Editorials
Death’s Sadistic Design: ‘Final Destination’ Turns 20!
“Final Destination will no doubt be a hit and inspire the obligatory sequels. Like the original Scream, this movie is too good to be the end of the road. I have visions of my own,” famed critic Roger Ebert declared in his review of the 2000 film that birthed a franchise. He was one of the few critics to give a positive review at the time, but his declaration proved accurate. Released in theaters twenty years ago, on March 17, 2000, Final Destination became a sleeper hit that earned a substantial international gross and inspired four sequels with a reboot on the way. Offering a unique slant on the slasher, Final Destination explored the concepts of death and fate in earnest while maximizing dread.
Conceived by Jeffrey Reddick as an episode for The X-Files, he later turned the idea into a feature-length script for New Line Cinema. The X-Files series writers Glen Morgan and James Wong, who also directed, took additional passes at the screenplay. All were in agreement to avoid approaching this as a standard slasher; no masked maniac or monster is hunting the teens in this story, just Death itself. In both life and horror, not much is more dread-inducing than the inescapable realities of dying.
The plot centers around Alex Browning (Devon Sawa), an unassuming teen set to travel on a class trip to Paris. He’s established as superstitious. He reads a series of strange coincidences as ill omens that leave him with a foreboding feeling. It culminates in the plane exploding shortly after take-off. Alex sees many of the passengers dying in excruciating detail, ending in his own death as flames engulf him. It turns out, though, that it’s a horrific vision that sends him into a full-blown panic that results in him and a handful of passengers getting ejected from the plane. Emotions are still at peak intensity at the gate when the plane really does explode, sending the survivors reeling from their intimate brush with Death.
They’re still sorting through their complicated feelings about the situation when Death comes back to collect, killing the passengers off one-by-one.
After the elaborate inciting plane explosion, the narrative slows down to show each character processing in different ways. Jock Carter Horton (Kerr Smith) channels the lack of control he feels over his life as wrathful aggression toward Alex, a physical representation of that helplessness. Teacher and chaperone Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke) recoils in terror as if Alex’s premonition is a supernatural contagion. His best friend Tod (Chad E. Donella) keeps his distance as his family holds Alex responsible over the death of the elder sibling that died on the plane. Then there are survivors like Billy (Sean William Scott), Terry (Amanda Detmer), and Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), who all represent different facets of survivors with a new lease on life, thankful for the chance to keep living.
Being that this was the first installment in a franchise, Final Destination hadn’t yet established the elaborate deaths for which it earned its reputation. At least not fully. The first to be reclaimed by Death, Tod, chokes to death in his bathtub after slipping. Water leaks out from under the toilet, following Tod’s movement, making it clear where this is headed. The second death is a jump scare; poor Terry steps out into the street and is immediately hit by a bus that seemingly comes out of nowhere. Once it’s become clear that Death is on the hunt in the precise order the victims were initially meant to die, it’s Val Lewton’s death that irrevocably changes everything. Specifically, it introduces the masterful suspense and intricate chain-of-event kills. A shard of her computer monitor slices open her throat, she’s impaled by a kitchen knife, and her house explodes, and Wong stretches the moment out with powerful coiling tension. No other death in the film reaches the same level of complexity, though Death certainly tries in the climax.
It’s the idea that death can come from anywhere and that it can happen at any time that offers up the most significant source of intensity here. As Tony Todd‘s mortician William Bloodsworth chillingly explains to the protagonists, “It’s all part of Death’s sadistic design.” Emphasis on sadistic. Even though Death is an unseen force, a fundamental part of life, there’s a feeling of gleeful sadism to the way it claims those that dared to escape it. The film takes special care to note a crying baby in first class as Alex initially boards the plane, adding extra devastating heft to the explosion, for example. It adds a lofty existential core to the slasher formula. The characters are grappling with heady thoughts of fate and survivors’ guilt while being brutally dispatched one-by-one—a fantastic setup for a horror franchise.
As if that wasn’t enough, the film is filled with nods and winks to horror fans. The most overt of which is in the character naming. Valerie Lewton pays homage to the great horror filmmaker Val Lewton, and Terry’s death makes for a literal example of the “Lewton Bus” technique. Terry’s last name pays tribute to Lon Chaney, and Billy’s is a bow to Alfred Hitchcock. It’s not just the ominous foreshadowing and multifaceted deaths that became a staple of the film series, but the horror-centric naming, too.
Final Destination, and the series as a whole, never goes quite as deep with its meditations on fate and death, but that’s probably for the better. Death is cruel, on-screen and in life, so levity is welcome. Twenty years removed from release, Final Destination makes for an intriguing entry in horror that’s both a product of its time and yet timeless. It gave a solid foundation for sequels to expand and improve upon- ranked lists often feature Final Destination 2 or Final Destination 5 near or at the top.
On its own, though, Final Destination blends existential dread with humor, heart, and atmosphere to create a unique standout of the early aughts.
Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.
To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.
Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.
After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.
SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?
Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.
For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.
Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.
Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?
AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?
Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.
From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.
The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.
Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.
With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…
There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.
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