With the Final Destination series turning 25 this year and the arrival of Final Destination Bloodlines , Matt Goldberg speaks to filmmaker James Wong and looks at the best deaths in a horror series that recognizes the Grim Reaper as the greatest slasher of all time.
This article was originally published on March 17, 2025 and has been updated to include ‘Final Destination Bloodlines’. This article contains spoilers for all six ‘Final Destination’ movies.
We’ve all felt it at one point or another: the creeping sensation of nervous dread that everything in a mundane situation could go wrong and spell our doom. Maybe we feel it when boarding an airplane, or perhaps it lingers in the pit of our stomachs as we step onto a roller coaster. The thrill of the Final Destination series is saying, “You’re right to feel these things, but even if you manage to escape, Death will still come for you.” Putting the “grim” into Grim Reaper, the long-running saga takes those who have had a near-death experience and makes them suffer for thwarting “death’s design.”
The movies follow a formula: our protagonist gets a glimpse of a grisly accident that claims the lives of all the characters. After raising the alarm, they are able to get to safety along with a handful of other characters before the disaster strikes. For the remainder of the film, death picks off the survivors with elaborate Rube Goldberg-like traps or shockingly slaughters the victim when they least expect it. Our characters race to see if they can perhaps escape the reaper again, but more often than not, Death proves inevitable.
While other horror slashers have to follow rules like Freddy Krueger’s place in dreams or Jason Voorhees being somewhat held by the boundaries of time and space, Final Destination leans into an omniscient, omnipotent killer. Anything that needs to leak, spark or break will do so like a real-time manifestation of Murphy’s Law. The slasher villain is already overpowered, and Final Destination simply took the next step by removing any guardrails and letting the world itself act as a killer. As silly as the series can be, it quickly discovered a clear identity that encouraged viewers to wonder what Death had in store for its victims.
To celebrate 25 years of Final Destination—and the release of its latest entry, Final Destination: Bloodlines—we’ve rounded up the most memorable deaths of the series… so far.
If you want to see a kill that sets the tone for the entire Final Destination series, you have to look at the death of the teens’ teacher, Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke). Although there’s a Rube Goldberg-like death earlier in the movie when Tod (Chad Donella) gets strangled in the shower, the Miss Lewton scene is better at amping up the ridiculousness and also understanding the darkly comic beats that would become one of the series’ trademarks. Lewton not only gets hit with an exploding computer (because as we all know, a small spark from a short circuit will make your monitor shoot glass at you) but as she’s already bleeding out, a kitchen knife impales her, and then a chair falls on it to plunge the blade even further for good measure.
The movie does spice things up with some sudden kills like Terry (Amanda Detmer) getting hit by the bus (back when audiences didn’t always expect that to happen when a character walks into an open street) and Billy (Seann William Scott) getting decapitated, but the Lewton kill is a prime example of what sets Final Destination apart from other horror franchises.
Speaking on the film’s 25th anniversary, director and co-writer James Wong explains that they wanted to use the Tod kill as its own kind of fake-out for Miss Lewton, leading the audience to believe that she would also die in a single location, and instead they would keep upping the ante. “I the moment when the knife block falls on her, and we thought, ‘That’s pretty cool,’ but it wasn’t enough,” he tells me. “Okay, then the oven explodes and the knife plunges deeper into her body. We started to challenge ourselves: ‘What’s the next step? What’s another way we can add to the horror and add to the fun of it?’ Because it becomes a little absurd with the Lewton kill, and it’s our way of winking at the audience.”
As Letterboxd member Taylor wisely observes about the first installment, “They figured out a cinematic language for ‘this character is 100 percent gonna die in this scene, I’m sorry. Will it be this that kills them? Maybe this? Or this?’ taunting us beyond reason, which is of course no stranger to slasher flick structure but is handled so head-on in these movies; it’s unprecedented.”
They saved the best kill for first in the sequel. There’s no shortage of incredible deaths in David R. Ellis’s follow-up, from the barbed-wire vivisection to the death-by-fire-escape-ladder to the smushed-by-glass-plate payoff after near-suffocation in a dentist’s office. But for a series in which every inciting incident features a major catastrophe, none of the five movies tops the traffic massacre. Not only does Ellis do a superb job of building tension, but once the big log goes through poor Officer Burke’s windshield, skull and back window, we’re off to the races.
It’s also the kill that resonates because car accidents are sadly common in America, and every driver has to constantly think about what could go wrong in order to map out safe routes. For a set piece that doesn’t have the flash of an amusement park or a racetrack, the freeway carnage isn’t just the best kill in Final Destination 2 but the whole series—everyone who’s seen it is now hardwired to instinctually change lanes when driving behind a logging truck.
Heather sums up my feelings perfectly when she says, “This did for logging trucks what Jaws did for the ocean,” with Josh noting that the “opening highway car crash sequence is a legit great piece of controlled chaos filmmaking and whatever the writing quality of these, the Rube Goldberg death sequencing concept is just too good; it never fails to deliver a fun, visceral shock every few minutes.”
Even though he didn’t direct the sequence, Wong cites it as his favorite in the franchise. “I still can’t get on the highway and follow a logging truck,” he says. Poodini asks the question we’re all left wondering by the time the sequence wraps: “Do you think that logging companies show this to their truckers?”
Wong returns here, as does the desire to kill shallow teens rather than people from all walks of life like in Final Destination 2. The opening catastrophe with the roller coaster is well-meaning, but relies a little too heavily on VFX that haven’t aged particularly well. That hasn’t stopped us from obsessively rewatching this entry: out of all the films in the series, this is the one that the most Letterboxd have logged at least five or more times (the power of Mary Elizabeth Winstead!).
Later on, there are some strong contenders for the best kill, with the tanning bed deaths as well as the skeevy guy taking a spinning engine block to the back of the noggin. But for me, I get the biggest laughs out of the way that selfish jock Lewis (Texas Battle) exits the movie. Wong and editor Chris G. Willingham slyly speed up the cuts in the gym sequence to build to their crescendo, and then provide a bunch of fake-outs to what exactly will take out Lewis. Naturally, it’s the silliest thing that does it when a pair of decorative swords on the wall are somehow sharp enough to slice through the cables on a weight-lifting machine, leading to heavy blocks smashing Lewis’s head apart.
I’m the outlier here, as plenty of Letterboxd prefer the tanning bed deaths, especially the way Wong transitioned from tanning beds to coffins. “The shot transition from the two flaming tanning beds to two matching coffins is peak cinema and I’m not even joking,” says Sam. As for the sequence itself, it’s the main kill that left viewers scarred, with Erin speaking for several by saying, “I have never even [stepped] foot into a tanning salon strictly because of this movie.”
Wong says he always had the tanning bed transition shot in mind because of the logistics required in capturing it. “We had to extend the walls in the tanning room in order to get the camera in the right place to match the image size of the coffins,” he explains, “so that was all planned out in the prep stage so we could make that transition.”
The best kill in fourth installment The Final Destination marks a rare exception for the franchise, because it’s not the manner of the kill that’s marvelous but who the kill is happening to: it takes time to literally drag a racist. That’s not me trying to “know what’s in someone’s heart.” That’s literally how the film credits Justin Welborn’s character: “Racist.” In the process of trying to burn a cross on the front lawn belonging to George (Mykelti Williamson), Racist gets tangled in the mechanism of his tow truck, set on fire and dragged down the street. The movie never tops this moment.
The Final Destination remains the worst-reviewed entry in the series, and sits at a lowly 2.1 average among Letterboxd . One would expect better, considering Ellis returned to direct this installment, but you can see his knowledge of practical effects wasted in a movie that’s leaning heavily on 3D gimmicks and bad CGI. The compositing is an eyesore, and while it’s possible that it looks better when viewed in the intended 3D format, I somehow doubt it given how cheap everything appears to be. Lee sums it up best in their review by saying the pro is that the racist dies first, and the cons are everything else.
Thankfully, the series bounced back with Final Destination 5 and director Steven Quale leaning into the dark comedy of the whole premise. By this point, no one was going to a Final Destination movie for the scares; they were going for macabre laughs, and Quale meets the audience where they are. The film throws in reliable comic actors like David Koechner and P.J. Byrne, and then gets aggressively silly. For me, the best kill involves the acupuncture treatment, not only because it gets the benefit of some fake-outs, but similar to the death of Racist in The Final Destination, we’re rooting for Byrne’s obnoxious Isaac to shed his mortal coil.
Joshua also appreciates the acupuncture death, but as part of a larger string of kills. “The gymnastic death, acupuncture death and the laser-eye surgery death could be the best three-death run in this or any franchise,” he writes. “They were so well crafted while also being realistic enough to absolutely ruin childhoods.” But more than the particular deaths, what Letterboxd really enjoy is the film’s surprising ending, which I won’t spoil since they’re right on how well it delivers. I’ll simply say that if you’ve managed to avoid finding out what happens (and hey, it’s been fourteen years since this came out, so enough time has ed for people to be surprised), then you should enjoy a little binge-watch of this series.
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After a fourteen-year absence, Final Destination returns with full awareness of what audiences are looking for from the series. Just as Final Destination 5 knows the series is more dark comedy than horror now, Bloodlines takes the torch and carries it to set everyone on fire. Working from a bigger canvas that builds the story across two time periods—1968 and the present day—there’s a serious challenge in picking only one kill as the best in this movie.
A strong argument can be made that the honor belongs to Erik (Richard Harmon) getting eaten by an MRI machine that first rips out all of his piercings before crushing him to death. But for me, I feel like you’ve got to go with the most cartoonish of kills: dropping a piano on a bratty child. The whole opening sky tower sequence is fantastic, feeling like directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein saw the unforgettable traffic collision from Final Destination 2 as a challenge they needed to rise to. Thankfully, they constructed the best opener since then as the towering restaurant Skyview, like the highway accident, offers no shortage of ways to eliminate its victims.
At the same time, you also have to appreciate its entire construction. The whole incident kicks off because this petulant kid wouldn’t stop dropping pennies off the tower. He keeps dodging the consequences while people around him perish, and then when he thinks he’s made it to safety, a grand piano squishes him. It’s a surprisingly satisfying moment that also tells the audience that no one will be safe from the goofy kills in this movie. As Marianna notes, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard the audience cheer for a kid’s death, and I know this sounds horrible but it was appropriate, OK??”
The Final Destination movies are not towering works of cinema, but they carved out a nice little niche in a crowded genre while remaining playful. Despite the gory deaths, Final Destination never veered into the alleged “torture porn” craze ignited by the Saw movies, and the filmmakers who came on board quickly recognized the comic appeal of elaborate deaths and audience psych-outs. With each film only running around 90 minutes a pop, a Final Destination movie never overstays its welcome. They quickly get to the kills, work to make them inventive and memorable, and then they roll credits. In Final Destination, Death doesn’t take a holiday; it works overtime.
Speaking to the series’ enduring appeal, Wong says we’ve all had close calls. “There’s always a moment of, ‘Ooh, I could have died in this accident or weird thing that happened. How did I get to this place where this could happen, and secondly, how did I escape it? How did it not kill me?’ We’re all born with this time clock on us, and the only thing we can really count on is death.”
The first five ‘Final Destination’ movies are available on Blu-ray and to rent on VOD. ‘Final Destination Bloodlines’ is in theaters now from Warner Bros. Pictures.
