When was the last time you got behind a logging truck on the highway without immediately changing lanes because you thought about Final Destination? You have Jeffrey Reddick to thank for that. Reddick is the brilliantly macabre mind that created the Final Destination franchise and a collection of other horror titles including Tamara (2005), Day of the Dead (2008), and Dead Awake (2016) among them.

Reddick is now expanding his skill set and taking a seat behind the camera. In addition to writing, he has made his directorial debut with Don’t Look Back. The film is a disturbing look at modern society and the toxic side of social media culture where likes and the hope of capturing a viral moment are more important than someone’s well-being.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Reddick and discuss the film and the themes it conveys, his incredibly unique story of getting into the film industry, and what it means to have created a franchise that ultimately changed the landscape of pop culture.

Don’t Look Back is tension-filled from the start but a departure from many of Reddick’s previous titles. It walks the line between supernatural thriller and grounded horror; a bold choice, but one that seems to be paying off.

“When you write something and they make a movie out of it, you’re anxious when it comes out because you don’t know if people are going to resonate with it or not. This one, people are resonating with it which is good,” Reddick tells me. “Obviously, there are people who don’t like it, but that’s the case with any movie that comes out. But the people that have liked it have really liked it. So, it’s been very interesting to see that. It’s been very encouraging and exciting. I hope it finds a—since you know, a lot of big Halloween movies got pushed to next year—I’m hoping we find a good audience because I’m proud of the movie and I think it speaks to a lot of things that are going on now in the world, too.”

The film was recently released on VOD platforms. There were initially plans for a theatrical run, but as with a lot of other horror titles this year, Don’t Look Back faced limitations.

Reddick explains, “We were going to have a limited theatrical and do a drive-in release, but by the time we got to our release date all the studios have decided, ‘Oh we can make money during the pandemic at drive-ins’ so they’re putting out older, big films in the drive-in theater. So, the market has gotten tougher to get into the drive-in. And it’s kind of weird going to theaters because you don’t want, unless it’s an area that hasn’t been hit by COVID—most of the areas that we got into weren’t in the major cities. We were in smaller towns and smaller states, which is great, so you don’t feel like you’re making people go out and risk their safety because of your movie. So, short answer is we weren’t able to get into drive-ins like we hoped because of studios.”

Reddick has arguably one of the most unique and impressive stories of how he got into the film industry. He is proof that sometimes taking a risk, or perhaps naivete, works in your favor.

“I’ve been in the business since I was 19. This story, and I’m staying this with a smile on my face, this story is legendary,” Reddick notes. “When I was 14, I saw A Nightmare on Elm Street. I grew up in a small town in eastern Kentucky, Jackson Kentucky. Me and my friend went to see a double feature at the drive-in: Alone in the Dark and A Nightmare on Elm Street. So, A Nightmare on Elm Street blew my mind. It’s my favorite movie of all time, the original. I went home and I banged out a prequel idea on my typewriter and found the number for Bob Shaye at New Line Cinema because I saw that he produced the movie and mailed him my treatment. He sent it back to me and said, ‘Sorry we don’t take unsolicited material but thank you for your time.’ So, I’m a 14-year-old hillbilly, right after the release of Nightmare on Elm Street. I didn’t even know what unsolicited meant because I was only 14. I had to look that up. So, then I wrote him back and I was like, ‘look mister, I’ve spent three dollars on your movie, so I think you could take five minutes to read my story.’ And he read it and he got back to me. So, from age 14 to 19, while I was in Kentucky, him, and his assistant Joy Mann, who is no longer with us unfortunately, they became like mentors to me. They would send me scripts; they would send me tchotchkes from movies—I didn’t know what tchotchkes meant until Joy told me—but they would send me toys and action figures. They really kept me super inspired to write. It was very encouraging.”

Reddick continues, “So, when I was 19, I went to New York to study acting and they offered me an internship. Then I ended up getting an agent, and I was like, ‘Oh this acting thing is going to be easy so I’m just going to stay in New York.’ The acting thing didn’t work out because it was the early 90s back then and diversity in casting was not a thing, let’s just say that. My agent told me I was “an ethnic Michael J. Fox type.” Which you know, Michael J Fox is an amazing actor and was all over the place. I’m like, that’s awesome. And she’s like, ‘Yeah but you’re like an ethnic Michael J. Fox. They don’t make roles for you. If you rapped or played basketball, I could get you work. I just don’t know what to do with you.’ But it was like, well, you can’t beat the racism. So, I decided to write full-time and I just stayed at New Line until they made Final Destination.“

So where did the concept for Don’t Look Back come from?

“The story of Kitty Genovese, a woman in New York in the 60s,” Reddick explains. “She was assaulted in her courtyard. Thirty or 40 people stood in the apartment complexes and heard her, and no one helped. The story always stuck with me because it made me think about how people could do that. I wanted to tell that story because I started seeing that kind of apathy towards people in real life and I started seeing it grow and grow and grow. So, I was always trying to find the right story to tell that [through]. That’s when I came up with the idea. You don’t know whether it’s supernatural, whether it’s a person, or the lead character’s guilt. You know, I don’t expect people to jump in harm’s way to try to help somebody, but if you have a cell phone, call the police before you start filming it.”

The transition from writing to directing is often a natural progression for a lot of filmmakers, and it is one that Reddick has handled well. However, moving into the director’s chair sometimes requires sacrifices and changes to the story in order to get the movie made through conventional means. The story of Don’t Look Back was not something he was willing to compromise.

“The opportunity came up and I wanted to tell this story the way I wanted to tell it,” says Reddick. “A lot of places said, ‘we’ll buy it if you make it straight supernatural or if you make it straight killer.’ And I didn’t want to do that with this film. I want to try to say a little more. I’ve been in the business so long, knew the response, or the danger if you’re trying to work in two worlds because the common refrain is that you didn’t do enough in either one to satisfy anybody and I know there will be some people like that, but we’ve also gotten a lot of [positive responses].”

That transition to director also comes with a certain set of newfound challenges. Most obstacles can be overcome when working with a large studio, but going the indie route often requires a bit more creative thinking and some clever workarounds.

“I think the biggest challenge, which is common for any director, is shooting days and budget,” Reddick reveals. “I wrote this to be at a certain budget level and then we decided to go the indie route. That opened up a lot of doors creatively, but it also created a lot of challenges on set as far as locations changes, not getting locations we thought we had, things changing the day before. And you have to roll with it as you do on any film. When you have a bigger budget, usually you can throw money at a problem and it goes away, but when you’re on an indie budget you don’t have money to throw at the problem. Everybody has to throw in their ideas and creativity and figure out a way to make something work. It was definitely constantly exciting. It was wonderful. It was a lot of good things.”

Going with actor Kourtney Bell was an easy decision, but casting a Black female lead was also the satisfying victory in a battle Reddick has been fighting for years.

“I was going through the normal casting process, but when we decided to do it as an indie film, I told the team I wanted to cast a Black actress,” Reddick explains. “I had seen so many wonderful Black actresses. With acting, when you’re casting lead characters for a movie [at a studio], white actors and actresses are the default, always—always. When I sold my story for Final Destination 2, in my treatment I had Kimberly written as African American. I was like, ‘let’s finally get a Black leading girl in a horror film.’ But when it went to script phase, they took that description out. And, of course, even if that description was in there, they would have probably still cast a white actor or actress because that’s just the default in Hollywood. It’s changed—we’re evolving as a country.”

Though Hollywood is slowly progressing in the right direction and slowly carving out space for diverse voices, there are still many struggles left to overcome and challenges for BIPOC actors. Reddick said Don’t Look Back was, at one point, going to be produced by a larger studio and the casting process was considerably different. He knew what and who he wanted, but “still had to see all the white actresses before they were allowed to cast a black actress.” Eventually, Reddick was able to cast Bell as his lead. He “looked Kourtney up on google and had already decided” before he saw her audition.

Through Don’t Look Back, Reddick hopes to impart a message of karma and the hope that we can do better by one another and as a society.

“We need to be better at helping people because we’re all connected,” Reddick stresses. “My biggest fear is how easily people are turned on each other over, whether it’s sexism, racism, homophobia, whatever it is—nationalism. It’s so easy to make people hate each other, and when they hate each other, they will hurt each other. That’s what frightens me more than some random serial killer, or some bog monster, or some nightmare monster. We can murder each other. I’m getting a little older now, and I’m still going to kill off pretty teenagers until the day I die, but sometimes when you get older you start thinking about some other things too. I hope it connects with people in the way I intended it to connect. I hope people will walk away with some questions that, maybe if they watch it again will get answered, but walk away thinking ‘next time I see something bad happening, maybe I should call 911 before I start recording it.”

Beyond Don’t Look Back, Reddick is currently hard at work on various upcoming projects including the Black Veil anthology and two series with Netflix.

‘Final Destination’

“I’m working on a couple animated series for Netflix. All I can say is that it’s based on a popular children’s book. It’s really, really good. I’m really excited about it. And the other one, which I’m really excited about as well, is the spin-off of Usagi Yojimbo—Japanese comic book. I’m getting ready to write my third episode on that. They were working on a new Final Destination but that got pushed back because of COVID,” Reddick notes.

Reddick tells us that the new Final Destination is set in a different world but is not a reboot.

“It’s always: if the formula’s not broken, don’t fix it. But my thing is that Death has so many designs in my brain that it could use. Like, we’re seeing one design with the Rube Goldberg kind of thing. But Death could get us in so many ways,” Reddick teases. “In my original story, which was a little dark because I am a Nightmare on Elm Street fan, Death kind of toyed with them psychologically for some sin or some wrongdoing they did, and they ended up killing themselves. So, that was a little dark. I don’t think I would want to make that movie now, but I just think that Death—it would be fun to explore that world, almost like what we did with the second one. I want to expand on the mythology. If I came back, I would want to do something different.”

He continues, “I love Final Destination so much. I just think about that 14-year-old kid in Kentucky being like, ‘I’m going to be making movies and be in the movies.’ And then to have a movie come out that has left such an impact on people. I don’t want to die tomorrow, but I could die happy tomorrow because I know at least that movie is going to live on.”