Editorials
‘The Final Destination’ Embraced the Early Aughts 3D Trend and Dialed Up the Silliness
The 3D resurgence of the early aughts had Hollywood in a vice grip thanks to advances in technology, and, by 2009, horror began to embrace the format in a big way. That included the fourth installment of the Final Destination franchise, The Final Destination.
The success of Final Destination 3 meant a sequel was inevitable, this one planned for 3D. Final Destination 2 scribe Eric Bress and director David R. Ellis returned, with the latter taking the helm because of the 3D. The sequel makes full use of its 3D, incorporating requisite CGI jump scares of flying car parts and viscera leaping out of the screen, which, in turn, dates this entry more quickly than its counterparts.
Not helping is that this sequel puts all its eggs in the baskets of 3D gimmicks and embellishing Death’s morbid sense of humor; The Final Destination dials up the puerile humor with its more expansive deaths, aiming for revulsion along with raucous gore – it’s not the blood splatter that’ll test your lunch but an extreme closeup with gnarly sound foley of a toenail cleaning.
Perhaps surprisingly, considering its maligned reputation, the fourth Final Destination still holds the mantle as the highest grossing of 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 The Final Destination getting the solo spotlight today.
The Inciting Disaster
The Final Destination has the misfortune of boasting the film series’ blandest protagonist yet in Nick O’Bannen (Bobby Campo) and the weakest opening disaster that incurs Death’s wrath once again. As Nick attends a race event at McKinley Speedway with girlfriend Lori Milligan (Shantel VanSanten) and pals, the telltale signs of an impending premonition set in. Once Death’s order is set, so too is a chain of events that causes fiery crashes, deadly debris careening into the fans, and a collapse of the stadium.
The setup at least ensures a variety in terms of creative kills, from freak engine crushes to flying tire decapitations, but the 3D constraints render these grisly scenes in garish CGI that doesn’t hold up well. And while the franchise is known to bend the laws of physics for the sake of a crowd-pleasing kill, this sequel doesn’t bother much with them at all. Not that you seek these out for any sense of realism, but NASCAR races have extreme noise levels ranging from 90 to 130 decibels, the type of noise that can damage your hearing from prolonged exposure. The Final Destination opens to a crowd unphased by the stadium shaking audible onslaught, solely for the sake of a tampon in the ears joke. Oh, the early aughts.
Like its predecessor, The Final Destination picks up the previous film’s inclusion of a climactic catastrophe involving a second premonition, shifting the big spectacle carnage from a professional speedway to a shopping mall, incorporating killer escalators and movie theater death traps.
The Standout Kills
Pool Disemboweling
The Final Destination boasts one clear frontrunner that stands apart from the rest, and also makes a strong case for the franchise’s most outlandish death yet. It’s a two-for-one death that sees Nick racing to help Janet Cunningham (Haley Webb) and Hunt Wynorski (Nick Zano), who died in such close proximity that Nick struggles to predict Death’s order. Ellis cuts between Janet’s car wash of terror and Hunt’s poolside relaxation gone awry to build anticipation and keep viewers guessing which one will perish. As creative as Janet’s eventual death can be, it pales in comparison to the audacity of Hunt chasing his lucky coin to the bottom of a public pool that’s unwittingly had its drainage system activated.
The pressure becomes so excessive that Hunt finds his rear end sucked into the drain, the clog forcing the pressure to rise until poor Hunt’s insides get sucked up and spewed out all over the pavement. An alternate version of this death sequence wasn’t nearly as showy with the organs, driving up the implausibility and silliness of a fatality that drew inspiration from real life.
For more on Death’s designs in this sequel and beyond, read our franchise kills ranking here.
Death’s Expert?
One of the most noticeable flaws of The Final Destination is its lack of the film series’ unofficial mascot, William Bludworth, or the actor who portrays him. Final Destination 3 included Tony Todd in a voiceover twice to bookend the standalone sequel. The Final Destination doesn’t even bring Todd back in that capacity, and his absence is noticeable.
Campo’s flat performance struggles to keep Nick’s plight engaging, and his visions guiding him through Death’s design are a pale stand-in for the charismatic Tony Todd.
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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