How ‘Final Destination 2’ Saved My Life
Chad Collins
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Editor’s note: this article contains mentions of suicide.
I was in third grade the first time I ever saw David R. Ellis’ Final Destination 2. We were assigned some sort of late-day reflection activity. In little adolescent roundtables, our task was to share with our peers brief summaries of a movie we’d seen recently. A lot of my friends saw Piglet’s Big Movie. I wanted to talk about Dreamcatcher, even though I didn’t understand it. But, my mind eventually wandered to that cool movie with the log truck. “I saw a movie with my mom, and at the end, the barbecue exploded and some guy’s arm fell off,” I said. My teacher asked me to visit the guidance counselor.
Like so many kids—different kids, sometimes sad kids—I looked for the fire of life in the murky confines of horror. It’s what kept me going, a nostalgic buoy with a clearly delineated throughline from where I was to where I am—writing about horror movies all the time. I’m no less susceptible to the desire most horror fans feel to watch anything horror everywhere, all the time.
If Sundance TV is showing Frailty, I’ll watch it. If SyFy is showing a Friday the 13th marathon, I’m there, even though I’ve seen them hundreds of times before. Horror movies are easy to disappear into. I could watch something else, but I don’t. I keep the process going, day in, day out. Horror is always there, whether it’s what I really need or not. Even when my soul feels barren and my mind stretched thin—beyond thin, to its breaking point—nothing revitalizes quite like horror. Nothing gives me the same life-affirming charge horror does.
I carried on for 25 years until, in November 2019, I made the decision to try and die by suicide. It’s not something I keep locked away, clutched close to my chest, a secret that’s mine and mine alone (I’ve discussed it once here on Dread Central), but it’s also not something I regularly bring up. Yet, there’s communicative value in it. Discussion detangles stigma. Conversation breeds recognition and awareness, empathy for others that might otherwise be hidden away when it shouldn’t be. In the simplest terms, it can share with a reader that you’re feeling or have felt what they’re feeling or have felt. There’s power in that, the congruity of worldviews and lived experiences. It’s part of what makes horror writing especially so uniquely popular.
Horror, as a time capsule for not just history, but personal, singular histories, endures. It’s everyone everywhere adding their own narrative addendum, their own perceptions and analyses, opinions and springboards to their own life. Different movies mean different things to different people for different reasons. Horror gets to the underside of human existence, and there’s a lot of meaning there. With the impending anniversary of Ellis’ Final Destination 2, there’s a singular meaning for me. When the hospital discharged me, it was almost five in the morning. After I was back home, I couldn’t sleep—who could? Instead, I channeled surfed, briefly transported to the adolescent revelry of the early aughts where thousands of channels were available at once. At first, nothing good was on. Then, luckily, I caught that the IFC Channel was showing Final Destination 2. It had just started.
At times, I tell the story cheekily to those I’m closest with. Presuming, of course, it even counts as a story. It might well be more of a grim memory where only time and distance have made it palatable. “I tried to die once, and immediately afterward, I watched a movie about the inevitability of death,” I say, though I promise it’s funnier in person. And, truthfully, it is funny. In the strangest of ways, on the hard road ahead of me, there was something familiar, almost knowing, in the peripheral specter of death looming around a dentist’s office or high-rise elevator. It was an immediate, sudden shift. In less than a day, the Final Destination franchise was new to me. In less than a day, it was restorative.
I’ve always been wary of logging trucks after seeing Final Destination 2’s sensational, practically conceived highway disaster (the best opener in the series, no doubt). Like everyone else, I found a locus in control, some kind of dominion over death, in its many Rube Goldberg unravelings of fate, life, and the end. Over and over again, Final Destination 2 registered with me exactly the way it was intended. An existential slasher, sure, but a slasher movie nonetheless. It wasn’t until I was the sole arbiter of my life and death—when the decision was uniquely mine and mine alone—that I recognized how the franchise, especially the grim second entry, worked thematically as more than just a January horror release.
Death is paradoxical. It is both a comfort and a fear. On one hand, there is a universally held belief that death means peace—the end. For doomsday cultists, there’s community, the sense of either surviving or perishing not as one singular force, but a collective one. Anxiety ceases with the inevitable. If everyone is going to go, and they’re all going to go together, then the unknown is rendered known—it’s rendered neighbor, friend, and family.
While Final Destination 2 is fiction, it tethers its emotional core to the same conceit. The survivors in any given entry are in it together. They dodge death’s traps until the very end. At that point, they recognize that, for better or worse, there was nothing they could do. Mostly. Distinctly, Final Destination 2’s Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) and Officer Burke (Michael Landes) are the only franchise survivors to, well, survive indefinitely. Other entries canonically kill past survivors, either on-screen (Final Destination 3) or off (Devon Sawa’s Alex Browning is himself confirmed dead via newspaper in Final Destination 2). While both Kimberly and Officer Burke are killed as part of Final Destination 3’s DVD special edition features, the inclusion is largely considered non-canonical. They’re caught and shredded in a woodchipper. This is similarly confirmed by a newspaper clipping, though the general consensus is that it simply doesn’t count.
It’s been an innate problem plaguing the franchise, one the forthcoming sequel might reasonably address. While there is comfort in the inevitability, the dramatic tension dissolves when, five entries in, there’s little chance anyone might truly, reasonably survive. It’s part of why Final Destination 2 is widely regarded as the best sequel in the series. Why as a survivor myself, it resonates so deeply in the marrow of my bones. It shattered my worldview and helped me find myself in the dark, dark woods of my own mind, my own pain and grief.
That same inevitability is ostensibly confirmed by a sheet of paper I still carry with me in my wallet. On it are names and phone numbers, a triage of persons for whom I’m supposed to call whenever the ideation swells. There’s truth in that, certainly. There always remains a clinical risk that someone who makes an attempt is liable to attempt again. You are expected to live in the swidden, the ecological term for what remains after slashing and burning. To live and maybe fall again. Though this time, with the resources to help navigate the uncertainty, to avoid what some might consider inevitable. In lieu of Tony Todd, there are counselors and medications. Breathing exercises and mindfulness exercises.
For a long while, Final Destination 2 had been my favorite entry in a deeply silly slasher franchise. It was a movie with a third-grade story, a movie intrinsic to my recall memory. I saw a cue, a trigger, and I remembered it. Now, Final Destination 2 is part of every association I have with that period of my life. It’s less recall, more recognition. With the right cues, I can conjure up the way my body sank into the couch. The way I draped a blanket like gauze over my legs. Images of the flashing, sporadic screen as I mindlessly flipped through the channels one by one, too tired to be awake, too exhausted to go to bed.
Most importantly, I can remember exactly how the movie made me feel. How in its dealings with life and death, graphic violence, and quick escapes, Final Destination 2 was a lifeline in the muck. It kept me going on the most important of nights. While I was out looking for death, Final Destination 2 showed me a brief glimmer of life.
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