Final Destination Introduced Cinema’s Most Terrifying Villain

Built into every horror movie is the fierce, if fragile, hope that the protagonist will prevail over their attacker. The stalker will be arrested, the demon banished with an exorcism, the serial killer met with the same grisly end that he’d planned for his victims. Twenty-five years ago, Final Destination turned that hope into sinking horror — some fates, it reminded us, are simply inescapable.

Directed and co-written by James Wong, the horror movie made our best-laid plans seem never more insignificant and our bodies never more vulnerable, prone to horrific violence and danger from everyday situations twisted to their most barbaric ends. In doing so, it introduced cinema’s most invincible, unrelenting villain — death itself.

It’s 17-year-old Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) who’s destined to die, along with the rest of his class, on a senior trip to Paris. Having fallen asleep before their flight takes off, however, he has a dream of the plane exploding, so vivid it can only be a premonition. Utterly panicked as events begin to play out as he foresaw them, he frantically rushes to disembark; a few of his classmates are either convinced enough to join him or caught up in the chaos. The flight takes off without them, and promptly explodes. Having envisioned their deaths, Alex has now helped them evade it. Or has he? Over the next few days, the survivors begin dying one by one. It turns out that they haven’t cheated death at all, merely postponed it, and now the Grim Reaper is killing them off in the order they were originally meant to die.

Alex taking his dream seriously is what saves him from the doomed flight, but the gut-churning horror of the Final Destination franchise lies in its depiction of just how little control we ultimately have over the world around us, no matter what signs we choose to read meaning into. We might attach significance to objects or deem them lucky — as Alex does his baggage tag — and while this provides momentary comfort or reassurance, it’s ultimately all futile. Alex’s friend Tod Waggner (Chad Donella) believes that a baby on board means they’re safe — what kind of cruel God would want an innocent infant to be killed? Like him, we rationalize events, failing to see that death is random and without reason. And like us, the teens in Final Destination want to believe that their actions matter. They duly fasten their seatbelts and secure their oxygen masks, but of what use are either when the plane is turned into a fireball and they’re either wrenched out through a gaping hole in the side or burned alive?

The survivors direct their anger at Alex, convinced he can predict the future, or worse, that he caused the crash. The alternative, that they’re at the whim of a vicious force they have no control over, is terrifying. Final Destination reinforces this helplessness, pointing out how life-and-death stakes so often boil down to just chance and quirks of timing. Even attempts to wrest control of your own life, as Alex’s classmate Carter Horton (Kerr Smith) does when he speeds down the street, determined to die of his “own free will,” are meaningless. It’s still Death who wins. The outcome is fixed, and tragically unchanging.

There’s a sadistic streak to Final Destination’s version of death; it violently cuts down teens who took for granted that they had their whole lives ahead of them. Not only does it come for them in exaggeratedly, almost comically cruel ways — strangling them with a bathroom clothesline or sending a shard of glass flying into their throat before dropping a block of knives onto their chest and then setting their house on fire (yes, that’s all one person’s fate) — but its all-pervasive presence means they’re always agonizing over its impending arrival.

And it’s everywhere they look. The film lends even seemingly ordinary terms an ominous undertone — at the airport, the camera lingers on the Flight Status board, fixating on the words “departure” and “terminal.” The characters’ whole world is reduced to Death’s sandbox, rigged against them. A razor gets a closeup. A lit match sparks fear.

Death enjoys toying with its victims. Its kills aren’t framed as just a rebalancing of the scales but as brutal retribution. It doesn’t grant them the dignity of a peaceful exit. Instead, they die horrifically, spending their last moments in abject terror. Death is also a taunting figure, dropping hints to the characters about their fate — in one scene, a torn magazine page that lands on Alex’s lap reads “Tod,” a warning to get to his friend immediately — but reiterating time and again that there’s nothing they can do to avert it. Those who do, even if only temporarily, bear lasting mental scars. In its depiction of survivor’s guilt, Final Destination examines how death wounds even the people it’s overlooked. The film’s characters have their view of the world reshaped, not only in a larger existential sense, but by their most primal terrors being confirmed.

In allowing its characters a measure of normalcy and then ripping it from them, the final shot is a stinging rebuke, a caustic mockery of their assertion that death could ever be outwitted. The grave will always be the “final destination.” In this film, however, the path to it has never looked more macabre.