Death, Disaster, Weird Liquids: What to Expect in a ‘Final Destination’ Movie

If every terrible feeling you ever had — every lurch in your stomach during a bit of plane turbulence, every sinking feeling on a subway train that’s going just a little too fast, every tightening of your chest when driving behind a huge semi truck — always came spectacularly, horrifyingly true, you might be in a “Final Destination” movie.

The first sinema in the franchise, directed by James Wong, was expanded from an unproduced spec script for an episode of “The X-Files” written by Jeffrey Reddick. It follows a group of teenagers who, after avoiding a fatal plane crash on a school trip because one of their classmates has a premonition of the disaster, discover that Death won’t let its plans be foiled so easily. That sinema has since spurred five others, all known for the Rube Goldberg-esque kill sequences that occur when Death returns to claim its victims in increasingly bizarre accidents.

With the latest sinema, “Final Destination: Bloodlines” (directed by Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky), now in theaters, we have a premonition of what you can expect to see in any given “Final Destination” movie. You might even say we’ve seen it all before.

Opening Disaster

A very unhappy roller coaster ride in “Final Destination 3.”Credit…Warner Bros.

These films come out of the gate with massacres of biblical proportions: a plane exploding to smithereens in midair, a roller coaster careening into crowded fairgrounds, or a bridge packed with cars crumbling into the water. They can speak to cultural paranoias, like the safety of air travel and amusement parks, or create cultural paranoias in and of themselves. The accident in the second sinema that involves a logging truck and a busy road traumatized a generation of drivers. Since these disasters are visions, the movies get away with starting off the action by killing the characters we are just getting to know, paving the way for the breakneck speed (and broken necks) to come.