For most successful horror film franchises, the river to box-office gold runs crimson with the blood of gleefully slaughtered teens. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Final Destination series, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2020. Over a ten-year period and five films (with a reboot on the way), the franchise raked in over $ 650 million at the box office for New Line Cinema, with a total kill count of 496; pretty decent numbers for a series lacking a corporeal villain. In the Final Destination universe, there’s no Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, or Ghostface – instead, the teen-murdering Big Bad is Death itself.
The standard Final Destination plot is repeated like a 12-bar blues pattern, with some variations. A stereotypical all-American teenage protagonist has a premonition of a disaster, usually involving a large-scale mechanical or infrastructural malfunction, and manages to escape with a group of bystanders only to watch, helplessly, as the disaster occurs and kills many others. The group realizes they’ve somehow cheated “death’s design” – but not for long, as the survivors get picked off one by one in increasingly complex death sequences. In the words of the mortician Bludworth, played by a scene-chewing Tony Todd in three of the films: “Disrespecting the design could initiate a horrifying fury that would terrorize even the Grim Reaper – and you don’t even want to fuck with that mack daddy.”
This franchise also bears another distinctive feature: its title sequences. For each Final Destination movie, the title sequence serves as a premonition and small taste of the carnage to come, using symbolism, editing and sound to create an ominous sense of doom and inevitability. As the franchise moved into its fourth and fifth films (and into 3D), the title sequences became increasingly striking and creative vehicles for fan service: high-concept mini-movies providing visual callbacks to the most gruesome deaths, designed to get the audience riled up and hungry for bloodshed. This is the title sequence at its finest: evolving meta-narrative devices that display an awareness of audience expectations, providing reverent nods to the history and possibilities of genre cinema.
Final Destination (2001)
The first film in the FD franchise was conceived as an X-Files episode script by Jeffrey Reddick, featuring Dana Scully’s brother as the hapless character who has the initial premonitions of a plane crash. Reddick worked the script into a feature film and passed it on to X-Files writers Glen Morgan and James Wong, who rewrote the script with Wong attached to direct.
Alex Browning (Canadian heartthrob Devon Sawa) is seated on a plane, embarking on a class trip to Paris when he has a horrifying premonition: shortly after takeoff, Flight 180 will explode. He snaps awake…
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