Everything I’ve been certain would kill me since watching the Final Destination movies

One of the great movie-watching highlights of my summer has been watching all the Final Destination movies in preparation for the HBO Max arrival of the newest installment, Final Destination: Bloodlines. The new one getting good reviews played a factor, but I’m generally always in for an excuse for a franchise watch or rewatch, for the same reason I like watching different adaptations of the same source material – seeing how different creative teams tackle the same or similar story beats in different filmmaking eras can be fascinating

I had seen and enjoyed some of the franchise when I was younger, but I couldn’t remember which installments (turns out, most of 2 and 3). My fond memories were well-placed – all but one of them are really fun, creative blockbuster horror movies. However, watching so many in a row does alter your brain chemistry a bit, as I learned about three movies in.

If there’s one thing the Final Destination movies teach you, it’s to keep your head on a swivel. The only way to outsmart the gleefully wicked Rube Goldberg death machines coming for you is to stay hyper-vigilant at all times, paying close attention to anything that could possibly go wrong and kill you in a hilariously convoluted accident.

Being paranoid is literally the best path to survival in the franchise. The only characters who manage to survive long-term do so in the safety of a padded room at a psychiatric facility or in a fortified bunker in the middle of nowhere. (Although, the movies really do make you think about what makes life worth living – I don’t know if a lifetime of solitude in a bunker with nothing to do but watch for signs of accidental death is actually all that much better than just dying.)

I wouldn’t call myself a paranoid person, exactly, but I do already have the tendency to be more vigilant than I probably need to be of things like hanging phone lines and cars when walking around the city (okay, there is no such thing as being more vigilant than you need to be about cars as a pedestrian). Watching these movies ramped that tendency up tenfold. So here’s a list of things in the world I’ve been convinced would cause my death if I wasn’t extra careful, thanks to the Final Destination movies.

• Spice rack (my hand getting caught in it)
• Garbage disposal
• Carpet (trip hazard)
• Shoes (trip hazard)
• That little edge between two rooms with different flooring (trip hazard)
• Upstairs toilet (falls through the ceiling)
• Upstairs bathtub (falls through the ceiling)
• Grocery store shelves
• Grocery store carts
• Every car on the road (note: this one’s clearly not new)
• My hair dryer (the cord)
• My hair dryer (water starts pouring out of the ceiling from upstairs and I’m electrocuted)
• Wind (not as a direct threat, but for what it portends. There is nothing more ominous in a Final Destination movie than it being windy. Wind is the sound of Death implementing its plan.)
• Any construction, especially wires
• Nearby AC window units
• My parents’ rickety ceiling fan
• A foul ball at a baseball game
• Dozens of motorized scooter riders who don’t give any notice they’re about to zoom by you on the sidewalk (we both die)
• The freight train that runs next to the park we take our daily walks at
• A giant construction crane

A quick digression for a Final Destination franchise ranking: