And Then There Were None

On Suspense, Agatha Christie, and Final Destination

This is part of a series of essays about my favourite horror sequels. Read the introduction here, and the full archive here. Subscribe for free to have it delivered to your inbox every other day in October. If you're enjoying it, you can show your appreciation by buying me a coffee or sharing it with friends.

Spoilers: I try my best not to spoil the films I discuss, but if spoilers ruin your viewing experience, it might be safer to watch the films before reading.

Final Destination Bloodlines (2025) Dir. Zack Lipovsky and Adam Stein

Plot Summary: In 1969, Iris Campbell disrupts Death’s design only to discover that Death is good at improvising.

"There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it." - Alfred Hitchcock

In Val Lewton’s 1942 classic, Cat People, we watch as Alice walks home alone at night. The scene is tense, cloaked in threatening shadows. The echoing footsteps sound like Alice is being followed. Stalked. Eventually - finally - the tension is broken by the sound of a growl and a hiss! She, and we, brace in expectation of the attack, only for it to be revealed the sounds came from the arrival of a public bus. This has become known as one of the first instances of the jump-scare. But more specifically, this style of jump-scare - where the threat is revealed to be harmless - became known as a Lewton Bus. That moment when a cat suddenly leaps out at the protagonist and isn’t, in fact, a masked killer? That’s a Lewton Bus.

In the 2000 film Final Destination, teacher Valerie Lewton and a group of her students have a heated argument about how and why they survived a doomed plane crash. One of the students walks away, making a rousing speech about moving on. Out of nowhere, a bus speeds into frame and flattens her. There was no warning, no build-up of tension. It's an intentional subversion of the Lewton Bus, featuring as it does a Lewton and a bus. The sudden brutality of it - the lack of suspense - is both shocking and, let's face it, funny.

"What you have to realise is that we're just a mouse that a cat has by the tail, every single move we make from the mundane to the monumental, the red light that we stop at or run, the people we have sex with or won't with us, the airplanes that we ride or walk out of, it's all part of Death's sadistic design. Leading to the grave." - William "JB" Bludworth

I love that Lewton Bus gag. It comes after an extended, suspenseful, Rube Goldberg machine style sequence that results in the death of another student. The film immediately breaks the pattern with the bus. Playing with the audience's expectations, keeping us on our toes. But future instalments misread it's purpose as that of brutal bloodlust.

Final Destination began life in 1994 as a spec script for an episode of The X-Files, titled "Flight 180." In it, Scully's brother is the one who has the premonitions of a plane crash. Writer Jeffrey Reddick developed the idea into a feature film script which eventually became Final Destination. The film itself had some additional writing from X-Files writing partners James Wong and Glen Morgan (who wrote some of the best Season 1 episodes like "Squeeze", "Ice", "Beyond the Sea", and "Tooms"), with Wong directing.

"In this repurposing of the Cassandra figure, Final Destination is coded as a darkly comedic tragedy with Alex at its centre haplessly trying to effect change." - Alexandra West (The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle)

The original film was concerned with ideas about control, self-determination, fate, and the inevitability of death. Generally speaking, especially in the West, we're encouraged not to think about or talk about death. I think it makes us uniquely unprepared for grief. Horror, of course, is a good outlet for processing and addressing this, but what I find interesting is how many people cite this film series as the thing that helped them accept and come to terms with their own death.

It's starting to become clear to me that this newsletter mini-series, ostensibly about my favourite horror sequels, is actually becoming a history of the slasher film. Because the success of Final Destination led to a franchise that allowed the slasher to survive, hidden in plain sight, during the height of the torture porn/found footage/J horror era. The series is a brutally efficient mutation of the sub-genre that met the start of the 21st Century where it was.

"Parents and children alike were struggling to define new roles for themselves in the face of an ever-changing society. Final Destination implies that even if these families could see into the future, they would not want to." - Alexandra West (The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle)

Traditional slashers had to spend time establishing motivations and writing inciting incidents for their monstrous metaphors for death. They had to give you an interesting cast of teens you wanted to root for. They even might try and nod towards some themes and suggest that escape, triumph and hope are possible. Final Destination doesn't need to bother with any of that. Death is a cosmic inevitability. It cannot be cheated. We will all face it. So let's get straight to why you, the audience, are here: inventive, gory deaths.

That's what slasher franchises became the longer they went on - excuses for bloodier, more VFX-laden, creative deaths. The teens became thinly written, badly acted canon fodder for the kills. Final Destination, as a series of films, is almost perfectly constructed to satisfy this audience bloodlust.

It means the films have a low ceiling in terms of quality, but a fairly high floor if what you're in the mood for are some fun, splatterhouse kills. Or at least that's what I thought. Revisiting the films recently, it became clear that there is a difference between funny cruel deaths and mean, punishing cruel deaths. As the sequels went on, there was a tortuous, frathouse nastiness to some of the kills that I found off-putting. If the series is ultimately about finding ways to personify Death, Death seemed to be getting increasingly vicious, impatient and lazy killing these teens.

Luckily, Final Destination Bloodlines came along to reset the table somewhat. Co-written by Gus Busick (co-writer of Screams 5-7 - apparently he's the guy to call if you want your '90s/00s franchise revived) and Lori Evans Taylor, Bloodlines recognises that in Final Destination, you have to write your set-pieces like a locked room murder mystery.

"Another obvious example is to have the audience provided with information not available to the characters, as when you have a man about to be stabbed in the back by another man, the audience sees but the victim does not. Suspense results from the audience wishing to warn its friend, the character who is about to be stabbed." - Alfred Hitchcock

Every death in Bloodlines is written like an Agatha Christie whodunnit. We have a cast of potential culprits - all with motive and opportunity, along with some red herrings, and the film encourages you as the audience to play along and solve the riddle. Yes, there's a satisfaction in the Rube Goldberg series-of-unfortunate-events, but that's just a small part of it. It's also about putting a series of bombs under the table and squirming in your seat as the characters narrowly avoid them without realising it. The sequences, at their best, have you as the audience constantly guessing and second guessing what is going to happen - how all these pieces are going to create disaster. Will it be the shard of glass in the ice? The rake under the trampoline? The Jenga tower? The precariously placed beer bottle? The BBQ propane tank? The lawnmower? All of the above? Place your bets.

Essentially, what Bloodlines remembers is that Final Destination isn't just about the bloodlust. That's what people remember. The end result. The severed heads and bodies exploding under sheets of glass. The Lewton Buses. No, the true star of the films is suspense.

It was right there in the original with almost every character named after a master of the form: Browning, Chaney, Lewton, Hitchcock, Murnau etc.

While the franchise has mostly been directed by journeymen without much visual flair, the best of them know how to craft these suspense sequences with patience and attention to detail. It's not easy to make these set-pieces work. The pacing is tricky to get right. When do you introduce a new suspect into the mix? How long do you hold on that insert shot? Where do you want to draw the audiences eye next? What do you want them to think? How do you keep surprising them? It's a juggling act. A magic trick.

What's frustrating about Bloodlines is that it gets all the suspense right but, aesthetically, looks a little off to me. This could just be personal taste here as I've not seen much discussion about the look of it - but everything has this glossy, bright, glow to it. The Netflix Look. I know it hasn't been made with AI but it looks like AI slop at times. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it feels uncanny and unreal. The CGI blood doesn't help (though I appreciate there are a lot of excellent practical effects).

That gripe aside, Bloodlines largely gets the rest right and offers fans of the series a fun, Grand Unifying Theory that ties all the films together. That's especially poignant and moving with Tony Todd's return as William Bludworth. Todd's character had been a constant presence across the series - to the extent that a Final Destination film didn't feel like a Final Destination film without him. His appearance across the franchise is satisfyingly explained here while giving Todd a fitting farewell.

He had stomach cancer when they filmed Bloodlines and the directors asked him to improvise his final lines - to say what he wanted to the fans:

"I intend to enjoy the time I have left, and I suggest you do the same. Life is precious. Enjoy every single second. You never know when... Good luck" - William "JB" Bludworth

Are the Final Destination films good? I can no longer give an unbiased opinion. The first couple have oddly become comfort watches for me and I can see Bloodlines becoming the same. Maybe the question should really be: Do I want to see teens become increasingly unhinged in front of news clippings and shout "DEATH HAS A DESIGN"?

Absolutely I do.

Order of Service

1. Final Destination (2000)
   A lot of people say Bloodlines is the best of the series. I disagree. I think this looks better, has a stronger grasp on it’s characters, and deserves a place at the top for establishing the premise in the first place.
2. Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)
   See: this post.
3. Final Destination 2 (2003)
   The highway disaster set-piece is a series highlight and some of the deaths are excellent. Spaghetti!
4. Final Destination 3 (2006)
   Mary Elizabeth Winstead carries this admirably but the deaths start to veer into punishingly cruel instead of hilariously cruel. The tanning bed sequence is a real low point for the series in my opinion.
5. Final Destination 5 (2011)
   You might have fonder memories of this one due to the, admittedly great, full circle ending, but the rest of the film is decidedly average.
6. The Final Destination (2009)
   A lot of bad CGI, insufferable characters and frathouse humour deaths. Peak late 2000s nihilism horror in the worst way.

Exhumed Contents

• This isn’t the first time - and doubtlessly won’t be the last - that I reference Alexandra West’s The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle. So here’s a link to buy it.
• Speaking of West, here she is with Andrea Subissati on the Faculty of Horror discussing the first Final Destination.
• The 20 rules for detective fiction writers to Play Fair with their readers. I think there could be a version of this for Final Destination set-pieces.
• You can read Jeffrey Reddick's original X-Files spec script here.
• The Slow Death of Final Destination: An interesting episode of Directorpiece Theatre on the Small Beans network - looking at the ways in which directors personify death across the films.
• An Evolution of Horror chat with original writer Jeffrey Reddick.