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It is also a loving horror homage, in a series packed with them, to producer Val Lewton’s “Lewton Bus” technique, where tension is slowly built and then abruptly broken by the appearance of a seemingly innocuous object. Terry Chaney (Amanda Detmer) argues with Alex Browning (Devon Sawa, left) and Carter Horton (Kerr Smith, right) in Final Destination just before being hit by a bus It’s a ghastly comedic shock that repeats itself later in the franchise and is teased in a couple of the sequels’ title sequences. Alex and Clear realize that the survivors will die in the order they were sitting on the plane unless they can thwart the design.Īside from the harrowing and markedly pre-9/11 explosion of Flight 180, the demise of Terry Chaney (Amanda Detmer) is perhaps the series’ most iconic moment: while ranting in terror, she backs into the street and is plowed over by a bus. They meet the chatty and weirdly omniscient mortician Bludworth (Tony Todd) who warns them about “death’s design”: a fatalistic plan set in motion by the Grim Reaper. Alex and fellow survivor Clear Rivers suspect otherwise and visit Tod’s body in the morgue. When Alex’s best friend Tod (Chad Donella) is found throttled by a shower cord, it’s written off as a suicide. He and six others are forced off the flight, which indeed explodes shortly thereafter. Reddick worked the script into a feature film and passed it on to X-Files writers Glen Morgan and James Wong, who rewrote the script with Wong attached to direct.Īlex Browning (Canadian heartthrob Devon Sawa) is seated on a plane, embarking on a class trip to Paris when he has a horrifying premonition: shortly after takeoff, Flight 180 will explode.
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The first film in the FD franchise was conceived as an X-Files episode script by Jeffrey Reddick, featuring Dana Scully’s brother as the hapless character who has the initial premonitions of a plane crash. Glen Morgan and James Wong in 2016 at the premiere of The X-Files at California Science Center in Los Angeles, California. This is the title sequence at its finest: evolving meta-narrative devices that display an awareness of audience expectations, providing reverent nods to the history and possibilities of genre cinema. As the franchise moved into its fourth and fifth films (and into 3D), the title sequences became increasingly striking and creative vehicles for fan service: high-concept mini-movies providing visual callbacks to the most gruesome deaths, designed to get the audience riled up and hungry for bloodshed. For each Final Destination movie, the title sequence serves as a premonition and small taste of the carnage to come, using symbolism, editing and sound to create an ominous sense of doom and inevitability. This franchise also bears another distinctive feature: its title sequences. In the words of the mortician Bludworth, played by a scene-chewing Tony Todd in three of the films: “Disrespecting the design could initiate a horrifying fury that would terrorize even the Grim Reaper – and you don't even want to fuck with that mack daddy.” The group realizes they’ve somehow cheated “death’s design” – but not for long, as the survivors get picked off one by one in increasingly complex death sequences. A stereotypical all-American teenage protagonist has a premonition of a disaster, usually involving a large-scale mechanical or infrastructural malfunction, and manages to escape with a group of bystanders only to watch, helplessly, as the disaster occurs and kills many others. The standard Final Destination plot is repeated like a 12-bar blues pattern, with some variations. In the Final Destination universe, there’s no Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, or Ghostface – instead, the teen-murdering Big Bad is Death itself.
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Over a ten-year period and five films (with a reboot on the way), the franchise raked in over $650 million at the box office for New Line Cinema, with a total kill count of 496 pretty decent numbers for a series lacking a corporeal villain. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Final Destination series, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2020. For most successful horror film franchises, the river to box-office gold runs crimson with the blood of gleefully slaughtered teens.