My Journey Through the Tony Todd-centric Final Destination Franchise Begins With a Fond Look Back at the Irresistibly Silly 2000 Original

Death has a design in a cult hit that hit me right in the nostalgia sweet spot

Tony Todd died EXACTLY as I was starting a deep dive into a horror franchise based on the concept of death. Coincidence? Probably!

Welcome, friends, to Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas’ latest journey through horror history. I let this newsletter’s paid subscribers choose which franchises I write about. This current poll pitted Halloween (which seems appropriate, as the poll launched on October 31st) against Friday the 13th, Saw, Child’s Play, and Final Destination. 

I have no idea what readers want. I assumed that Halloween would probably win the poll, followed by Child’s Play and possibly Friday the 13th. 

As is often the case, I was wrong. I was extremely wrong! 

As I expected, Child’s Play put in a strong showing, and Halloween snagged seventeen percent of the vote. However, Friday the 13th lagged far behind at 12 percent, besting only Saw, which scored just eight percent. 

Final Destination is the surprise winner, with thirty-four percent of 76 votes. I was not expecting that. When great and important horror franchises are discussed, the Final Destination films are seldom in the mix. 

At the same time, I could understand why the series appealed to voters. As a Gen Xer who was born in 1976 and started reviewing movies for The A.V. Club in 1997, the 2000 cult shocker hit me right in the nostalgia sweet spot. 

It pains me to admit this because my dumb brain still likes to pretend that entertainment from my twenties is relatively recent and not ancient history, but Final Destination is an old movie that appeals to old people such as myself.

Final Destination is nearly a quarter century old. It is a period piece that transported me back to the turn of the century. It was a crazy time that was so much better than today because the technology was more primitive, we were all fucking stoked that Y2K didn’t happen, Donald Trump wasn’t president, and I was a young man with a thriving career, a solid credit score, and my whole life ahead of me. 

What the hell happened?

The surprise hit feels like an episode of The X-Files for a very good reason; it began life as an unproduced teleplay for the iconic spookfest. That helps explain why James Wong, a writer and producer on The X-Files, made his directorial debut here. The script is credited to Wong, X-Files writer/producer Glen Morgan, and Jeffrey Reddick, who also wrote the story.

It’s easy to imagine Scully and Mulder investigating the freaky case of a group of high school kids who find themselves stalked relentlessly by the abstract concept of death. 

That’s the crazy thing about the Final Destination series. While the late, great Tony Todd is its marquee horror icon, he’s not the villain but rather a spooky, intimidating, and entertaining font of useful information. 

Todd is here to unpack exposition and explain the movie’s wonderfully, maddeningly convoluted mythology. In Final Destination, Death, AKA the bad guy, has a design—a very particular design. Death is NOT happy when someone messes with its intricate plans. 

In Final Destination, Alex Browning, a teenager played by Chucky and Idle Hands star Devon Sawa, accidentally messes with death’s design when he has a premonition that his school flight to France will crash. 

He freaks out when images from his vision begin to come true. After a tussle with fellow student Carter Horton (Kerr Smith), Alex is removed from the flight along with Carter, teacher Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke), Alex’s pal Tod Wagner (Chad Donella), and classmates Billy Hitchcock (Seann William Scott) and Clear Rivers (Ali Larter). 

Alex fucked with fate by cheating death. Death is PISSED. His powers of prognostication might have saved his life and the lives of six others, but at a steep price. 

Death is eager to finish the job it began by luring these high school kids and their teacher NEARLY to their doom before Alex cockblocked the Grim Reaper.

Alex’s psychic powers prove a gift but mostly a curse. His impressed and suspicious peers begin to think that he can predict the future in its entirety when really his gifts are as powerful or as limited as they need to be for any specific scene.

Watch out for Death, as it’s coming for you!

Alex’s classmates look askance at the warlock with the freaky knowledge. He also attracts the unwanted attention of FBI agents Weine (Daniel Roebuck) and Schreck (Roger Guenveur Smith), who find it mighty suspicious that the freaked-out twerp can predict the future.

Many of the characters here are named after prominent horror icons. Schreck is, of course, the name of the actor/vampire who played Nosferatu in the film of the same name, while Weine’s moniker is an homage to Robert Wiene, the director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which is best known as the film from which Tim Burton got all of his ideas. 

Death is not happy about being outsmarted and outwitted by a reasonably intelligent, intuitive high school student. So, it embarks on an all-out mission for revenge. 

By definition, death is sadistic. It is responsible for literally every death since humanity began. But it’s also a horror movie villain, so it goes about things in a peculiar, doubly circular way. 

Death does not go after Alex directly. First, it goes after his friends and teacher. Rather than going straight for the kill, Death takes its sweet time.  

Alternately, death comes out of nowhere as a speeding bus or out-of-control neon sign. 

By getting off the plane before it crashes, these kids cheat death and destiny, but only temporarily. Their demises have been postponed rather than canceled. There are no deaths from old age in this grim world, where death is more of a presence and a force than life.

Like a magician, Final Destination is all about misdirection. It leads you to think that a character will die a horrible freak death a certain way, and then BOOM, it comes from another angle, and another means altogether. 

Oh no! Death!

These deaths might seem unnecessarily involved, but they’re really necessarily complicated. Horror franchises exist for kills. Final Destination is no exception. Its money shots are set pieces that find DEATH, the silent, sly destroyer, working its sinister magic. 

Alex has a terrible case of survivor’s guilt exacerbated by the mysterious deaths of his fellow survivors. Death is a mystery to him that can, surprisingly, be solved with the help of Tony Todd’s gloomy guide to the afterlife. He’s a human Cliff’s Notes for understanding the unknown. It’s a ridiculous character in a ridiculous movie, but Todd, ever the professional, handles it with aplomb. Not every horror icon has two franchises, but Todd proves a one-scene wonder and the collective glue that holds the franchise together. 

I had the honor of interviewing Tony Todd during my A.V Club days. I asked him why he contributed a voice cameo to the third film and did not appear in the fourth entry in the series at all. He said that the studio forgot how much they had paid him and how much they should pay him, but they thankfully remembered in time for him to return in the fifth and upcoming sixth entry in the series, Final Destination: Bloodlines. 

Alex is so freaked out and half mad that he moves to a remote cabin he hopes will be freak death-proof, only to realize that he got the chronology of the deaths wrong and must race to save Clear from certain death. 

Ali Larter is the final girl, the female lead, and the love interest, but she doesn’t have much screen time and has little to do beyond being the girl. 

Final Destination is a supremely silly movie that takes itself very seriously in a way that thankfully does not preclude a welcome streak of dark humor that finds its purest, most inspired representation in a running joke of John Denver music serving as an ominous omen. 

That’s fitting since Denver famously perished in a plane crash. 

Wong and Morgan bring the same craft to this supremely silly spookfest that they did to The X-Files. It may be spectacularly stupid, but it is well-made.

I’m not surprised that Final Destination was a surprise hit that inspired a franchise. There’s something irresistible about its conception of death as a weird game-player with a kooky set of rules only it and Tony Todd’s wonderfully hammy mortician understand. 

I was hoping that Child’s Play would win the poll to determine what horror franchise I’d cover next, but I’m excited about binging this series, particularly since it’ll give me an opportunity to celebrate Tony Todd, one of my favorite horror actors.

It’s just the kind of mindless diversion I need at a time when the world has seldom looked bleaker or less hopeful.