‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’ almost solves my slasher problem

Sixth entry in the horror franchise keeps death in the family.

As a child of the ‘80s, slasher movies are in my DNA. Just as my grandfather grew up scared of Frankenstein’s monster and my mom was terrified of The Birds – or, to jump a generation, the hushed tones in which my kids talk about Pennywise¹ – I had Jason Voorhees and Freddy Kreuger as my own personal boogeymen.

It’s easy to see why the subgenre is so popular and goes through a resurgence every generation. It’s a reliable formula – teens behave badly; get hacked apart; lather, rinse, repeat – and it’s cheap. Studios might like to pretend these offerings don’t exist, but it’s also what kept the lights on at several of them throughout the 80s; before The Lord of the Rings gave it a touch of class, New Line Cinema was known as “The House that Freddy Built.”

But I’ll be honest: these days, the slasher movie has largely lost its appeal for me. Sure, I’ll pull out one of the old faithful for Halloween, and I’ll usually turn out for a new entry in the Scream franchise. But I’ve found my affection waning in old(er) age. There’s something off-putting about waiting around just to watch unlikable, one-dimensional characters get butchered. As I’ve gotten older and experienced the death of friends and loved ones, reveling in graphic demises feels sad, not fun. Attempts to class the genre up with films like In a Violent Nature, have really just proven you can’t really make these films respectable². I’m not judging. I’m just saying I’ve outgrown it. The slasher is a young person’s genre.

Much has been written about the appeal of these films. Some say it’s because the formula – which often sees teens pay a violent price for indulging in drugs and premarital sex – harkens back to old wives’ tales and morality fables. Others think young people just like the fun of jumping out of their seats and squirming at gore. Those are all good explanations, but I also like the theory that the appeal lies in teens’ fear of their own mortality. The teenage years are the ones in which people traditionally have their first encounters with death, and the slasher movie amplifies that anxiety.

Of course most slasher movies use a metaphor. It’s not death that the kids are scared of; it’s the maniac with the chainsaw or the child killer with the razor gloves. And there’s a loophole; death can be avoided. It’s just a matter of staying pure enough to fight the monster and live another day – or at least until the prologue of the sequel.

Death is back

I’ve always respected the Final Destination franchise for ignoring the metaphor and making the fear of death itself an explicit part of its text³. The series is no less formulaic than your Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street sagas — 90 minutes of watching people die gruesome deaths – but by refusing to let a masked maniac be the villain and instead focusing on the anxiety that comes with knowing almost everything in this world can kill you, it sinks under the skin in a way that other slashers don’t, usually accompanied by a gallows humor that acknowledges its absurdity.

The first Final Destination came out in 2000, when I was 21 and still in prime age for a good slasher film. I have a vivid memory of seeing it with my friends opening weekend; we arrived late and had to sit in the front row, and when a young girl got unexpectedly pancaked by a bus, we all threw our popcorn into the air and screamed, loudly. We were hooked, and I showed up for most of the sequels. I finally checked out after The Final Destination, the fourth entry in the series, which was a piece of trash that also released the year of my 30th birthday, when I was on the cusp of getting engaged and outgrowing my slasher phase. I figured I was done after that⁴.

Now, 14 years after the last film, we have Final Destination: Bloodlines. And while I was skeptical that there was any life left in this death-obsessed franchise, I walked out pleasantly surprised. The sixth film in the series is the best since the first, and it might also be the rare slasher movie to overcome my old man criticisms of the genre.

The new film follows the saga’s formula, but adds a few wrinkles. Yes, it starts with a character having a vision of a violent event – in this case, a fire atop a skyscraper-based restaurant complete with collapsing glass floors, out-of-control flames and bursting beams. But in this case, the vision is the recurring nightmare that college student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) has every night. But the dream isn’t about her; it’s about her grandmother, Iris, who abandoned the family years ago.

Heading home, Stefani tracks down her recluse grandmother and learns the truth behind her dreams: Iris had a vision of her own death and prevented it, saving the lives of everyone in the restaurant. But she believes that Death holds a grudge from being cheated and is coming to get not only the survivors of the disaster but all the people who were born from them in the ensuing decades. Iris is probably right; immediately after revealing this, she’s killed by a weathervane to her head. A gruesome incident involving a runaway lawnmower shortly afterward confirms that Death is making its way through the family.

As a Final Destination film, Bloodlines delivers the hallmarks of the franchise well. The initial disaster is a gruesome tour de force. I don’t know that it tops the original film’s plane crash or the phobia-spawning log truck disaster of the sequel, but it’s an energetic, scary setpiece. After that, the film falls into the saga’s routine of involving elaborate Rube Goldberg-esque death traps. The Final Destination movie is less about shock and scares and more about tension. Most scenes start with a sly look at all the everyday items that can lead to death – a backyard cookout draws suspense from lingering on propane tanks, broken shards of glass hidden in an ice bin and a rake placed in a very unlucky position – making us question which character is next and how it’s going to happen.

Screenwriters Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor and Jon Watts, along with directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, have a lot of fun faking the audience out before delivering the surprise kill. I won’t spoil anything, but there are several out-of-left-field twists that made me gasp and laugh in equal measure, and the film’s gore is inventive and extreme. The Final Destination movies have never been on the same level as movies like Saw or Hostel, which seemed to revel in nightmarish gore and realistic anguish. Instead, the films have a dark sense of humor – I particularly liked the use of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” as a prologue to the flame-filled disaster that starts the film – and lean into their extremity with a ghoulish glee, like an R-rated Looney Tune (there is literally a shot of someone being pancaked by a baby grand piano that feels like Wile E. Coyote by way of Eli Roth).

Beating my slasher problem

Of course, here’s where I have to admit my hypocrisy. I just said that I had largely outgrown slashers and was tired of watching people die violent, bloody deaths. How can I defend myself for having such a blast with this movie?

Well, first I’ll just lean back once again and quote Roger Ebert (who was quoting Robert Warshow), who repeatedly said, “A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man.” Yes, I’m tired of violent, bloody horror movies that exist only to showcase elaborate deaths. And yes, I highly enjoyed watching people die bloody, violent and elaborate deaths in Final Destination: Bloodlines. I contain multitudes.

I could chalk it up to the movie being a guilty pleasure, but I don’t think it is. The truth is, while Final Destination: Bloodlines is a big, violent, R-rated scary movie, it’s also a bit more thoughtful than the traditional slasher film.

Some of that comes from the nature of this particular franchise. This isn’t a series where the goal is to defeat some supernatural serial killer. It is, instead, about the inevitability and unpredictability of death, and our fear of mortality. True, most of us will never be in a plane crash or situated behind a malfunctioning logging truck on the freeway. But most of us will cop to a few late nights where we’ve lied awake wondering how our end will come and what it will feel like. New parents will admit to the dangerous edges the world suddenly reveals when they bring their baby home from the hospital. The world is dangerous and no one gets out alive. Sure, these movies take it to an extreme, but they have proven consistently effective how it getting their hooks into a fear that starts at adolescence and accompanies many of us throughout our lives.

Releasing this into a post-pandemic world, just five years after we were locked away from others for fear of death, gives this a special resonance. When Stefani finally meets Iris, she’s walled away in her compound, afraid to cross her doorpost because she believes doing so will mean death. I’m sure all of us have friends or family members who had trouble acclimating to the world once vaccines were available and our cities began to open back up. It’s much safer to stay locked away where we can control the environment and nothing can hurt us; but then again, what kind of life is that? As Tony Todd – returning as the mysterious undertaker Bludworth in his final performance – says late in the film, when you know death is inevitable, maybe you should just enjoy the time you have left. Despite its carnage and wicked sense of humor, the Final Destination series has always tackled our fear of death head on, and this film does it better than most.

But the film is also helped by changing up its characters’ relationships. Most of the films in this series concern a group of teenage or college friends or coworkers and let them bicker it out as they’re picked off one by one. There’s always the intrepid hero, their love interest and then a few disposable, unlikable characters we don’t mind seeing dispatched. But centering Bloodlines’ story on a family shifts the dynamic. These are not fickle friends or strangers tossed together. This is a likable, fairly functional family. They love each other. And it gives the film an unexpected weight; it’s the rare slasher film where it’s actually sad when a character dies, and where you’re actively rooting against their death.

These are, for the most part, warm, funny and engaging characters. Stefani is the prototypical slasher heroine — the smart, likable center of the cast. But the film wisely doesn’t make her the only sympathetic character. Her brother Charlie (Tio Briones) might josh her a bit, but he’s missed his Stefani since she went off to college. While her uncle Howard (Alex Zehara) might be upset when Stefani brings his mother up in conversation, he’s presented as a family loving, warm man. There’s a strong brotherly chemistry between Stefani’s cousins, Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner) and Erik (Richard Harmon), with the latter taking a character who would normally be a one-dimensional jerk and turning him into something warmer and more sympathetic. Even Stefani’s estranged mother (Rya Kihlstedt) is presented in a softer light. The focus on a family gives the film a slightly softer edge, so that the deaths sting a bit more than when we’re just watching selfish bullies get their just desserts.

I’m not going to pretend that Final Destination: Bloodlines is a particularly deep film or a work of art. This is still a movie in which people are gruesomely smashed, slashed, hacked apart and dissected. It’s not trying to elevate anything – it does what it says on the box. And I won’t pretend the series suddenly gets smart – Death is still personified as loving complex traps and people can find a way to outwit or outlast it (at least for a bit). It doesn’t quite solve my slasher problem because, in the end, it still adheres to a formula of centering its biggest moments around gruesome deaths, and I still feel a twinge of guilt about that. But it does so in a way that works a bit better than most of these films, and earns its screams, gasps and laughs. It’s not for everyone, and if it’s not your thing, it’s still not going to be. But for those who like what death is up to in these movies, you’ll be in for a good time.

1. I want to be 100% clear that, to the best of my knowledge and control, neither my 9yo or 13yo have seen It. But all of us can probably attest to learning about these things through cultural osmosis.

2. The reason I think Scream is still appealing is because so many of its main characters have survived that it now almost works as an anti-slasher. There are still Ghostface kills, but it’s the endurance of Sidney, Gale and the others that we root for.

3. I hesitated for a moment about whether the series is a slasher series. There’s not a masked killer and it has a much heavier supernatural bent than other films. But its template is highly influenced by the slasher subgenre (and original iterations of the first film actually considered making Death a dark, hooded figure in the background).

4. I did manage to catch up with Final Destination 5 recently and it’s a fairly substantial course correction from its predecessor, with surprisingly likable characters and an epic twist at the end.