“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.
