The press release for horror thriller
Final Destination solemnly and routinely informs us that “the characters and incidents portrayed herein and the names herein are fictitious, and any similarity to the name, character or history of any person is entirely coincidental and unintentional”. Elsewhere, however, it gives the lie to that coy legalese, at least as far as the names are
concerned.
We have one character called Tod, another whose surname is Browning, and the press release confirms that this is a reference to the
director of the classic oddity Freaks and the 1931 Bela Lugosi Dracula. I was wondering. I began wondering when a character’s surname was revealed to be Hitchcock, though I missed the reference to Val Luten (disguised as Valerie Lewton), who starred in the original Cat People and in Walk of the Zombie, and noticed the Murnau only in the credits.
This kind of self-referential knowingness has become part of the horror genre, especially of teen-slasher flicks. In the hugely successful Scream trilogy, the conventions of the genre are archly discussed by the characters even as they’re being carved into bloody bits. The tendency has also emerged, less successfully perhaps, in movies such as I Know What You Did Last Summer and its sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, leading one critic to aver that this seemed like a new type of arty pretension, and someone should make a movie named I Still Know What You Did Last Year at Marienbad.
Final Destination doesn’t go that far. The name game is its most obvious gesture towards its predecessors; otherwise, it’s basically straightforward rip-roaring thrills. And how thrilling it is. Quite nerve-racking, in fact. So much so that one fellow viewer, sitting behind me, kept erupting into little bursts of commentary, I think simply to anchor her to the reality of the screening theatre and prevent her succumbing to outright terror.
Devon Sawa, whose pimply puppyfat face and gappy teeth give him an Everyman air, makes the transition from the trashy horror of Idle Hands to the classy horror of Final Destination. He plays Alex, who, on the brink of a school trip to Paris, has a vision in which he sees the aeroplane explode. He freaks out and, along with several others, is ejected from the plane, which then duly explodes. That’s weird enough for all concerned, but it gets weirder: one by one, those who survived the explosion are killed in mysterious ways. Naturally, it’s up to Alex – and newfound babe sidekick Clear (Ali Larter) – to work out what’s going on and try to stop the horror.
Apart from the truism that we all have to face mortality, and we knoweth not the hour and so on, the movie doesn’t bother with anything so cumbersome as themes. We do get a ghoulish undertaker (named Bludworth, ha ha) who provides the necessary mumbojumbo “explanation” of how death has a design that can’t be thwarted, but mostly we’re here to be shocked by some ingeniously gory and rivetingly suspenseful expirations, to be titillated beyond reason by the headlong rush of the action. We can admire the artful camera-work afterwards.
There is, though, an underlying sense of
humour in Final Destination (directed by X Files alumnus James Wong) that relates to the knowingness of contemporary horror. Many of the movie’s events are so outrageously horrifying that they are also hilarious. It all chimes with one character’s comment as the travellers get on the doomed plane: he sees a squalling
baby and a disabled person on the flight, and says, “It would have to be a fucked-up God to take down this plane.” Well, now you know.