Frame By Frame – Final Destination (2000)

Year – 2000
Decade – 2000s
Director – James Wong
Cinematographer – Robert McLachlan
Genre – Horror
Keywords – 2000s Horror
Studio – New Line
Shooting Location – Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia
Aspect Ratio – 1.85
Format – 35mm film with spherical lenses

Also check out the archive’s collection of frames sorted by category here.

The Movie
A high schooler (Devon Sawa) bound for Paris on a class trip cheats death when a pre-flight premonition spooks him off the plane, which explodes on take off. Along with a handful of fellow students who followed him off the flight, he’s then hunted by an unseen malevolent force intent on dispatching the survivors in apparent “accidents.” Followed by five sequels, in which the Rube Goldberg-esque death scenes become increasingly elaborate and gruesome.

There’s a spoiler section marked below before the twist ending, but the method and order of deaths is part of the fun, so this post is best reserved for those who’ve seen the film.

Frame Gallery #1

Frame Gallery #2

Frame Gallery #3

Frame Gallery #4

Frame Gallery #5

Scene Breakdowns

Plane Crash

A shot-by-shot breakdown of Alex’s premonition of Flight 180 exploding mid-air.

The deaths in the Final Destination series fit in one of two categories – intricate cause-and-effect set pieces and sudden demises. Let’s start with the former…

Tod’s Death Scene

Tod’s death is crosscut with Alex (Sawa) being interrogated by the F.B.I., but for the purposes of breaking down the coverage of this bathroom set piece I’ve eliminated the interrogation.

Now a surprise death as Terry (Amanda Detmer) steps into the street and is promptly taken out by a bus.

Finally, another intricate fatality – this time Alex’s teacher Ms. Lewton (Kristen Cloke). As before, this scene is crosscut with Alex and the F.B.I. but I’ve left that portion out.

Annotations

The Script

Even before New Line’s Final Destination became writer Jeffrey Reddick’s first produced credit, he already had a long history with the company.

“When I was 15 years old I was in Kentucky and I saw the first Nightmare on Elm Street movie and I thought it was one of the best horror movies I’d ever seen and it totally blew me away. So, I didn’t know anything about the film industry but I wrote Bob Shaye who was the chairman of New Line Cinema a letter and a treatment that I’d written for a prequel to Nightmare on Elm Street. And he sent it back to me unread with a form letter saying, ‘We don’t take unsolicited material. Everything has to come through an agent.’ I didn’t really want to take “no” for an answer so I wrote him back kind of a nasty letter and I was like, ‘Look, I’ve seen five of your movies. I spent like $25 on New Line Cinema so you can at least take 10 minutes to read my stuff.’ And fortunately he read it and he wrote me back a very encouraging letter with some critiques but he was very encouraging and he told me to keep at it. And after that I started kind of stalking his office and writing his assistant Joy and getting Nightmare on Elm Street memorabilia and every time a new movie came out they would send me stuff and I would write stories and send them back to New Line. And this went through high school and into my sophomore year of college. I came to New York for a summer field study and Joy said, Why don’t you come in and see if we have any internships for you” and I got an internship in marketing and I worked there 11 years.'”– Jeffrey Reddick (#4)

While still seeking representation, an agent suggested Reddick pen a spec script for something already on the air. Thus the first iteration of Final Destination was born.

“I was a huge fan of The X Files and thought about a scene where somebody has a premonition and gets off the plane and then it crashes and used that as the plot. It was going to be Scully’s brother Charles who had the premonition. He gets off the plane with a few other people but they start dying and Charles blacks out every time there is a murder so people suspect he is doing it. The twist at the end was that the sheriff who had been investigating alongside Mulder and Scully the whole time had actually been shot and flatlined at the same time as the plane crash. Death brought him back to kill off all the survivors, including Charles.” – Jeffrey Reddick (#3)

An appetite for post-Scream horror ultimately helped Final Destination get made.

“One of my really good friends Chris Bender went to work for a producer Warren Zide and they came to me one day and said, ‘Scream has come out. It’s really hot. We want to do a horror movie and we know that you have like 50 ideas. So, why don’t you send them over?’ And I sent a list of ideas over to Warren Zide and (Final Destination) is the one that they really liked. So, we spent about six months working on the treatment. It started off as a three page treatment – the movie form of it did – and we brought the project to New Line Cinema. They didn’t show any favoritism. They’d read a couple of my projects before and passed on them, but we submitted it to New Line and they liked the story a lot and I was signed to write the first draft.” – Jeffrey Reddick (#4)

By the time director James Wong and writer Glen Morgan did their own pass on the script, Reddick had already been asked to change the adult protagonists of his early drafts to teens to appeal to a post-Scream audience. One of Morgan’s contributions was John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High as a harbinger of death.

“That bit with the John Denver song happened to me at the Vancouver Airport when I was working on (the Fox sci-fi series) Millennium. I was about to board a plane and it wasn’t Rocky Mountain High but John Denver came over the PA and it was just a few weeks after he had died in a plane crash and I was like, “’If they play Glenn Miller, I’m not getting on the plane.”” – Glenn Morgan (#4)

The most indelible change made by Morgan and Wong came in transforming the film’s death scenes into intricate chain reactions in everyday environments. The elaborate set pieces increasingly became the series’ calling card as the franchise continued.

“James and Glen came up with a really great idea of using kind of a Rube Goldberg device to kill the characters, as opposed to my version – which was where Death used their survivor’s guilt to plunge them into these terrifying scenarios where they ended up committing suicide, which is pretty dark….In my version Tod still got hung, but it was through mechanisms that he set up himself. I think the one death that I miss was Carter’s, who was named Tony in the original script. [Like in the movie,] he was an asshole, and his girlfriend starts haunting him after her death. He’s at a subway station, and she shows up to him. She talks about what an awful boyfriend he was, and what she did to make herself beautiful for him. Then she starts throwing up – revealing that she was bulimic, trying to stay skinny for him. Kind of a little homage to Gates of Hell, she starts puking her intestines up. He sees this, and he’s so terrified that he throws himself in front of a subway car. As opposed to in the movie where she gets hit by a bus, her jerky boyfriend gets hit by a subway car. I always thought that would have been a really awesome scene to pull off and see in a film.” – Jeffrey Reddick (#5)

The Original Ending

The ending of Final Destination filmed during principal photography found Alex sacrificing himself in the finale to save Clear, who in this version is pregnant with his child. She then has the baby in an uplifting epilogue.

That conclusion was an upbeat riff on Reddick’s original script.

“(In my version) Clear and Alex were in love, they had sex, and so she was pregnant. Death obviously couldn’t claim her, because she had a life inside of her. But then at the end of the film, she and Alex are in the delivery room, and she’s just given birth. In an almost Evil Dead style, you see this mysterious force moving through the hospital, going into the delivery room, and up to Clear’s face, then it cuts to black, so you’re not sure what happens to her.” – Jeffrey Reddick (#5)

Test audiences didn’t love the original conclusion. They wanted Alex to live and Kerr Smith’s prickish Carter to get his comeuppance. A new ending was shot four to five months after photography initially wrapped – at a cost of nearly $2 million dollars – that sent Alex, Carter and Clear off to Paris (or, for the sake of thriftiness, Victoria, British Columbia) for one more jolt.

“This sort of spiritual ending which had to do with Clear having a child and having the child be the vindication of how you beat death was perhaps a little too esoteric and not visceral enough for the public that we were trying to attract, which was arguably a post-modern Scream crowd.” New Line chairman Bob Shaye (#1)

New Line Senior VP of Production Richard Brener put it even more bluntly.

“We went for something a little more sentimental, a little deeper, and they just wanted to see more death.” (#1)