How the ‘Final Destination’ Series — and the Horror Sequel Industry — Lost Its Way

With everyone confined to their homes for the foreseeable future, we’ve all been in search of projects hitting the sweet spot of “just substantive enough to leave a feeling of accomplishment, while not requiring more effort than we can muster in these psychologically taxing times.” With this in mind, there’s never been a better time for full immersion in a long-running horror movie franchise, which can kill time just as effectively as it kills buxom teens. At the suggestion of a trusted friend, my girlfriend and I spent the past week mainlining all five installments of the Final Destination series, and it was a restorative experience.

You can lose yourself in the comfort of formula and the excitement of variation, as each new film sends a fresh batch of victims into one Rube Goldberg contraption after the next. The producers refused to fix what wasn’t broken, sticking with the tried-and-true “big opening number, four or five imaginatively gory kills to fill out the second act, grand finale” template while inventing unlikely household-object deaths from MacGyver’s worst nightmares. Even when basking in the arterial spray, however, a viewer with critical sensibilities can’t help but notice a dispiriting trend creep in to the mayhem.

Little by little, a difficult-to-place charm drains from the demises, as if the soul could have left a franchise that started out as little more than an excuse to methodically decapitate telegenic D-listers. It wasn’t until the very end of the final Final Destination that what had changed crystallized itself. It all concludes just as it began, using the crash of Flight 180 as a loop-closer molding the franchise into a decadelong Mobius strip. FD5 reveals itself as a stealth prequel in its final minutes, as the characters file in for the same fiery wreck that opened the original, now from a new vantage point. 

Director Steven Quale capitalizes on the eleven years separating his whack at the concept from the series’ outset by capturing the crash with alternating interior and exterior shots, the latter formerly impossible due to budgetary and technological limits. Final Destination (The First) announced its shoestring resourcefulness and jerry-rigged creativity by constraining the whole crash to the cabin, rocking the set back and forth and deploying greenscreen as passengers got sucked out of the holes in the jet. With twenty million more dollars to play with, Quale shows the whole thing going kablooey, capturing the engine explosions and wing fractures from an outside POV. Plumes of computerized flame engulf either side of the plane as it goes down, tiny corpses-to-be flinging themselves from its breaches.

That farewell set piece clarifies how the Final Destination movies — and in a grander sense, cheapie horror sequels, one of life’s purest joys — got subsumed and hollowed out by the proliferation of CGI. Physical spectacles like combusting fireballs, spurts of blood, and visceral squelches always packed the most wallop when realized physically. The weird primitive rendering, the occasional stray pixels, and the lack of texture all undermine the cumulative impact of Quale’s fiendish games. The problem isn’t that it looks fake; these things have always reveled in their own artifice, well aware that it’s part of the fun. The problem is that it lacks a human touch.

The original Final Destination attained the level of success that spawns franchises on the virtue of its ingenuity, in both conception and (pun intended) execution. Final Destination 2 upped the ante within its first half hour, first in intricacy with the opening logjam’s many moving parts and then in comedy with the Looney Tunes-caliber slapstick destruction that follows. But from the third installment onward, there’s a sense that the filmmakers took the path of least resistance where former teams gamed out practical solutions. There are external factors to consider; from the studio, these films were given steadily increasing budgets and mandated to make exponentially larger sums, which led to untenable stake-raising. The latter-iteration plane crash plays like something out of a disaster blockbuster rather than a B-grade horror picture because bigness sells, and for bigness on a cost-effective deadline, CGI made the most sense.

But let this stand now as a warning to possible horror franchises of the future as they endeavor to prolong their lifespans. These fly-by-night productions should get chintzier and more loosely supervised as they go, not the opposite. The fourth Nightmare on Elm Street (the one where Freddy eats the cursed pizza studded with the meatballs of doomed souls) or the more recent tenth Hellraiser (the one where hell-bureaucrats subsist on a diet of paper dampened by tears of the damned) excelled by dancing like no one was watching. The Final Destination films all have at least a trace of that devil-may-car energy, but the quotient decreases where it should be growing. Each successive sequel should operate like it has less and less to lose. At the very least, heed the lesson of Final Destination, a film about the inevitability of death one way or another: this won’t last forever, so do everything you can get away with while you can.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.

Where to stream Final Destination

Where to stream Final Destination 2

Where to stream Final Destination 3

Where to stream Final Destination 4 (aka The Final Destination)

Where to stream Final Destination 5