‘Final Destination’ And Me
The first time I became aware of the Final Destination series was in the local video store. I remember the poster of the first film hanging in the window for a while and then, later, being on a wall near the reception desk. Later still, I would go in and see the VHS tapes of the first two films sitting by side, in the same section as Scream and Urban Legend.
When I finally got around to watching the Final Destination films for the first time, I enjoyed them. The first film reminded me of that late 90s aesthetic—films like I Know What You Did Last Summer, Disturbing Behavior, Cherry Falls—while the third film reminded me of the films I’d watch in college, like Black Christmas (2006), Captivity, and Disturbia. I liked them a lot, but there was a definite nostalgic element baked into them. Ironically, for films about the threat of death and how things weren’t safe, they reminded me of the past. A place and time I could feel safe in. Because I didn’t always feel safe, even at home.
With my father in the house, it was hard to find safety. The house would feel volatile and unwieldy. I would come home, and the rooms would feel agitated and aggressive from my father’s presence. I would go to school and look at the kids and imagine them going home and being able to find safety, being able to relax in the kitchen, in the living room, in their bedroom.
Outside and inside—at school, at home, in between–I felt unsafe. The world felt precarious, felt like it could reach out and grab me whenever it wanted. Everywhere I went, I felt the possibility of pain.
So I found rituals to keep me safe.
For me, numbers and words had power. I found that if I did things in multiples, I could have a better hour. If I changed the route I walked, I could have a better day. If I said a phrase repeatedly, then maybe I would have a better week. I’d whisper things to myself when people weren’t listening. When I was alone, I’d hope that someone would listen and take care of me and my family, whether that be God or some kind of energy that surrounded me. If I just did things the right amount of time, if I just said things in the right order, perhaps I could impinge on reality, put pressure on it.
It felt like a negotiation, one where I could keep us safe.
It was only years later, after watching the first and third Final Destination films again, that I realised how much of what happens in these films felt like the symptoms of CPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder) that I was experiencing. I wouldn’t be diagnosed with it until years later, but even though I didn’t have a name for it then, I saw my experience on-screen. I could see the hypervigilance, the anxiety, the dissociation, along with the catastrophizing and the guilt.
At the beginning of the first Final Destination, Alex (Devon Sawa) is getting ready to go on a school trip. His father stands in the doorway and tells him, “Live it up, Alex. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” Alex’s smile disappears, and he stares at his father, a look of foreboding on his face. It was a look I understood.
As I got older, I began to feel that something ominous had attached itself to me. Like something knew my name, that there was something after me. I still thought that words could have a positive power, and I continued to whisper them to myself to ward off disaster, but words had also begun to hold the threat of danger for me. I found that words uttered in a certain way in a specific order could hold disaster.
If I went on a trip and my mother told me to have a great day, sometimes I would feel the words attach themselves to me for the rest of the trip. I would hear a voice say, “And it was the last time they ever saw him.” I saw myself dying, saw my mother and brother being told the news, saw them breaking down in tears, saw them having to go on without me. If my brother went out for the evening and told me he’d see me when he got back, I was sure that something would happen to him. Fate had been tempted by those words, and they’d be the last words I’d hear from him. I saw my mother and I waiting for him to get home; time going by, anxiety creeping in, more time passing, and anxiety turning to panic.
Words could fuse and act like a spell for me. They harbored catastrophe, disaster. Just by saying them, I felt like something had been set in motion. In my mind, a chain reaction had been set off, and we were on a collision course.
After that scene with his parents, Alex and his friends arrive at the airport. As they make their way to their gate, a Hare Krishna hands Alex a flyer and says, “Death is not the end.” Later, he hands over his boarding pass and looks around to see the arrival and departure times rapidly shuttering and changing. He hands over his bag and is told that his birthday is the same date as his departure time. At that moment, he has the same sense of foreboding. He turns and looks at the arrivals and departures again. As he watches the shuttering repeat—terminal, cancelled, departed—he hones in on the word terminal, which now seems like an ominous warning.
In Final Destination 3, Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has the same thing happen. She’s walking through the amusement park when a rollercoaster suddenly rushes by her. The breeze blows past her, and as she looks at the rollercoaster from afar, the whole structure now looks quite threatening. She watches Lewis swing a hammer on the strong man game, only for the top to break off and fly past the mechanical devil. The devil, voiced by Tony Todd, says, “This is the beginning of the end.” She takes a picture of her boyfriend Jason standing in front of the devil. She looks at the picture on her camera and notices the devil looming over his shoulder. Isolated incidents are now somehow conspiring.
Before they get on the ride, Jason comes over and asks her what’s wrong, and she tells him she’s having that feeling of déjà vu, except for “…something that hasn’t happened yet.” He tries to console her, says everyone gets scared, and that things never are as bad as they imagine. She tries to listen and goes along with it. She is about to enter the turnstile, and then she sees the words “No exit after turnstiles. I’ll see you soon.” She stares at the words and pauses.
But those words are no longer just words. They feel threatening now, weighted with fate.
This is how CPTSD can feel: A steady accumulation of seemingly disparate elements, building pressure, suddenly threaded together on a string of impending disaster. Suddenly, the world feels heightened, and every single day can become weighted with potential. The world shrinks into a funnel and seems to teeter on the precipice of catastrophe.
I remember the same thing happening to me. A gentle breeze, someone tripping on the pavement, a car horn, the sound of laughter, someone shouting. Isolated incidents suddenly discordant, connected, building to something. My body would react accordingly. I would freeze, an electrical charge of fear running through me as my body remembered the house I grew up in. I was preparing for something, anything.
It could be something small, like hearing a siren, a door slamming, the beeping of a traffic signal, or footsteps coming toward me. Suddenly, a day that had appeared calm would feel like it was exploding. The moments leading up to it were nothing but the calm dishonesty of a quiet afternoon. The seconds that had once been sleepily ticking by were now roiling on the surface of a frantic afternoon.
The opening of each Final Destination film is a premonition. Our main character is blessed (or damned) with a vision of the catastrophe that is about to happen, before being thrown back to reality.
In the first Final Destination, Alex sees the wing, the flickering lights, and the rain outside the window. He sees people laughing and cheering, all none the wiser while he tries to stay calm. I’ve felt this myself. Being on a plane while people laughed and carried on their conversations, seemingly oblivious to the fear racing through me, seemed to make it more likely that something was about to happen. Things were adding up, building to a crescendo. Alex sees the explosion, he sees people screaming, he sees the exact moment and order in which people will die.
In the third Final Destination, Wendy is reluctant to get on the ride. She hears Jason say, “I’ll see you at the end.” She sees Kevin get gum stuck on his hand, the sign saying no cameras, the hydraulic pump leaking, then moving forward, taking the plunge, Frankie’s camera dropping and getting hooked on the tracks, the wheels running over the camera, the pump severing, the shoulder harnesses unlocking, the wheels falling off, the screams.
I completely understood these visions. A symptom of CPTSD for me isn’t flashbacks but, rather, flashforwards. When I heard a certain phrase, when I began to feel that fear, I would suddenly hurtle along a line of catastrophizing and see the minutiae of an impending tragedy. I could see my brother outside, my mother walking back home, and every excruciating detail of something terrible happening to them. I’d see myself in the aftermath, having to get the funeral arrangements ready. I saw myself standing next to grieving family members at the church, then going back to someone’s house. I felt the handshakes people gave me and heard them telling me to be strong. And I saw my father standing elsewhere as I saw myself unsure what to say to him.
By the time I came back to myself, I wasn’t always sure where I was. It would sometimes feel like I had slingshot myself into the future, and the events I had thought up had happened and were now in the past. I would suddenly feel all alone.
The catastrophes at the beginning of these films use our fears of being at the mercy of mechanics and mechanical failure. The Final Destination films go big initially and then, after that, become mostly about the disaster of the everyday.
Death carries out its plan in a domino effect. In one instance, leaking liquid spreads across a tiled bathroom floor, which leads to a slip in the bathtub, which leads to falling on the washing line that hangs over the bathtub, which wraps around Tod’s neck. A bottle dropping from a shelf in a warehouse falls on a crane pedal, the crane begins to move forward, the crane drives into tools, pushes against ladders, and sends wooden boards flying through the air.
One thing leads to another. The everyday object and its place in the plan become a weapon. Every object becomes magnified and heightened, imbued with a deathly energy. Suddenly, Alex and Wendy must be fearful of everything around them. Anything could lead to anything else. Even the act of a misplaced step could spell catastrophe. The world is now precarious and chaotic.
Watching the Final Destination films years later, I saw my own fears on screen. My hypervigilance had grown with my role as a carer, and I was afraid for my mother and brother most days. The feeling that I had to keep them safe was overwhelming. I was managing it as best as I could. But there were times when I would find myself frozen. I would lock a door and stare at it, unable to see that it was closed. I would turn off an iron and stare at it because, even though I could see it was turned off and that it was unplugged, that information didn’t give me a feeling of certainty. I’d stare at these things and wait until the certainty happened, as if I were daring things to move.
In the world I seemed to reside in, doors didn’t stay shut, and irons didn’t stay turned off. Every object could sometimes seem fraught with some potential of sentience. I would think that when I turned away, somehow the iron would be left on, or somehow turn itself on, and the whole room would go up in flames.
Objects could become like words to me. They could cause destruction if they were too close together, like words could cause friction if spoken in a certain way at a certain speed. I didn’t like things touching. I could see the iron falling, hitting something else, the room ablaze. My fears became Final Destination death scenes. Sometimes at night, I was afraid to close my eyes for fear I’d somehow abandon my mother and brother in my sleep to some cosmic catastrophe.
I saw myself mirrored in Alex and Wendy, frantically scrambling to stop an impending tragedy from befalling them and their friends. When my mother and brother arrived back home at the end of the day, I would feel like some crisis had been averted. That they weren’t just alive but that their lives had been spared.
“You can’t be there all the time to protect them,” a friend told me once.
“I know,” I told them. But I didn’t truly believe it.
I felt something watching us, waiting. I saw myself mirrored in Wendy when she stands in the cemetery, telling Kevin that the fear she feels is “like a presence, like a living thing. Always with me… cold and terrifying.” Watching the scene, I was struck by how close to the bone it was. It was how I felt. At some point, reality had become quietly precarious, and everyone around me seemed at the whim of a presence. With my father gone, it was up to me to feel it. It seemed up to me to try and spend my days keeping that presence from the door. The world had somehow become a dangerous playground where anything and everything could reach out and hurt you, and I felt at the mercy of it all.
As you can tell, I have a special place in my heart for the Final Destination films, especially the first and the third films. Like a presence, they have stayed with me.
The initial reasons I liked them still exist, but now there are other reasons. I like to watch them for Devon Sawa and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who have become like Kyle Gallner, Bill Paxton, and Jennifer Jason Leigh to me. Anything they’re in, I’ll seek out. I like the third film specifically for the transition shot from the sunbed scene to the gravestones, which I think is the best transition of the franchise. Right up there with the transition in Scream 2 where Ghostface wipes the blade and “The Swing” by Everclear starts to play.
But sometimes I will think back to watching them when I was in a bad way, and how they offered me comfort. Even the endings seemed to mirror my CPTSD symptoms. Just when you thought you were safe, there was always something else. Despite surviving one day, the next day always brought the threat of something else. There was always going to be another bus, another train, another potential moment that held our demise.
Roger Ebert, in his review of the first film, said that Final Destination “…observes the time-honored formula of the Dead Teenager Movie: it begins with a lot of living teenagers and dooms them.” Looking back, I can see how I used to see myself as one of them—a teenager who thought themselves doomed. But nowadays, watching Alex and Wendy try desperately to save their friends, I like to remember how I would feel a little less doomed as I watched their attempts. Until gradually, and over a period of time, the doom became something almost manageable.
Categorized:Editorials
