In Death There Are No Accidents: 25 Years of 'Final Destination'

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Issue 045’s Letterboxd list can be found here

Our friends, The Adams Family, have shared some exciting news about their new film, Mother of Flies. Variety reports that it has been picked up for worldwide sales by Yellow Veil Pictures!

With a ~1M budget, Clown in a Cornfield raked in $3.6M during its first weekend. This is IFC's biggest opening weekend at the box office!

Evil Dead Burn, the latest sequel in the Evil Dead franchise, is set to be released in theaters on July 24, 2026. The film will be directed by Sébastien Vaniček (Infested). [1428 Elm]

Another rapper-turned-actor is about to make their debut. Kid Cudi is set to both direct and star in When the Light Dies, a horror/romance thriller. [Fangoria]

This summer in Las Vegas, Universal Horror is, once again, bringing the screams and scares with four immersive houses, including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Exorcist: Believer, and Scarecrow: The Reaping. [Bloody Disgusting]

Finally, after many years, Freaked is getting a 4K restoration thanks to Drafthouse Films! [Collider]

With Final Destination: Bloodlines now playing in theaters, let’s go back to where it all began, with Final Destination (2000), which shows Death coming after those who got away. No one’s safe. No one. Check out the list on Letterboxd.

Death had a plan and so did these directors. Final Destination is the franchise that taught us no one's safe: not in your car, during your sports practice, and definitely not in a tanning bed. Let's meet the sick geniuses who made paranoia an art form.

James Wong (Final Destination, Final Destination 3): Wong helped birth the franchise with the OG plane explosion and created the blueprint for how to kill off a group of teens in the most creative ways possible . Then he came back for Final Destination 3 and said, “What if the coaster wasn’t the only thing unhinged?” Thanks for the nail gun scene, James. We’ll never look at Home Depot the same again.

David R Ellis (Final Destination 2, The Final Destination): The man, the myth, the log truck. Final Destination 2 is where the franchise fully embraced its identity, and that's largely thanks to Ellis. He embraced the beauty behind this franchise which is, the butterfly effect, and made Death feel petty and devilishly playful. Whih is to say: Ellis got it. In The Final Destination, he leaned fully into 3D absurdity, proving that even if the stories get wilder, the tension will still land with the right audience. Literally land. Like on their heads.

Steven Quale (Final Destination 5): Final Destination 5 could’ve coasted. Instead, Quale gave us an opening sequence for the ages and an acupuncture death that lives rent-free in our minds. He knew the audience was in on the joke by now, so he flipped the formula, twisted the timeline, and gave us a jaw-drop of a final act.

So next time you find yourself flinching at a nail gun, an escalator, or literally any truck on the road, thank these four. Then maybe take a deep breath (but also avoid tanning beds, log trucks, gymnastic beams, acupuncture needles, nail guns (obviously), pigeons, and most other things.) 

Final Destination': A Lesson About Living and Dying

Scream isn’t the only defining horror series of the millennial generation. A staple of my late adolescence and early adulthood, Final Destination has captured various points of anxiety for me and my friends. When the original came out, 9/11 had yet to happen – an important cultural moment that changed our lives forever. It’s funny how these things unfold. The 2000 original would go on to perfectly depict an anxious generation. We’d just come off the Y2K scare, the Columbine shooting, and a general sense of unease when the film arrived in theaters. The film’s confrontation of death hit a somber note; while the franchise would become more fun and cartoon-y, the original remains a relic of the seriousness of death, grief, and the rippling effects on our lives. It didn’t take long for our united cinematic experience to collide with real life in a way that we’d never felt before.

Final Destination still feels shockingly prescient. During a recent series marathon, the first film reminded me how real it all felt, like it could actually happen. Sure, the log truck opening for the second installment caused all of us to hate driving behind log trucks, but it was the plane crash that tapped into the generation’s fear and paranoia in a very authentic way. Alex’s (Devon Sawa) vision of the disaster and his “the plane’s gonna explode” declaration transmitted through the TV set. That raw terror vibrated throughout our lives, as we came to terms with death and its outward shockwaves. Death surrounded us in those days. I’d already been to my fair share of funerals. I was 14 and understood how ephemeral life was, how people came into and out of our lives in the blink of an eye, and the distress of coping with it all.

The film, directed by James Wong, who co-wrote the script with Glen Morgan and Jeffrey Reddick, refocused the prevalence of death in our lives. It seemed not so scary, that maybe we do have a modicum of control over how we die. That realization squelched the obsession I had with fate and destiny – and the end of the world. Right around that time, I became fixated on the Left Behind books (talk about exploiting fear for a quick buck – oof!) and constantly wondered what came next. I grew so delusional that I forgot how to live and be present in the moment. I was an extremist, you could say, and that’s just no way to live.

When Final Destination came to theatres, something shifted. As a teen, tangled in contrasting points of view, I noticed that progressive ideals became prevalent in many of my favorite horror films – Bride of Chucky with its openly gay character (RIP, David), and Scream for its trope-deconstructing approach, for example. Then, there was Final Destination that pushed the genre forward into an exciting direction. The killer wasn’t some dude in a mask. It was death itself, something none of us can outrun or outlive. It’s an inevitability that once caused sleepless nights and anxious days but soon soothed me into a deep slumber. Nightmares no longer plagued me. How I would die seemed to be of less concern than how I would live my life. I suppose that happens to all of us, but it was Final Destination that transformed me the most.
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In 2020, I conducted an oral history project for the first film. Over on Consequence, you can see my conversations with the cast, crew, and producers around the importance of the film and how much it did for horror. Read here.

For 25 years, the Final Destination films have made us think twice about either driving behind a truck with tree logs or laying in tanning beds. Those are only two examples of how these films have affected us over the years. With Death looming over us, we chose our favorite kills from the franchise, which you can find here on Letterboxd.

The Chattanooga Film Festival makes its triumphant return to the Chattanooga Theatre Center for the 12th edition of what MovieMaker Magazine calls one of The 25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World! It all goes down in-person June 20-22 with the virtual side of the festival continuing through the 28th.