[COLUMN] Final Destination Was a Horror Franchise for the End of History | by Darren Mooney

Note: The final few paragraphs of this article include some discussion of Final Destination: Bloodlines, the latest entry in the Final Destination film franchise. It’s not great, unfortunately, but if you want to remain unspoiled, it might be worth bookmarking this article and coming back to it later.

Final Destination is the last great horror franchise of the 1990s.

Perhaps that statement requires some elaboration or defense. After all, the first film in the series was released in March 2000. Chronologically, it is possible to argue that the 2000s did not actually begin until January 2001. However, decades do not neatly delineate themselves. Spiritually and culturally, there is a compelling case to be made that the 1990s ran from the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 to the destruction of the World Trade Center in September 2001.

Every era gets a horror story that is perfectly tailored to it. “From a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another,” argued Susan Sontag in October 1965. “But from a political and moral point of view, it does.” The horrors of the early nuclear age were populated by mutants and aliens. The early horror of the post-9/11 era embraced the visual language of torture and unconvincing moral certainty.

Final Destination is recognizable as a descendent of the classic slasher genre. The formula is fairly straightforward and conventional, with a (largely) young and attractive cast graphically and systematically slaughtered. However, what makes Final Destination stand out from the other major horror franchises is not some unique element; it is instead an absence. There is no Jason Vorhees, no Freddy Kreuger, no Michael Myers. The Final Destination series is a slasher movie without a slasher.

The killer in the Final Destination series is death itself. The premise of each film is that a set of characters “cheat” death by escaping some horrific accident, only to wind up dying in a series of elaborate set pieces over the ensuing days. However, death is never anthropomorphized. It never speaks. It never manifests physically or literally. The closest the series comes to giving death a voice is through exposition delivered by mortician William Bludworth (Tony Todd), himself a survivor.

While the kills become more fanciful as the franchise goes on, and the thrill of the series is watching the Rube Goldberg machinations of the Grim Reaper, the deaths in the first Final Destination are often mundane. Tod (Chad Donella) slips in the bath and is strangled by a shower cord, his death ruled a suicide. Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke) is killed by a falling kitchen knife. These are domestic accidents. They could happen to anyone at any time, not as a result of malicious intent, but simply due to bad luck.

This is a clear point of departure from the “man with a knife” movies of the 1970s into the 1980s, themselves informed by a broader cultural fixation on the serial killer as a public phenomenon and paranoia about suburban white flight. The serial trend continued into the 1990s. Despite a lull in the slasher genre, it returned with a bang following the success of Scream. The serial killer thriller became a mainstay of film and television after The Silence of the Lambs.

Still, the Final Destination franchise is a very different sort of horror movie. It is perhaps better understood in the context of the resurgent natural disaster movies of the period, from viral outbreak thrillers like Outbreak or Virus to the spectacle of Twister to the dueling volcano movies Volcano and Dante’s Peak to the competing asteroid movies Deep Impact and Armageddon. The villain in these stories was not any individual or rival power, but the world itself.

This perhaps reflected “the End of History” or “the Unipolar Moment”, that brief window at the end of the millennium where the United States had emerged triumphant from the Cold War as the single global superpower. It was a period of relative peace and prosperity, particularly from an American perspective. It was hard to comprehend a credible threat to this global superpower, short of some sort of malevolent existential (perhaps even supernatural) force.

This perhaps explained why audiences were drawn to these movies. Looking back at the era, Jo Livingston reflected, “The world was stable and the future glowed, for the West; our supremacy was the condition of world peace. We indulged in visions of disaster because they could only happen in a parallel and near-unimaginable universe. From our safe perch at the top of a whole millennium, we enjoyed imagining an earth shaken to bits.”

This gets at one of the interesting aspects of the Final Destination franchise. For all the franchise is built around the grim inevitability (and inescapability) of death, these are fun movies. These are not grim relentless slashers like David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills. The audience is meant to be having fun. Final Destination 3 begins on a rollercoaster. Final Destination 2, The Final Destination and Final Destination: Bloodlines all skew closer to comedy than many major horror franchise films.

There is a clear sense that the Final Destination franchise suffers no delusions of grandeur. It often feels like the sort of franchise that 1950s producer and director William Castle would have loved, embracing gimmicks and high-concepts. The DVD of Final Destination 3 is basically a choose-your-own-adventure. Months before Avatar would reignite interest in the format, The Final Destination embraced the hokey throwback gimmick of 3D. These are unapologetically silly and goofy films.

Still, one of the more interesting aspects of Final Destination, compared to the other major horror franchise, is that there is no sense of “transgression” for the heroes. These films lack the often conservative moral framework that informs so many slasher movies. These teenagers haven’t ignored any warning signs or crossed any boundaries. All they have done is survive an event that was supposed to kill them. It’s difficult to imagine any moral framework in which that merits punishment.

Discussing the explosion in natural disaster movies during the decade, critic J. Hoberman drew attention to the lack of any moral framing to these stories, “In the ’90s, however, it was as though America was being punished just for being its own ever-loving, arms-dealing, channel-surfing, trash-talking, butt-kicking, world-historical Number One self.” The greatest transgression that the teens at the heart of the Final Destination franchise have committed is the sin of being alive.

There is perhaps a nihilism to the Final Destination franchise, a relic of the pop cinema of the 1990s. “The crisis, perhaps, is that there is no crisis,” Stephen Brown opined of the natural disaster movies of the decade. “Here, after the fall of communism, the so-called end of history, is the ultimate symbol of a political vacuum, escapism of the most spectacular kind. What these movies ultimately offer is a complete evacuation – of meaning, of political difficulty, of personal responsibility.”

There is no autonomy in the world of Final Destination. There is no choice. There is no way to stop the inevitable, only temporarily delay it. This is particularly true in the first movie, and the franchise has waded into the sort of lore that inevitably bogs down long-running horror franchises, providing examples of how the characters can “cheat” death by either taking another’s life or by dying and being resuscitated. However, these tricks very rarely work – even when it seems like they have.

Indeed, one of the interesting aspects of the Final Destination franchise is the sense in which these attempts to deepen the back story only serve to reinforce the themes. The big twist of Final Destination 5 is that it is actually a prequel to Final Destination. The plane disaster that sets in motion the plot of Final Destination is revealed to be death finally striking at two survivors of an early accident, Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) and Molly (Emma Bell).

Bloodlines goes even further, positing an origin story for the entire franchise, opening with a sequence in which a young Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger) saves hundreds of lives at the opening of the Skyview Restaurant Tower. Bloodlines posits that every previous Final Destination movie since has been about death trying to tidy up the loose ends from that event, working its way systemically through the family trees of the survivors, including children that were never meant to be born.

This is all very silly, a very modern example of franchise brain where everything has to be related back to some core event or character to solidify their importance in the narrative. However, it also feels weirdly in step with how the larger Final Destination franchise has understood death as a concept. As menacing as death might seem to the characters in these movies, it also seems strangely inept. It takes death more than a half a century to close the book on the Skyview Restaurant Tower.

Maybe death was taking it easy; two years before Final Destination, Martin Brest would remake Death Takes a Holiday as Meet Joe Black, another expression of these fin de siècle anxieties, imagining the prosperity of the 1990s as a backdrop against which even death itself would navigate an existential crisis. In the Final Destination films, death might not be on vacation, but it is certainly asleep at the wheel, making a desperate retroactive effort to tidy up after its own mishaps.

Across the franchise, death seems like a blundering hitman. It is so eager to claim its targets that it creates a cascading web of collateral damage, which it is constantly cleaning up. The retroactive implication is that death only targets the teens in the first Final Destination because it went so hard after Sam and Molly at the end of Final Destination 5, trying to kill a pair of ants with a bazooka. This is its own reflection of 1990s anxieties, as much an illustration of “chaos theory” as Jurassic Park.

At times, the version of death featured in the Final Destination films feels like a companion to the archetype of the incompetent hitman that populated so much 1990s pop culture, like Vincent Vega (John Travolta) in Pulp Fiction, Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) in Fargo or Joe Messing (Mark Pellegrino) in Mulholland Drive. A.O. Scott has talked about “the Coen brothers’ whimsy, with its edge of nihilism”, which feels oddly in keeping with the Final Destination franchise.

That said, as much as the Final Destination franchise makes sense in the cultural context of the 1990s, it has always existed on the cusp of the 21st century. Released a year before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the franchise’s first big set piece is the midair destruction of an airplane. It evokes 9/11, but also wouldn’t have been filmed after 9/11. Actor Kerr Smith conceded, “If it were a year and a half later, Final Destination could not have been released.”

Still, while the series predates the attacks, the franchise exists in the shadow of 9/11. In Final Destination 3, Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) puts together a collection of ominous predictive photographs including the Twin Towers with an airplane shadow over it. The climax of Bloodlines finds a train ploughing through rows and rows of suburban houses, archetypal Americana disrupted by a means of mass transit run off course. It is a literal derailment, life coming off the tracks.

Indeed, one of the bigger issues with Bloodlines is the sense in which it is the product of a different sort of studio system than the original Final Destination and so has to be a different kind of horror film. It is a story about familial trauma, passed down along the maternal line, clearly indebted to David Gordon Green’s reimagining of Halloween, to the point of retrofitting Iris as late 1960s final girl so she can be reintroduced as an old survivalist (Gabrielle Rose) like Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis).

The film is clearly conceived as a post-Halloween reboot horror blockbuster, meaning that it’s built around a smaller set of larger set pieces, including multiple elaborate sequences that kill off a couple of characters at once. It’s a structure that is recognizably that of a modern crowd-pleasing horror franchise revival – bigger, bolder, even more self-aware, even more aware of its mythology – but it also feels at odds with what makes the Final Destination franchise so distinct.

Bloodlines tries to force a very 1990s concept to fit a contemporary franchise framework, and the results are just as messy as any of the franchise’s trademark kills.