Editorials
‘Final Destination 3’ Twisted the Formula and Took Us On a Roller Coaster of Terror
After sitting out the sequel Final Destination 2, original Final Destination director/co-writer James Wong and co-writer Glen Morgan returned for the series’ roller coaster of a third installment, Final Destination 3. This time, the sequel would operate as a standalone set six years after the first film.
Final Destination 3 may feel smaller in scale based on the catastrophe that sets Death’s design in motion, but Wong and Morgan inject new ideas and slight twists to the well-established formula. That includes how high school student Wendy Christensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) picks up on Death’s clues and the kill order through photographs she took on the ill-fated day.
Final Destination 3 also escalates the stakes in the grand finale with a second full-blown mass casualty event, one that hits closer to home for many compared to the memorable amusement park opening. The third installment is also the first to introduce a survivor with murderous intent; the psychopathic turn by Ian McKinley (Kris Lemche) is foreshadowed in an unsettling act of animal violence well ahead of his grief-fueled bid to snuff out those he deems responsible for Death’s latest freak accident. These new updates to the blueprint, along with a likable cast, ensured a solid entry for the franchise.
In anticipation of the sixth installment, Final Destination Bloodlines, we’re retracing Death’s steps to examine the established lore, formula, and, of course, the standout kills from the series, with Final Destination 3 getting the solo spotlight today.
The Inciting Disaster
Compared to the high death toll from Flight 180’s mid-air explosion in the original film and Final Destination 2‘s intricate multi-vehicle highway pile-up, Final Destination 3‘s inciting disaster sequence seems smaller in scale. Yet the inspired setting and its engaging production design, along with Wong’s nerve-fraying direction, ensure that the roller coaster derailment in a Pennsylvania amusement park exploits a common worry to its fullest.
The coaster in question, fittingly named Devil’s Flight, transforms into a steel death trap that sees its unlucky passengers ejected from their seats and sent careening toward the pavement thanks to a dropped camcorder. An even unluckier few get battered and spliced on their way down. Wong focuses on the mechanics of the ride’s malfunction, which is a smart move considering the limited variety this scenario provides. It’s not quite as bloody or flashy as the previous opening disaster sequences, but it’s just as effective because Wong keenly understands why roller coasters can be so intimidating in the first place.
A quick 60-second ride on a fast-moving coaster gets protracted to an excruciating degree thanks to Death’s mordant sense of humor.
The Standout Kills
1) Fast Food Headache
Sam Easton‘s Frankie Cheeks is the camcorder-wielding character responsible for setting the initial coaster crash in motion, and the smarmy high schooler gets his comeuppance when picking up fast food in a drive-thru. Frankie is none the wiser as the dominoes line up then slowly topple, culminating in a semi-truck plowing into Frankie’s car.
What sets this death apart is the way the truck’s engine flies out of its carriage and into Frankie’s skull; its fan slices through bone in an instant. It’s a swift death, but it’s gruesome.
2) Tanning Bed Meltdown
Best friends Ashley Freund (Chelan Simmons) and Ashlyn Halperin (Crystal Lowe) are the first to fall post-premonition, signaling to Wendy that Death really is returning to claim them all. As such, Final Destination 3 gives them a particularly nasty demise as they begin a routine trip to the tanning salon.
A rise in temperature and an increase in condensation set in motion a series of events that’ll leave the girls locked inside their tanning beds as it slowly cooks them alive. It’s a grisly punchline and a brutal way to relieve the built-up anticipation, thanks to Death’s foreboding signs that it’s coming.
For more on Death’s designs in this sequel and beyond, read our franchise kills ranking here.
Death’s Expert
“You may NEVER return… from Devil’s Flight! Try not to scream!”
This is the first entry of the Final Destination saga to not feature an appearance by William Bludworth, likely due to the intent to make Final Destination 3 a standalone with a fresh setting and characters. That doesn’t mean this sequel doesn’t feature franchise stalwart Tony Todd, though.
Tony Todd lends his distinct voice, first for the giant Devil statue beckoning riders onto the Devil’s Flight roller coaster in the opening sequence, then as the subway announcer in the film’s closing bloodbath. It’s up to Wendy and her photographs to piece together Death’s plan without Bludworth’s crucial advice.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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