The horror franchiseFinal Destinationdominated the 2000s as the movies combined ridiculous campy features —similar toSharknado, and horrific gory deaths. The movie was able to seamlessly substitute reality for dramatics as the kills are attributed to the supernatural force, Death.
TheFinal Destinationfranchise was created by screenwriter and director Jeffery Riddick who contributed to the scripts of the first two movies. Since its debut in 2000, the franchise has come to encompass five movies, two comic books by Zenescope Entertainment, and a series of novels. The movies have featured a few notorious actors, some of which are Mary Elizabeth Winstead,Resident Evil’s Ali Larter,Criminal Minds’ A.J. Cook,andShameless' Noel Fisher.
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EachFinal Destinationplot revolves arounda group of people, sometimes friends and sometimes strangers, who work to escape their eventual death after the movie’s protagonist has a vision, referred to as premonitions, of the group dying in an accident and intercepts. As the story develops, the group is slowly killed offin shocking and often-gruesome murders.
Although kitschy-sounding, the movie adopts a very unique voice. The movies tend to be comedic and terrifying simultaneously without ever falling victim to B-rated parody.The inescapable nature of Deathadds to the movie’s fear as the group members slowly come to their senses and work ferociously to stay alive, however, their incapability to do so often results in jaw-dropping deaths, teasing the audience with the unimaginable. Here are five absurd and teeth-chattering murders from theFinal Destinationmovie series.
Evan Lewis’ Death inFinal Destination 2
After being saved from deathby protagonistKimberly Corman’s premonition that predicted a major highway pile-up and explosion caused by a large log sliding off of the back of a truck and impaling the front window of the following car, Evan Lewis is the first of the survivors to go. His death sequence includes a number of nail-biting moments, leaving the watchers on the edge of their seats. Although it is baffling how he got himself into the situation, it doesn’t make the impact any less severe.
Samantha Lane inFinal Destination 4
Samantha Lane’s death inFinal Destination 4accentuates the “anything can happen” implication seen throughout the series as the characters find themselves evaluating their every move. In this sequence, Lane dies while attending a last-minute visit to her usual hair salon after escaping death at a race car event. Her death reallymakes people question the mundane, as after she survived the initial accident and the many misfortunes of the salon, her final moments were more unavoidable than most.
Valerie Lewton’s Death inFinal Destination
As the inception of the series, the firstFinal Destinationmovie set the tone for the ones to follow. In this movie, it is first learned from the recurring mortician character William Bludworth that those who escaped their initial death by premonition will be immediately sought after. In this sequence, teacher Valerie Lewton is suffering from survivor’s guilt and is amidst packing her belongings to leave town. She is in fear of the protagonist Alex Browning’s premonition which predicted a plane crash that was carrying students and teachers to their senior trip. As the third death in the movie, Lewton’s had plenty ofblood and quick scares.
Nora CarpenterFinal Destination 2
RevisitingFinal Destination 2,Nora Carpenter is unrelatedly widowed and fresh off of losing her son to the Death theory. In this scene, she leaves a “survivor’s meeting” early to tend to her son’s funeral, despite the advice from the movie’s lead, Kimberly Coleman, police officer Thomas Burke, and lone survivor of the firstFinal Destinationmovie Clear Rivers. Carpenter’sdeath sequence is dreadfulin many ways and it’s hard to point blame towards her inadequacy, unlike many of the other sequences. Similar to the salon sequence, this was a woman at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Erin Ulmer inFinal Destination 3
Lastly, there’s Erin Ulmer’s gruesome death inFinal Destination 3that involves a nail gun to the head. After protagonist Wendy Christensen saves her friends and classmates from death at a local amusement park, Ulmer is the fifth of the movie’s survivors to die. In this sequence, Christensen and her friend arrive at Ulmer’s workplace to warn her of the subsequent deaths, but Ulmer refuses to take them seriouslyresulting in this bloody scene.
Fear not about this reminiscent visit to theFinal Destinationseries as creator Riddick has confirmed that there will be a sixth addition. In a recent interview about his newly-released horror movieDon’t Look Back, Riddick expressed, “Yeah, there will be anotherFinal Destination. They were talking about it before COVID, about developing it, and then COVID hit.”
