Hello, true believers, and welcome to You Aughta Know, a column dedicated to the decade that is now two full decades behind us. That’s right, it’s time to take a look back at one of the most overlooked decades of horror. Follow along as I do my best to chronologically explore the horror titles that made up the 2000s.
It was the first Saint Patrick’s Day of a whole new millennium and while many were certainly out partaking in a night (or two or three) of inebriation, Destiny’s Child was soulfully suggesting that their honey was cheating on them and a slew of titles lost to the tides of time were at the top of the charts; I mean, does anyone remember Bruiser on television or Tough Cookie as their go-to read? Yet in theaters, a film that would usher in a wildly successful franchise was being introduced. Taking bits and pieces of the successful new age slasher formula created by Scream, a tale of death and dread that was equal parts teen scream and X-Files was coming our way. That’s right, we were headed towards our Final Destination.
Originally titled Flight 180 and written with a much shorter script, Final Destination was the brainchild of Jeffrey Reddick, once written in a more condensed format and conceived as a possible episode of The X-Files. Having read a story about a woman who cancelled a flight after her mother had a gut feeling to not board, and the subsequent flight going down, the idea of skipping death was tapped into and expanded upon. Reddick had an existing relationship with New Line Cinema, having previously pitched them a prequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street that they liked, and he was convinced to flesh out the idea and try and sell New Line on it as a full length film. Obviously, it worked.
New Line loved the idea, tapping into the very popular teen-based format of the time as well as riding along with some of the standard blueprints of a slasher film, but also injecting it with a large amount of dread. Reddick was brought in to create a full length draft of the screenplay before writing team Glen Morgan and James Wong were also attached, with Wong tapped to direct. It would end up becoming quite a power team behind the scenes, with Reddick going on to write in the genre for years, and Wong and Morgan both working on a series of other horror features, including Black Xmas, Willard and even the third entry of the Final Destination series.
Now we all know the story, right? Alex, played by teen heart throb Devon Sawa straight out of Idle Hands, has a premonition that the plane their high school class is on to France is going to explode and after an altercation, seven passengers are removed and thus survive the explosion. Now, Alex is slowly realizing that they were meant to die and Death isn’t keen on glancing over that fact, now hunting the survivors down and killing them in various freak accidents.
Now the Final Destination series is well known and beloved in the community but as far as franchises go, it’s akin to Saw; although many are fun and even good films, the pressure to create more intense, dynamic and large-scale set pieces was on and sometimes, among those moving pieces, the charm was lost. Final Destination stands alone in its franchise (although the fifth would become a bit more rooted) because it is the most tethered to reality. Exploiting the common fear of flying and creating an excellent death dream sequence, our movie’s most extravagant scene is still something that is a commonplace fear among a massive amount of people. Where our sequel would arguably set up the most effective premonition scene, entries after would be just as big, if not bigger, but became less and less realistic, losing themselves in the scale of things instead of that common bond of fear amongst the multitudes of its viewers.
Final Destination really did everything exactly right for the time. They brought in a cast of attractive and talented up and coming teens to play the central characters. Sawa was a household name by this point, whereas Ali Larter, who plays Clear, had just been pushed into the teen eye because of Varsity Blues. Kerr Smith was in the middle of Dawson’s Creek and Sean William Scott was coming out of the massively successful American Pie. For some added horror credibility, they cast Candyman vet Tony Todd to play, get ready for this spectacularly badass and comic book-ish name, William Bludworth; a mortician who essentially represents the human manifestation of Death. And they leaned heavily into the idea of Rube Goldberg machines to create clever death machinations.
Now! Get ready! Here is why this movie is so damn clever, so smart, so freaking sincere with its body count: they created death from normalcy. The things you surround yourself with on a daily basis became your murderer in the world of Final Destination. Like those random stories you read where someone was killed by all the right dominoes falling into place.
How god damn brilliant is that? It’s so unsettling, so dreadful, so sly. Production designer John Willet deserves so much credit for the amount of unease the film creates, and it is because of his very basic skewering of the norm that the movie grabs onto your heart and holds on the whole way through. Washed out colors, nothing ever being completely squarely in scene, forced perspective both vertically and horizontally. These tricks were used to create that tension in us without blatantly calling for it. It’s genius.
Playing it out like a slasher also does wonders for the film. We feel like we’re watching that same game of cat and mouse but instead of a masked assailant, we have a primal force of the universe at work here, that somehow feels both completely ethereal and nearly tangible. As the scenes set up, we become precog detectives, turning the gears in our head to spot the clues and discover what schematic Death has laid out before our heroes meet their untimely demise. Reddick, Wong and Morgan all-too-cleverly had every single audience member wondering: would I catch the signs? Would we hear the creepy song, see the warnings, catch the clues? Suddenly we aren’t trying to figure out who the killer is because we already know it’s everyone’s ultimate assailant: Death. Now we’re just trying to figure out the “how” of it all.
Final Destination still holds up incredibly well. It blends supernatural horror and slasher horror in a way that hadn’t been done since A Nightmare on Elm Street and has scarcely been done since. Producing four sequels (and with a fifth reportedly on the way), the initial installment still stands true as a iconic staple in the horror halls of fame.
