(Not so) Final Destination?
With the sixth episode in the famous series said to be released in 2025, Nina Romain looks at the appeal of seeing every single one of the characters in a horror getting picked off in new and poetic ways, as they attempt to dodge death.
Like a good graphic death scene? Then if you’ve watched any horror this century, you’ll probably remember a few from the notorious horror series Final Destination, which started in 2000 with the infamous exploding plane en route to Paris which led to the sequel’s even-more-graphic logging truck motorway death scene.
There are suggestions on IMDB that next year will see the sixth movie released, tentatively titled Final Destination: Bloodlines. If this is correct, this will be the first FD movie in 14 years, released 25 years after the original. The online rumourmill has it that the opening disaster may be a revolving rooftop restaurant on top of a skyscraper which collapses, and another sequence involving a premonition with a revolving door.
If you’re starring in Final Destination, your chance of dodging the grim Reaper are slender, to say the least. Your chances of dying are extremely good, and include: drowning by getting sucked into a swimming pool drainage hole, falling off the top of a malfunctioning rollercoaster, getting your leg trapped in a moving staircase, getting into a lift with a creepy guy carrying a box full of artificial limbs, and getting a safety ladder fall from above to go straight through your skull via your eye. Other ways you might meet your maker are via the famous lorry carrying logs on a freeway, and getting neatly sliced in three sections by flying barbed wire fence in a field (FD2).
London’s Picturehouse recently offered an all-nighter of the famous death-ridden series, screening all five in chronological order (FD, FD2, FD3, The Final Destination and FD5). They entertainingly promised an “all-night good time that you’d cheat death to be at (be it death by plane, car, rollercoaster, or worryingly precarious suspension bridge)”.
So what’s the appeal of these “sometimes ridiculous, always ridiculously enjoyable ‘00s horror franchise” as offered by Picturehouse?
Psychologist, specialising in personality and behaviour, Donna Dawson offers some thoughts on as to why this type of horror is so appealing:
“Watching people get picked off one by one in a horror film gives us a variety of sensations: first, there is the suspense we experience as we try to guess which character is next and how each of them will meet their grisly death. And characters that we don’t like, meet their deserved end with a sense of justice served.
Dawson adds: “Also, being outside of the action allows us to deal with our own mortality indirectly, as we can experience the relief that it is ‘not us’. Third, the surge of adrenaline we feel does a lot to sharpen our sense of ‘fight or flight’, which can make us more cautious about our own safety until this sensation wears off.”
Final Destination continues to inspire horror directors, as this year’s horror Tarot plot reveals. Although based around a pack of tarot cards, the reading leads to the gang of friends getting picked off one by one with gory warnings just beforehand, just as FD did. One character sees a discarded newspaper with the scaremongering headline “You Die Today” above a front-page picture of themselves, before a Final Destination style death picks them off one by one. A character even perishes with the same ladder through the head as FD2 used.
Paxton, the only truly likeable character, is seen to have survived, which smacks of a hasty reshoot after negative feedback. This is opposite to the original FD which had a “happy ending” where the leads survived before… before the test screening showed what a horror audience really want is a good gory ending, leading to the famous death-by-electric-sign.
Is there any reason why Final Destination is still around a quarter of a century later? One argument is that it’s horror with smarts, with some tiny, articulate touches. Just before the aforementioned ladder/eye death in FD2, the character Evan is in his kitchen making a snack. He completely ignores the fridge’s tiny stick on letters arranged to read “EYE” as a grim premonition of his own death, as well as the letter “H” which will resemble the death-dealing ladder.
So as we wait for a new instalment of the Grim Reaper coming to life next year, if (like Kimberly Corman in F2) you ever hear Highway to Hell on the car radio while driving…why not pull over to avoid any large lorries overtaking you with a load of huge, badly-secured freshly hewn trees?