25 Years Later, Final Destination Remains a Paranoid Series Best

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What if a movie slasher didn’t have a spooky mask, or a signature weapon, or corporeal form at all? That’s sort of the secret premise of Final Destination, though at the time of its release 25 years ago, filmmakers James Wong and Glen Morgan discussed their resistance to considering the movie a slasher at all. That’s probably in part because slashers were in a near-immediate slump following the end of the initial Scream trilogy, and though the Final Destination poster lined up its young people in proper Scream/The Faculty/Dimension Films fashion, the actual film didn’t have much in common with the particular approach of the turn-of-the-century slasher apart from picking off teenagers one by one. The Scream-era slasher had been refashioned as a whodunit with a climactic Scooby-Doo-like unmasking, an understandable direction in the wake of so many ’80s slasher franchises leaping into fantastical nonsense in their dotage. Final Destination, though, offered no such concrete solutions, trading in a doominess that anticipated a post-millennial take on the subgenre: The slasher is death. Death is inevitable. And if you’re lucky enough to avoid it, death will probably just circle back to find you.

So let’s circle back to Final Destination itself. Though the movie would go on to spawn a franchise with signature Rube Goldberg-style deaths, sort of a precursor to the more intentional and human-made traps of the Saw series, the original film is (like many slasher pictures before they go into sequel mode) more deliberately paced and less mercenary with its premise. It’s still efficient, though: We meet Alex (Devon Sawa), a high schooler on his way to Paris for a school-sponsored trip, alongside various classmates. He gets a few eerie wisps of premonition before he boards the plane, but once settled into his seat, he has a full-blown vision of a rocky takeoff and midair explosion that kills every passenger, including him.

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Waking from this terrifyingly detailed account, he starts to see the same details from his dream repeat themselves, and panics. He’s thrown off the plane, along with five other students and one of the teacher chaperones. Flight 180 (the film’s original title) does indeed explode shortly after takeoff, leaving Alex even more spooked. Then, he eventually realizes, death starts to circle back to “correct” for the six deaths that would have happened if not for his vision. A menacing coroner (Tony Todd) makes the case more explicit, hinting that he has knowledge that extends beyond the veil.

It’s easy to picture Todd’s wonderful single-scene performance in an X-Files episode, and indeed, budding screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick originally wrote the story as an X-Files spec script, then expanded it into a feature. Fittingly, it then caught the attention of X-Files staffers James Wong and Glen Morgan, who co-wrote many classic episodes of the series and were looking for a first feature film. The signs that shimmer through Alex’s peripheral vision, as well as that of his haunted classmate Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), indeed have an X-Files-y sensibility that the sequels would downplay in favor of spending more time on those elaborate death scenes. In the original Final Destination, there are only two really big single-death sequences. But alongside the slow build toward the big plane explosion, these scenes have just enough everyday plausibility to resonate as freak accidents – even when, at one point, water from a leaky toilet creepily recedes from the bathroom floor where it has previous spread, death covering its tracks to make a kid’s death look more like suicide.

That’s not to say Morgan and Wong avoid dark comedy; they’re simply just as likely to get there with an abrupt beheading or the splat of a city bus, to further goose Alex’s paranoia. Given how good Sawa is here at playing an average-seeming teenager pulled into a rabbit hole that resembles a self-centered (but correct!) cosmic conspiracy theory, and how good he is now in various horror parts (most notably the Chucky TV series), it’s strange that Final Destination didn’t ultimately do much for his career in the short run. (Is it a perverse triumph of equal treatment that he was as discarded by major-studio productions as any number of scream queens?)

Sawa’s performance is key to the ways that Final Destination still feels like it vibrates on a slightly different wavelength than its companion films. There’s a whiff of Y2K anxiety to the Morgan-Wong-Reddick original, even though no one mentions the year: planes exploding in the sky, computers sparking and starting fires, our households turning against us. (The two big Rube Goldberg deaths are both notably domestic.) The question of whether it’s really all “death’s plan” loses all ambiguity sometime around the point where the sentient toilet water appears, yet the paranoia does feel more vivid here than in the sequels, one of which needs to haul out Larter’s and Todd’s characters just for a taste of the first film’s gravitas. Morgan and Wong may have wanted to avoid the lowness of the slasher film, but the best slashers share with this one a palpable sense of dread. The filmmakers give the survivors’ temporary good luck a feeling of flickering anomaly, a design less intelligent than malevolent. In some of the sequels, it’s the films themselves that can seem a little cruel. In Final Destination, it’s the journey.

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.