remain at large for the rest of time and while we might be able to cheat it once, maybe even twice, it will keep coming and coming and coming until it bumps us off.
There was no cathartic finale to leave us feeling safe and satisfied. This wasn’t a villain who could be brought down in a blaze of bullets. While the film made waves for its deviously well-modulated shocks ( one of which was so effective that the makers had to insert an extended introduction to the next scene as test audiences needed time to calm down), what struck me at the time, and more so with every next rewatch, was the sheer hopelessness of it all, the brutal unambiguousness of its conceit: death is coming for us and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Photograph: United Archives GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo As a 15 year old at the time, I was enthralled as I watched and then faintly terrified in the months after.Īli Larter in Final Destination. Dismissed by some at the time as a “dramatically flat” scrap of nonsense made by “contemptuous” film-makers, it was Roger Ebert who provided one of the few voices of dissent, recognising the appeal of the film’s “biblical” dilemma and its “unusual substance”. A teen has a premonition that his flight to Paris will explode mid-air but finds out that by abandoning the plane with a random assortment of peers, a plan has been interrupted and the Grim Reaper must find gruesome ways to redress the imbalance.Īnd so began a formula that was regurgitated over the span of another four sequels as unintended survivors of a tragedy were picked off one-by-one in a series of freak “accidents”, each one nastier than the last. The set-up remains an underappreciated stroke of genius. This week marks the 20th anniversary and my (probable) 20th rewatch of Final Destination, a compellingly nasty yet darkly humorous film about the crushing inescapability of death. But there’s another that’s been part of my life for even longer and despite its comparative silliness, it’s arguably had a more profound grip, spookily re-entering my mind at strange times such as these.
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