Michael. Freddy. Chucky. Jason.
These icons of horror defined the genre and set the standard for a good horror movie. They taught the world that monsters needed a signature look, a strange backstory, and a set of rules for defeating them. Moreover, they established that monsters needed a gimmick, some specific manner for taking out victims.
Then, in 2000, came a different kind of slasher icon, one who defied expectations. The killer in Final Destination is Death itself. Although personified with its own set of rules, Death in Final Destination returned mystery to horror, putting elaborate kills before recognizable character beats and opening the way for the genre to move past the slasher model that had ruled since the 1980s.
The Slasher Goes Safe
While the 2000s’ glut of Asian remakes and Z-level torture porn movies make the decade one of the lowest points in American horror, at least the period had a distinctive character. The same can’t be said of the 1990s. Certainly, the ’90s had some fantastic entries, from the creature feature Tremors (1990) and the stately The Silence of the Lambs (1991) to The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project from 1999. But those high points stood out among a sea of middling entries that tried to recapture the best of the 1980s. The slasher icon of the ’80s still loomed large in the public imagination, and studios tried to replicate the success of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Sometimes, that meant carrying franchises from the past into the 1990s, leading to the tired Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991) or Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993).
Sometimes, it meant introducing new slasher icons, with mixed success. Yes, Scream (1996) is a great movie that gave the genre a jolt, but it did so by reanimating the slasher corpse. Not only was it mostly beholden to movies of the ’80s, but it launched a whole new wave of anonymous horror entries that lacked Craven’s direction (see: I Know What You Did Last Summer from 1997 and Halloween H20 from 1998).
Worse were the horror films that had to struggle past studio and audience expectations for a standard slasher formula. Candyman (1992) translates a Clive Barker story about class in England to a bloody fantasia about race in Chicago, with an incredible lead performance by Tony Todd as a romantic monster in the vein of the Universal greats. Yet, both the studio and fans couldn’t understand why he didn’t use his hook hand more, pushing for graphic kills instead of the character’s tragedy and allure.
The icons of ’80s horror gave the genre the populist edge it lost after The Exorcist in 1973, but they too became restrictive and dull in the 1990s. It took Death itself to kill those tropes and make way for a new wave in the 2000s and the 2010s.
The Invisible Hand of Death
The evening after he eulogized the classmates he lost in a shocking airplane accident, teenager Tod (Chad Donella) stumbles into the bathroom for some grooming. Tod goes about his work totally unaware of anything around him, not even bothered by a strange cloud forming behind him, but we viewers know there’s something more going on.
The camera stalks behind Tod and pans around him in the bathroom, just like Michael or Jason does to their victims. The camera looks at what will be the means of Tod’s end — the water leaking from the toilet, a clothes line hung up over a tub — as if choosing the tools of his death. And when the deed is done and Tod’s body hangs from the line that strangled him, the camera watches as the water seeps back into the toilet, putting the tools away.
This first proper death scene from 2000’s Final Destination feels just like a death scene from any slasher from the 1980s or ’90s. Director James Wong, who worked with fellow X-Files alum Glen Morgan to adapt a spec script by Jeffrey Reddick, follows all the tropes that had been well established in the previous two decades. There’s a group of good-looking but empty-headed teens, a mystery that points to our innocent lead, and even a knowing figure who explains it all to the hero (the great Tony Todd as mortician William Bludworth).
But there’s one important thing missing from Final Destination‘s impressive kill scenes. There’s no distinctive mask, no ironic one-liner, no signature murder instrument. Death, the killer in Final Destination, has no face or form. The closest thing it has to a one liner are the clues it gives to main character Alex (Devon Sawa) before claiming another victim.
That omission of a clearly defined killer is enough to help Final Destination redefine the horror genre. By erasing the monster, leaving only its effects instead of the character, Final Destination allowed the kills to stand out. We suddenly have more room to care about the characters, broadly drawn as they are in this movie. There’s more space to watch clever and well-constructed kills, which had turned arbitrary or silly in the 1990s but now feel inventive, surprising and tragic.
Without having to worry about building a horror icon, Final Destination could just worry about the most important thing in a horror movie: the horror.
After Death, Horror’s Resurrection
Perhaps the biggest indicator of Final Destination‘s influence on the genre can be seen in the other films that flourished during the 2000s. Saw led the torture porn subgenre and, on the surface, seems to follow the standards set in the ’80s and ’90s. The franchise seems to have an iconic figure in Jigsaw, who uses a pig mask, a toy puppet, and follows a set of rules. However, Jigsaw operates as a misnomer and distraction from the main character John Kramer, a more complex character than Michael, Jason, or Freddy.
Moreover, the primary appeal of the Saw movies (outside of their wild ongoing narrative) are their approach to kills. The traps set by Kramer and his acolytes have much in common with the Rube Goldberg sequences designed by Death in Final Destination – intricate systems to induce pain and suffering.
To be sure, Final Destination wasn’t the only influential horror film of the period. The Sixth Sense led the way for respectable scary movies, which eventually found their fullest expression in today’s A24 and elevated horror entries. Gore Verbinski’s remake of The Ring (2002) opened the door (for better or worse) to movies such as The Grudge (2004). The Blair Witch Project showed how to create maximum scares on a minimum budget, making room for the Paranormal Activity franchise and other found footage movies.
But none of these advancements would have been nearly as successful if Final Destination hadn’t taken the formula that had dominated the genre for two decades and utterly refigured it, showing horror fans that moving beyond slashers was, ironically, nothing to fear.
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