Forget the masked madmen that have haunted horror films for decades, the Final Destination franchise’s anonymous, amorphous killer taps into real anxieties about mortality, says Billie Walker.
We are experiencing masked-killer fatigue in horror films. Halloween was resuscitated, then buried once more. Texas Chainsaw Massacre returned for a brief stint. There seems no end in sight for Scream, and in a few months we’ll see the return of I Know What You Did Last Summer’s veiled avenger.
These slashers hinge on masked psychopaths, who (with the exception of Scream’s revolving killers) gained an unspoken immortality when they returned to reboot franchises, which made the new movies feel all too familiar. At the turn of the century, however, James Wong’s Final Destination (2000) was designed to offer something different: the feeling of being stalked by a malevolent presence without the need for a masked madman. In the absence of a killer, the franchise amplified a universal dread – death itself.
Every Final Destination film begins with a freak accident, whether that be a plane crash, a rollercoaster breaking down, a collapsing bridge or any number of mass tragedies. There is always one would-be victim who foresees their doom, warns others and steers them away from certain death. The survivors soon discover Death does not like to be cheated, and the hand of fate returns to systematically snuff out all those who remain. Twenty-five years on from the franchise’s gory beginnings, Zach Lipovsky and Adam B Stein have revived vengeful Death in Final Destination: Bloodlines. But their film differs from its predecessors. Instead of preventing an event herself, Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is plagued by dreams of a disaster that never happened, one that her grandmother Iris (Brec Bassinger/Gabrielle Rose) predicted and stopped, making Iris and all those she saved Death’s targets.
What separates the Final Destination movies from other slashers is their inventive kill scenes. As Death has no face, an invisible force controls anything in its orbit, creating violent chain reactions that dismember, impale, suffocate and immolate the intended victim. These are not murders: there are no knife-wielding killers to blame, only elements. In this way, the Final Destination series encourages paranoia. Lipovsky and Stein successfully play into our awareness of the movies’ patterns in Bloodlines. Every shard of glass, electrical hazard and blunt object is placed in the audience’s peripheral vision, encouraging anxiety around a potential danger. These triggers get us as jittery as Death’s next victim.
Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)
Final Destination has influenced countless horror movies, inspiring killers that present as anonymous embodiments of our fears. In David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2015), teenage Jay (Maika Monroe) is plagued by a fatal curse after her first sexual encounter. The entity takes the form of strangers and friends alike, stalking her until it can get close enough to kill her. The violent force in Smile (2022) and Smile 2 (2024) manifests itself in similar ways to It Follows. In these films, viewing a violent death conjures an invisible trauma demon that hitches a ride on its host until they befall the same brutal fate as the one they witnessed. By creating anonymous killers, It Follows and Smile follow in Final Destination’s bloody footsteps. They do away with the need for masked killers by turning universal anxieties – around sex and traumatic memories – into dogged Grim Reapers.
Osgood Perkins’ adaptation of Stephen King’s short story The Monkey (2025), shares Final Destination’s thanatophobia, as well as a fascination with comically implausible death sequences. After witnessing the untimely death of his mother, Hal (Theo James) becomes convinced that the family have been cursed by the sinister wind-up monkey he and twin brother Bill (Theo James) found in their attic. In adulthood, Hal distances himself from anyone for fear of cursing them too. Much like the estranged members of Stefani’s family, Hal lives an empty life in an attempt to save those he loves from a grim fate.
The Monkey (2025)
Hal is not the only one whose morbid obsession has left him isolated. Driven by a desire to understand the violent vision that haunts her, Stefani seeks out information about her grandmother in Bloodlines, and learns that Iris has become an outsider from the family. In her years spent avoiding Death’s grasp, Iris’ paranoia negatively affected her children’s upbringing. Eventually, she chooses to live out the remainder of her days alone in the woods. The Halloween and Final Destination franchises may be more different than they are alike, but the heroines of Bloodlines and 2018’s Halloween do share some character traits. In attempts to fortify themselves against their pursuers, the ageing Iris and Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) have barricaded themselves inside their isolated homes. Fear has become their driving force and life has little meaning beyond their will to survive.
Throughout the series, Final Destination presents two ways to live. One is to fear the inevitable; the other is to concentrate on life itself, rather than its end. Characters who take the former option rely on extreme safety measures. In Final Destination 2 (2003), Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), the last survivor of Flight 180, has locked herself in the padded cell of a psychiatric ward to keep Death at bay. While in Bloodlines, Iris has passed on a survivalist instinct for alert overcautiousness to her daughter Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt). In every instalment, the surviving victims have fought to avoid their impending doom. But ultimately there is no way to cheat the inevitable – the resulting fear of death is actually just a fear of life itself.
Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)
You would think that a film that focuses so much on the end of life would be a depressing watch, but thanks to its exaggerated death sequences and violent sense of humour, Final Destination: Bloodlines turns our shared anxieties over our own mortality into a punchline. The movie doesn’t linger too long on the generational trauma that plagues the family. Instead, it examines the absurdity of battling against the inevitable and the wasted, overly sheltered lives of those who try to play Death at its own game. At a time when studios keep dragging out the same stale masked killers that have been stalking horror screens since the Seventies, it’s revitalising to witness the rebirth of a franchise with a wicked sense of humour and infinite catastrophic possibilities. Final Destination: Bloodlines has brought the ultimate killer back to the big screen.
WATCH FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES
