This post has lots of spoilers for both Final Destination: Bloodlines and the first Final Destination movie, as well as maybe The Monkey and The Cabin in the Woods.
When I was still coming off of my high of seeing Final Destination: Bloodlines, I said that not only did it nail the formula better than any other entry in the franchise, but it also managed to avoid being completely nihilistic, and even ended on a note that was almost uplifting. I didn’t want to overstate it, but was just marveling at how it managed to lean into the black comedy inherent in the premise, but without becoming so campy or silly as to turn into a horror movie parody.
But since watching the sixth movie (and scheduling another visit to see it in IMAX), I’ve been reading through my old posts about the series, and re-watching all of the recaps on the YouTube channel Dead Meat. That reminded me of the maudlin (and in my opinion, just awful) original ending of the first Final Destination, which had the characters breaking the cycle by having our hero sacrifice himself and help bring new life into the world.
You could conclude that that’s a lesson about focus testing and studio interference, or you could conclude, as I did, that the Final Destination movies need to stick to their formula and stop trying to introduce any kind of emotional heft into a series specifically about a cast full of people all dying in absurdly improbable ways.
But then I started thinking about another scene in Bloodlines, which built off an idea from Final Destination 2: you can “satisfy” death by dying and then somehow being resurrected.1Which is an idea I’ve seen pop up in several other movies since then, as well. The character of Erik plans to save his brother Bobby, who’s next in line, by aggravating his peanut allergy until he flatlines, and then having the hospital staff bring him back.
Erik starts to get him a bag of roasted peanuts, but Bobby says as long as they’re doing this, he wants to get a pack of peanut butter cups. (Which he’s presumably never tasted, of course).2And we’re given a clear shot of the warning label on the vending machine, right before they start trying to tip it over, because this movie understands exactly how the series is all about planting ideas in the audience’s mind. And the moment I like so much, which seemed like nothing more than a good gag at first: Bobby takes a bite of it, and he says, “It’s so good.” The reason I like it is because he’s marked for death, but he has a small moment of choosing to enjoy something.
Today I saw an interesting interview with the Bloodlines directors, Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky, where they answered questions and gave some behind-the-scenes info, like the fact that Bobby’s actor also happened to have a peanut allergy. Which, they said, made the scene feel more real. They also talked a bit about alternate endings, alternate deaths, original concepts for the script, and the process of filming the scenes with Tony Todd.
As written, Todd’s scene served to show his connection to Iris’s premonition and to explain why he’s always been the one character in the franchise who knows the rules of how death works in these situations. He then performs the same role for the plot that he has in every other movie: to give the characters an idea of how they might make it out alive, to give them motivation for the last act.
But the directors reveal that they left the end of the scene open, to give Tony Todd an opportunity to improvise and speak directly to long-time fans of the Final Destination movies. So before his exit, he delivers the lines that I think are the emotional core of the movie, telling the family that they can’t escape death, so they might as well enjoy every second they have left.
With that, so many other scenes in the movie align to reinforce that same idea. We know that protagonist Stefani’s mother Darlene originally had a different death, because we see it heavily implied in the trailer that she’s crushed by a revolving door.3Which in the final movie, just has all the characters trying to enter the hospital and spooked by the revolving door. It’s so much better left at that. The version of her story in the final cut is stronger, because it underscores her reconciliation with her kids. As we saw earlier, she’d left in an attempt to keep them safe, but at the cost of enjoying a life with her family.
It’s all explicit in Iris’s story, where she managed to survive for decades but only at the cost of losing any connection to everyone in her life, and spending her entire life locked inside a cabin. It’s repeated in Darlene trying to avoid her mother’s mistakes and ending up just repeating them. By Uncle Howard having one last good afternoon at the barbecue, reunited with his entire family, including his sister. By Stefani’s estrangement from the rest of the family, only reconnecting with them because of the funeral. And the final scene, which shows how she could reconnect with her brother and enjoy spending time with him, only because they’d let their guard down because they’d thought they were safe.
For that matter, it adds a level of poignancy to Iris’s original premonition. In the moment, having Iris get engaged and announce her pregnancy on the same date just feels tonally appropriate. It’s a heightened happy moment contrasted with all of the disaster, plus it’s heightened melodrama to work as a fond-memory flashback. But it’s also thematically appropriate. We learn that she was set up for a life of happiness but lost it because of the premonition, even though she survived.
I always thought that complaints about the characters in Final Destination movies were misguided, since they really exist only to be killed, and that to insist on their being likable or relatable isn’t just unnecessary, but ghoulish. But so much of Bloodlines works so well because these characters do have existing relationships, and aren’t just strangers who’ve been brought together by fate.
So maybe I’ve been wrong about whether a Final Destination movie, which is so heavily based on the gimmick that drives it, also requires any kind of emotional weight to it. They really are experiments in horror movie filmmaking for its own sake, taking the core components of horror movies and distilling them down to pure suspense. As much as I love The Cabin in the Woods for challenging the audience with the question of why we’re so intent on seeing people killed for our amusement, I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with a movie that’s uninterested in asking that question, and instead just wants to deliver the best possible version of its formula.
I think Bloodlines excels at delivering on the formula, but for a movie that seems so uninterested in being quiet or subtle, it also quietly and subtly has an emotional undercurrent that keeps it from devolving into nihilism.
I’ve been seeing a lot of reviewers mention The Monkey in comparison to Bloodlines. And I don’t want to keep harping on how much I thoroughly disliked that movie, but I think it’s a great contrast to illustrate why Bloodlines works so well.
I think the kills in The Monkey are much less interesting, for one thing, with neither the irony nor the timing of even the weakest kills in the Final Destination series. The only sense of suspense comes from wondering when something is going to happen; there’s never a sense of wondering what’s going to happen. The movie either shows you directly what’s going to happen, with no sense of mystery, or it just happens as a non sequitur, without any foreshadowing.
But the more significant contrast is in the underlying tone. The two movies have more or less the same “message:” no one can cheat death, so the best we can do is to make the most of the time we have. But The Monkey has such a needlessly nasty and nihilistic take on it. It says “stop worrying about death, and enjoy the time you have with the people you love.” But we never see any sincere expressions of that love which aren’t quickly undermined by a juvenile and clumsy attempt to be sardonic. And everybody in the movie is so deliberately gross that I can’t imagine wanting to spend more time with them.
Even if the end result in Bloodlines is the same, and it all ends in a gruesome and grisly death, I really appreciated seeing the lengths that a surface-level obnoxious and arrogant guy would go to for the sake of protecting his kind-hearted, extremely allergic brother. And giving him the chance to enjoy one simple pleasure before he goes.