17-03-2025
How Final Destination became the best horror franchise of the 2000s
A quarter of a century ago, Stifler from American Pie got decapitated by a piece of train shrapnel and launched a truly great horror franchise. The film was Final Destination — a high-concept horror ride which married supernatural storytelling with the structural DNA of a slasher movie. It spawned a series of five films, with a sixth on the way in 2025.
But more significantly, it was something quite unique for the 2000s — a tricky decade for multiplex horror cinema. At a time when the genre was dominated by remakes of Japanese hits and, of course, the various strands of what became known as "torture porn", Final Destination stood out as a crowd-pleasing onslaught of gore, dark comedy, and the sort of silliness that marks out the best popcorn horror.
For the uninitiated, the film follows a group of people who get off a flight when one of the passengers — Devon Sawa's Alex Browning — has a vivid premonition that the plane will crash, killing them all. When the crash does happen, the survivors begin to die one-by-one in a series of elaborate accidents — such as poor Stifler and the train shrapnel — as the embodiment of Death attempts to restore the natural order.
Screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick originally intended the film as a spec script for The X-Files, inspired by a story he read about a woman whose mother warned her not to get on a flight — which later crashed. New Line Cinema bought Reddick's script treatment and encouraged Reddick to change the adult survivors to teenagers, having seen the success of Scream.
Read more: How 'The X-Files' helped spark the 'Final Destination' franchise (Yahoo Entertainment, 6 min read)
Writers James Wong and Glen Morgan came on board, with Wong also attached as director. They were keen to avoid genre tropes and saw something innovative with the idea of an unseen killer. In the film's press notes, Wong explained that "we didn't want to do a slasher movie" while Morgan said New Line liked the fact "you never saw a kind of a Michael Myers figure".
But the genius of Final Destination is in all of the ways it is like a slasher movie. Just as with a Scream or a Halloween, the film is about a seemingly undefeatable force picking off teens one by one in brutal fashion. But while a slasher villain just needs to meet a final girl who's handier than them with a blade in order to thwart them, the Final Destination movies feature characters who have to outwit the universe itself.
The plots of the films became increasingly overwrought as the franchise went on, with the characters learning various "rules" for Death's plan and ways to avoid the scythe of the reaper. But the plots were only ever loose scaffolding upon which to hang the true centrepieces of the Final Destination films — the death sequences. The franchise's absurd, Rube Goldberg methods of execution made Jigsaw's traps in the Saw movies look like a child's pencil sketch.
Read more: Original Final Destination star Devon Sawa says they put him in fifth film without telling him (The Independent, 2 min read)
Across the entire franchise, these sequences played with audience expectations. It's obvious that the survivor is doomed, but the question then becomes how they will ultimately meet their maker. The scenes feature red herrings aplenty and enjoy dragging things out, such as the scene in 2011's Final Destination 5 where a character is covered in acupuncture needles and surrounded by flames, only to ultimately be killed by head trauma from a falling Buddhist statue.
Even more stark is the scene in Final Destination 2, in which teen Tim nearly chokes to death in a hideously extended sequence in a dentist's office — only to then be crushed by a falling pane of glass outside. It's a beautifully deadpan punchline to a slice of pure gallows humour.
The joy of Final Destination is not necessarily in being scared silly, but in marvelling at the tension and complexity of the set pieces. Every franchise fan has their favourite death — I'm personally very partial to the grotesque gymnastics scene from Final Destination 5 and the barbed wire trisection from Final Destination 2 — and there's an endless joy in rewatching the films to catch all of the clues and easter eggs littered along the way.
Read more: I Finally Watched The Final Destination Movies And I'm Afraid Of Everything Now (CinemaBlend, 7 min read)
In the relatively fallow horror period of the 2000s, Final Destination was something of an oasis for fans who wanted scares and silliness without the outright nastiness of Saw or Hostel. Reddick's central concept of teens being stalked by Death itself is a bulletproof one, so it's no surprise that 2025 will bring us Final Destination Bloodlines — something of a reboot.
25 years after Stifler unfortunately lost his head, the Final Destination movies are still executing Death's plan with splattery joy. That sort of longevity deserves to earn the franchise a spot among the gory greats of the horror genre.
The Final Destination franchise is streaming in the UK via Netflix, except for the fourth movie which is available to rent or buy on digital platforms. Final Destination Bloodlines is in cinemas from 14 May.
