Dead End - Final Destination

CREATOR JEFFREY REDDICK TALKS ABOUT CASTING DEATH AS THE PRIME ANTAGONIST

- OLIVER PFEIFFER

WHO HASN’T experienced that unshakable feeling that forces are somehow conspiring against you? There’s a dark inevitability underpinning human existence that’s hard to ignore. Perhaps that’s what gives good horror films their relatable dread-inducing power. To a significant degree, this is what Final Destination, which emerged in 2000 as the postmodern slasher horror film resurgence was reaching overkill, capitalized on.

Concerning a teenager’s scary premonition of a plane crash that subsequently prevents him and a group of students from dying, only for death to claim their lives one by one later in gruesome fashion, Final Destination had a bleak preordained sensibility that suggested you can never cheat death even if you disrupt its design. It was the perfect antidote to the relentless killer-in-a-mask antagonist, precisely because the Grim Reaper wasn’t depicted. Instead, death was hidden behind the morbid possibilities of the everyday.

“The studio was having a hard time getting their head around not having a physical killer,” writer Jeffrey Reddick, who created the story, tells SFX. “They were like, ‘We don’t understand it; you can’t fight it, you can’t see it!’ We were like, ‘That’s the point – it’s death.’”

Reddick came up with the concept for Final Destination (which was originally called “Flight 180” and written as a spec script for