Summary
The early 2000s were an experimental time for horror.Moregore-heavy franchises likeSawcame out, along with adaptations of Japanese classics likeThe Ring. However, the king of the early 2000s franchises has to beFinal Destination.
The premiseofFinal Destinationwas so simple and satisfying that it only made sense to make more movies about it. Some people see a disaster happen, outlive it, and then some unknown entity tries to kill thosesurvivors off one by one. Even though the base formula is the same every time, there are small changes made by each entry in the series. From the 2000 original to the latest,Final Destination Bloodlines, let’s go through how the series' lore has changed over the last two decades.
Final Destinationbegins with a vision ofa giant plane crashand a young student, Alex, waking up to find he is still alive, and the plane hasn’t crashed…yet. He’s able to convince some fellow students to get off the plane, and then they all watch as it gets destroyed from the airport lobby.
It’s never explained in any of these movies why the protagonists get these visions, but regardless, the whole movie is Alex trying to figure out who will be next. FBI agents are investigating him as he keeps appearing at disaster scenes. The only other piece of lore established is that if someone gets saved, they will go to the back of the line, and then the next person will be killed.
Final Destination 2involves a highway scene where a log truck causesa giant car pileup. Even in the best racing games, no one could try and recreate this magical carnage. Kimberly and her friends are on their way to spring break, but other than her, they all die, although she does save a few strangers by causing a ruckus on the highway. This was the first and only movie in the series to have a surviving character from the last movie, Clear Rivers, carry over to the sequel, but she also dies.
What’s new this time is that other people can see Death approaching through visions, although it’s still mostly Kimberly taking the initiative. More so than that, suicide is impossible for anyone under the curse, because one character, Eugene, puts a revolver to his head, and all six bullets end up being duds. Finally, this was the first movie to show that someone saved by a character marked by Death can get killed instead of them, as seen with the BBQ explosion.
Final Destination 3took a big leap by introducing the photograph warnings. The initial accident happened at a school fair for seniors, whereinone of the rollercoasterswent wild and killed everyone on board. Wendy was the lead who was taking pictures for her Journalism class throughout the carnival.
After the incident, she starts to notice that some deaths mimicked those in the photographs, prompting her to attempt to predict how other people were going to die. It was also the first movie that completely killed its entire surviving cast by the end, with another big crash, this time involving a subway derailment, eliminating its characters for good.
The Final Destinationis the fourth movie in the series, and it is all about a NASCAR-like disaster.The biggimmick involved 3Dfor a lot of its kills, which didn’t change the lore at all, but it certainly made the film unique, in both good and bad ways.
Nick was the survivor in this one. He was trying to save his friends and random people from the track. The big surprise at the end was a movie theater exploding, which turned out to be another fake-out, something that had never happened on that scale in the series before. Still, Nick and his two friends were eventually killed by a truck, mirroring the end ofFinal Destination 3,where no one was allowed to survive.
Final Destination 5had a few big reveals to add to the lore. First, viewers may have been able to figure it out earlier based on context clues like technology, but it was a prequel to the original film, which ended with the plane crash that kicked off the series. Sam and his girlfriend, Molly, are on theirway to Parisbecause Sam got a new job as a chef,which is when the plane explodes.
The beginning of the movie is about a bridge collapse, and in Sam’s vision, there is a survivor, Molly. Someone surviving in a vision had never been done before. Also, it was established that if a survivor killed someone, they would absorb their life. Molly does die, though, as previously mentioned, and even those who killed someone else still died, so that change to the lore was only semi-permanent.
Final Destination Bloodlinesis a major change for the series, as it’s technically a prequel like the fifth movie, or at least the beginning is. In the 1960s, a woman named Iris survives a tragedy in a restaurant, but because of her premonition, she prevents the deaths of everyone involved. That causes a ripple effect in time as Death has to eliminate multiple bloodlines, one family at a time, which took decades.
Final Destination Bloodlinesbegins with Death’s eyes set on Iris’ family, the Campbells. Because of this backstory, this could explain all the other events in the franchise by connecting the victims to survivors of the restaurant tragedy via their ancestors. Also, William Bludworth, the mortician playedby the late Tony Todd, who appears in most of these movies, was a survivor along with Iris from all those years ago, which explains how he knew so much about the curse and was always lingering around the fringes of Death’s retribution.
