Final Destination, as a horror franchise, is known for its reliable results. Each of its first five movies begins with someone having a premonition of a terrible disaster (a plane crash, a highway pileup, a roller-coaster accident), persuading a group to avoid it, and then spending the rest of the movie dodging the Grim Reaper, who seeks to collect the souls he lost. Death exists in these films as an amorphous concept; there’s no cloaked villain carrying a scythe. Instead, the characters keep finding themselves in implausibly dangerous situations, where a procession of coincidences might lead to them getting squished, impaled, or otherwise maimed.
Death is, in many ways, a comforting villain for a slasher series. It’s not malevolent like the Freddys and Jasons of the genre; rather, it’s goofily irresistible, a fated force that insists on smooshing a meathead in the face with his own gym equipment. It also mirrors the tone of the Final Destination saga, which follows a consistent, if slightly repetitive, formula. Sure, the fourth movie leans on 3-D photography (it was hot at the time), and the fifth reveals itself to be a surprise prequel to the first. The plot beats of the installments are always the same, however: A plucky-if-whiny group of young people comes to the realization that they cannot forever outrun the specter of doom.
I learned that Final Destination was returning, after a 14-year break, when I saw a trailer for it at the theater. It showcased one of many set pieces in the film: As a surly tattoo-parlor employee closes up shop, terrible things start to happen—his piercings get caught on a chain that’s attached to a spinning fan; flammable cleaning fluid starts to leak everywhere. I felt my fellow theatergoers have the same shudder of recognition that I did. Oh, an inexplicable Rube Goldberg machine of death? This is Final Destination! It must be back!
Back it certainly is, with Final Destination: Bloodlines. There were reasons to be skeptical of its quality; the co-directors, Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, for instance, were perhaps previously best known for making a live-action Kim Possible movie for the Disney Channel. Reviving mothballed horror classics—à la the failed Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street reboots—is also a practice with a shaky track record. Yet Bloodlines is a total delight; it’s also arguably the best of the series because of an added soupçon of self-awareness. The film begins, as usual, with a vision of cataclysm: a Space Needle–esque building that both collapses and explodes. Instead of taking place in the modern day, as is typical of Final Destination films, this disaster happened in 1968—and is later revealed to be a vision that a woman named Iris Campbell had decades prior.
In stopping the accident, Iris delayed the deaths of hundreds, who then perished over the decades. When Bloodlines begins, she’s lived in seclusion for years, having doomed her descendants by cheating death herself. The living members of the Campbell family, by all accounts, should never have been born—giving the plot an intense timeline for them to deal with, as they come to realize that Iris’s actions have now caught up with them. The well-established stakes help the story speed through the most boring part of the Final Destination schematic, where people refuse to believe the supernatural madness befalling them and then grow progressively more convinced of it as the body count rises.
Maybe this premise sounds like pseudo-philosophical fiddle-faddle. But what I love most about Final Destination is the absence of heavy, heady themes that have pervaded the horror genre of late: Rarely does a modern scary movie encourage the audience to laugh, or leave behind some especially frightening image that can amuse as much as haunt them. Not so in the Final Destination films, in which people die in the most outlandish fashion and are, at best, afforded a five-second funeral scene; maybe one family member gets a comforting pat on the back. There’s a sinful sort of glee in watching all of this unfold, knowing that the same mournful character might be the next one to die. Iris even lays out the exact order in which everyone will go and the sort of hazards to look out for, which means the protagonists second-guess their every step to a Looney Tunes–level extent.
Essentially, it’s fun to have a horror movie you can cheer during. The packed audience in my theater clapped and applauded as the deaths became gradually more absurd (in particular, I tip my cap to the oldest stuntperson to ever be set on fire on-screen). If Scream revived the slasher in the 1990s with its clever meta storytelling, Final Destination helped bring back the proper amusement park vibe for the genre, jolting the viewers every few minutes with a gory surprise that had them screaming and giggling at the same time. Bloodlines is well plotted and brilliantly grisly, but most important, it knows how to enjoy itself. I’d say that having fun, more than anything, is what people are seeking from the communal cinematic experience.
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