From faces sheared off to internal organs sprayed into the faces of innocent swimmers, the Final Destination movie franchise has come to specialise in unbelievable character deaths. So lock away any sharp objects, check your device for loose wiring and make absolutely sure you’re not sitting in a car parked on a railway line, as you check out our top ten ranking of the very best, or very worst, ways in which characters have been written out of the franchise… then scroll on down for a full guide on where you can stream all the films. Good luck!
10. Catching the bus
Terry (Amanda Detmer) being very suddenly run over by a bus in the original Final Destination is a brilliantly executed shock: characters have been pancaked by speeding mass-transit vehicles millions of times in films, but there’s usually an engine noise, a horn blast or just a giveaway change of camera angle to give you half a second of warning that death is coming. Not here: this impact is delivered without any backlift at all. It’s the original FD shocker, although it’s not representative of the franchise because even before the end of the first film, we’ve moved on to comically elaborate expiries, trailed with a ton of clues. There’s none of that here. Just: splat.
9. The grim ripper
No big spoilers here for the new franchise revival movie Final Destination Bloodlines, but of course it features several superb demises, including one character having their face sliced off by a bin-lorry crusher, and a family barbecue that ends messily due to an unfortunate ice/glass/rake/lawnmower/uncle interface. Its top death scene, however, has got to be the one in a hospital, where a series of questionable decisions leads to an MRI machine being turned into a super-powerful magnet. This is bad news for a member of the film’s doomed fraternity who has metal piercings in… various places.
8. Briaaaaaaan!
Being a minor character in a Final Destination movie is always a hazardous business, but being a minor character in a closing scene, when the main protagonists have convinced themselves that everything’s okay now? That, my cursed little friend, is fatal. Poor Brian Gibbons (Noel Fisher) finds this out at the end of Final Destination 2 when his parents host a barbecue, at which it is revealed that Brian recently cheated death. Having broken the news that tells us he is now doomed, he attends to the barbecue. Boom! The grill explodes and Brian’s severed arm lands on his mother’s plate. Like most barbecued meat, it’s burnt on the outside and raw in the middle.
7. Dismounting tension
In FD world, if it’s not one thing, it’s another. Or if it’s not that, it’s something else, and if that’s not what kills you, maybe it’s this other thing, but it’s probably not that, it’s probably something you haven’t noticed yet. Or not. One of the best scenes with myriad potential causes of death happens in Final Destination 5, when gymnast Candice Hooper (Ellen Wroe) competes in a venue where every possible piece of equipment has a screw loose, there’s exposed live wiring and the roof is leaking. Most of these urgent health and safety issues prove to be red herrings, but after an unbearably long build-up, during which Candice gets through an entire routine on a balance beam with an upturned screw on it, what finally gets her is… gravity.
6. These ladies are hot
A notorious FD kill-off thanks to its sheer unpleasantness, the dual ending of gal pals Ashley and Ashlyn (Chelan Simmons and Crystal Lowe) in Final Destination 3 involves a lot more suffering than most of the franchise’s gruesome deaths: at least if a falling sign decapitates you or you’re squished by a pane of heavy glass, you don’t know much about it. After a frankly rather confusing sequence of events that involves a loose shelf, a tube of lotion, a hat rack and slushie water spilled on dodgy electrics, Ashley and Ashlyn end up trapped inside a pair of tanning beds that have been set to “grill” mode. As the best friends slowly cook to death, the use of Love Rollercoaster by Ohio Players on the soundtrack is funny; the cut at the end from two flaming tanning beds side by side to two adjacent coffins is hilarious.
5. Billy, you’ve lost your head
Can you cheat Death, once he’s decided you are destined to die? Yes… and no. In Final Destination, Carter (Kerr Smith) tries to take control of his own demise by driving recklessly and then, when that doesn’t work, parking on a railway track in front of a speeding freight train. Oh, and this is with three of his friends in the car with him. The death is a corker thanks to the screaming hysteria in the car and particularly the reactions of goofy, silly Billy (Sean William Scott) in the enger seat: “I am so close to puking right now!” is one of the movie’s funniest lines. Mainly, though, it’s a fabulous bait and switch. After Carter changes his mind and is rescued in the nick of time, a piece of jagged metal from the car wreck flies out and cuts Billy’s head clean off. But Carter survives! Yay!
4. Spotting a snag
Some Final Destination harbingers of death are subtle: there can be peril hidden in apparently innocuous everyday objects such as a vending machine, a mobile phone, or a box of sharpened wooden stakes teetering on the top of a collapsing shelving unit. But when Nora (Lynda Boyd) cops it in Final Destination 2, the clue is not a subtle one. She is in a lift with a guy who is creepy anyway, but is also carrying a basket full of prosthetic hooks. Obviously she won’t be able to avoid becoming fatally tangled, which just leaves the question of exactly how that will kill her… it turns out to be a simple case of her head becoming stuck inside the lift with her body outside, which means the former goes up a floor but the latter doesn’t. She really should have seen this coming.
3. A vision of doom
Tapping into our commonest fears is an FD staple, so it’s surprising that it wasn’t until Final Destination 5 that the franchise finally cashed in on something that keeps a lot of us up at night: what if you have corrective laser eye surgery but it goes wrong, because you claw the eye out of the teddy bear you brought along as a stress reliever and it rolls onto the floor, and then the machine malfunctions, burning through both your eyeball and the hand you try to protect yourself with, and then when you escape from the rogue mechanism, you slip over on the eye of the bear, causing you to crash through a seventh-floor window and plummet to your death? We’ve all worried about it but for Olivia Castle (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), the nightmare is real.
2. She’s definitely dead
There are so many ways to cease to be in a Final Destination movie, sometimes Death has several to spare. The kids’ teacher from the first film, Ms Lewton (Kristen Cloke), is already on her way out when she makes the fateful decision to stop making tea in a mug and switch to ice-cold vodka instead, which causes the mug to crack, which makes her drip vodka down the back of her computer monitor, which explodes and fires shrapnel into her neck. But then the vodka catches light and causes a kitchen fire. And then Ms Lewton tries to reach for a cloth to stem the bleeding, but it gets hooked on a knife, which falls and sticks in her chest. And then a chair tips over onto the knife, driving it home. At that point she dies. Then the house blows up.
1. Offally bad luck
Our overall winner scores highly in all the key categories: it’s elaborate, it’s disgusting, it’s ironic and it involves a mode of death that is hard to predict precisely, up to the very moment it happens. We’re in the fourth movie, The Final Destination, and the fantastically named Hunt Wynorski (Nick Zano) is relaxing by the pool at a country club, happy in the knowledge that his lucky coin will keep him safe. But when a child mishits a golf shot, the ball knocks the coin into the pool filtration mechanism and it jams. To cut a long story short, before you can say “death by underwater disembowelment”, Nick has become stuck in a seated position on the floor of the pool, the system’s suction keeping him down. We assume he will simply drown, with the only further indignity likely to be a kid in inflatable armbands kicking his corpse in the head, but no: the pressure builds and builds, and then it blows and it’s gut fountain time. What a way to go.
Check out where to watch every Final Destination movie in the United Kingdom with our streaming guide!
