Final Destination: The History of Death (Books, Movies & Comics) | Horror History

The first known disaster in the Final Destination franchise takes place in Victorian England in 1889, when rising gas from some underground construction causes the explosion of a house at Number 4 Mornington Crescent. Thanks to the vision of the young girl Juliet Collins, there are seven survivors, but one by one, Death would reclaim them. Newsman Matthew Upton was impaled by a chemical filled pipe, historians Hector Barnes, Jane Stanley and their protégé Andrew are poisoned by snakebite, surgeon Stewart Tubbs inhales a poisonous gas and serial killer Bill Sangster is caught in the gears of a drawbridge.

These events are the first known example of what I’ll be calling the Flight 180 phenomenon, where accident survivors are picked off one by one after avoiding Death. This usually happens when a clairvoyant, a character with an ability to foresee future events, has a vision of his or her own death and saves their own life, and possibly the lives of others, forcing Death to change its ways to reclaim its rightful victims. There is a lot of mystery surrounding Death.

Is Death just a force of nature, no different than time or gravity? Or is it an entity, a grim reaper with it’s own thoughts, plans and vulnerabilities? In this video I’ll be analyzing every death in the series, including the ones that occur off screen, in the novels and in the comics.

This video is sponsored by Hunt a Killer. Welcome to Horror History. Before I continue on with the history of Death, which is essentially the Final Destination timeline, here are a couple of disclaimers.

For this video, I’ll be using the sequel timeline. In the first Final Destination movie, we see that Flight 180 crashed on May 13, 1999. However, in the sequels, that date has been moved to May 13th, 2000, and I’ve theorized that this has something to do with the line in the first movie, where Alex looks up at the stars and wonders if there could be a world where the Flight 180 passengers are still safe.

Second disclaimer -- there is at least one premonition incident that we don’t know the details of that occurs before the other accidents. “It’s just that I’ve seen this before. A lucky few survive a disaster, and one by one Death comes for them all.

” I’ve theorized that this could be William Bludworth’s own near-death experience, but as of right now, we don’t know for sure. Third disclaimer. Outside of the movies, there are also Final Destination novels and comics.

While they don’t seem to directly contradict the canon of the movies from what I can tell, they are out of print. Not having access to all of them, it’s hard to say when they all take place chronologically, so I’ll start with the ones that I can’t place in the timeline. With that all being said, let’s get into it.

In Final Destination: Dead Reckoning, punk rock singer Jess Golden saves some lives with her vision of a collapsing nightclub. The bouncer Sebastian, is later killed by his exploding motorcycle, a student named Amber is run over by an out of control car, a jock named Charlie falls down an elevator shaft, a cop named Marina is poisoned by a black widow, a waitress named Macy is struck by a metal pane, an alcoholic named Ben falls into a manhole, and a drug dealer named Eric is hit in the head with a surfboard. The book also describes what is perhaps the only visual depiction of Death’s true form.

In Jess’s dreams, she sees a horrific monstrosity of shifting bones and corpses that supposedly represent Death. Several months later, Jess and her friend Jamie are nowhere to be found, so it’s unknown if they found a way to beat death. In Final Destination: Destination Zero, journalist Patti Fuller learns she had a great grandmother who once cheated death by being revived after she drowned in a river.

Patti had her own vision, and foresaw the bombing of the South Hill Metroline in Los Angeles. She managed to get some people off the train before it happened. The survivors include Hal, who later drowned in a flash flood, Zack, a construction man who was cut in half by a glass pane, and Susan, a mechanic who was burned to death.

Then there was Al, who was beheaded by a flying hubcap while receiving what I will refer to as mobile pipe cleaning service by a professional… named Candi, and Will who was impaled by CDs and DVDs from a now defunct electronics store. I’m guessing that is NOT just what he needed. "You're just what I needed!

" Patti eventually dies of an intentional overdose so that she can be revived, and theoretically go on living just as her great grandmother once did many years ago. In Final Destination: End of the Line, recent high school grad Danny King has a vision about a train crash at 32nd Street in New York City. This time, the survivors include Rinoka, who is crushed by a bathtub that falls through the floor; Peter, who is impaled by the horns of a gazelle; Jack, who falls onto a wine corkscrew that impaled him in the eye; Mary-Beth, who is butchered by a chainsaw dropped by a construction worker; and Bodil and James, who are both part of a wild series of events culminating in them being thrown from the top of a moving truck into a store display of umbrellas that impale them.

The last two remaining are Danny and his sister, Louise. What happens to them is very interesting, and potentially exhibits another rarely seen ability of Death. Louise tries to do what Patti Fuller did, so she can technically die by injection but be revived.

“Only new life can defeat Death. ” But when Louise comes back, she accidentally cuts the brakes while adjusting her brother’s motorbike, and in his final moments, Danny realizes that Louise was only revived in order to play a part in his Death. This is significant because it means Death has the ability to use the victims’ survival tactics against them -- however, this alone is not enough to prove that Death is a conscious entity, rather than a natural phenomenon.

What happens to Louise afterwards is not known, but the next novel, Final Destination: Dead Man’s Hand would introduce a new facet that would change our perception about Death in the Final Destination franchise. The holiday gift grind is upon us. I seriously don’t know what to get anyone this year.

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Allie Goodwin gets married to her ex-boyfriend one drunk night in Vegas and saves five lives when she foresees the glass elevator collapse in a hotel called Merlin’s Tower. Sure enough, Death comes for all of the escapees, but unlike all of the disasters mentioned so far, they do not die in the same order they died in during the premonition, and this is because of another rule of Death. If someone intervenes with Death’s plans and saves a life, that person will be “skipped”, but Death will come back around for them after completing its list.

Because of this, it starts with an exotic dancer named Shawna who is rammed into a slot machine by a special prize car that rolled off of it’s display platform. Guess it wasn’t her lucky day at the slots. Her boyfriend, a man named Warren Ackerman, dies shortly thereafter when a powerline falls onto a puddle he’s standing in.

Then a gambling addict named Arlen is killed during… a pipe cleaning disaster… involving a severed pipe. Death seems to have preferred methods of taking people out, and I guess in the books it really likes to… interrupt that clarinet practice… Allie’s newlywed husband Thomas is hit by a speeding truck, another commonly used tactic of the reaper, but Allie’s death is much less in line with the usual methods found in the world of Final Destination. After her initial premonition, she was sprayed with blood by one of the victims she was unable to save from the elevator, and once she is the last remaining survivor, she finds out that she contracted HIV from that blood.

We don’t see her death, but it’s heavily implied that she does not survive. This is perhaps the only subtle death among those who cheated Death’s design. I think William Bludworth’s explanation is the best answer as to why so many of them pass on in such a gruesome manner.

“The risk of cheating the plan, of disrespecting the design, could incite a fury that could terrorize even the grim reaper. And you don’t even want to **** with that mack-daddy! ” I think the basic implication is that if you mess up Death’s original plan for you it’s gonna be much scarier when your fate finally does catch up with you.

Final Destination: Sacrifice is an interesting departure from the standard formula, because the protagonist has many prophetic visions. The first is a bus accident, but he’s unable to convince anyone else to get off the bus, and he is the only survivor. Next, he sees a factory explosion, and this time he’s able to save himself and four co-workers, but soon finds he has only delayed each of their appointments with death.

After a ladder accident, a bathtub electrocution, a lawn mower malfunction and a railroad splattering, he once again finds himself the only survivor. Next, he envisions himself and his family dying in a gas explosion. At this point he’s overwhelmed with grief, and decides to hang himself, thinking that if Death got what he wanted with him, the people in his life would maybe no longer be in danger.

There are two ways to look at this story. It could be that Death is not perfect, and these first three attempts were unsuccessful, or it could be that suicide was in the cards for him all along. There are a few other disasters referenced in news articles, but it’s not clear when they take place.

They include a building collapse that kills 14, a bus crash that takes 32, an electrical fire that destroys an office, a capsized boat resulting in the loss of 4 lives, a Ferris wheel that sends 9 more souls to the afterlife, an accident in the gulf that kills 18, a hardware store accident that claims 2 (which we only know to take place some time after April of 2003). That’s it for the ambiguously placed entries. If you know when some of these take place, please do drop me a comment.

From here on out, the order of events are more clearly spelled out. Which takes us to the end of April 2000. The office employees of a New York branch of Presage Paper set out on a business retreat, but as their bus crosses the North Bay Bridge, the structure starts to collapse.

A part time salesman named Sam Lawton has a premonition, causing him to take his ex girlfriend Molly Harper and flee the bus. Six others give chase, and as a result, they are the only survivors. At the funeral for the deceased employees, they encounter William Bludworth, who warns them that Death does not like to be cheated, and over the next couple days, each of them would find out exactly what he means.

Intern Candice Hooper breaks her spine in a freak gymnastics accident, tech expert Isaac Palmer is taken out by a variety of accidents during his massage therapy and board member Olivia Castle falls out of a building after having her vision impaired during a botched Lasik surgery. The next on Death’s list is factory supervisor Nathan Sears, but he’s able to avoid Death’s attempt, and an employee named Roy Carson takes the fall instead. According to William Bludworth’s theory, this may have changed Nathan’s position by adding Roy’s remaining lifespan to his own.

“You shorted Death. So you let Death have somebody else in your place, and then you take their spot in the realm of the living -- all the days and years they’ve let to live. And they take your place in Death.

” We never find out if Bludworth is telling the truth here though, because as it turns out Roy only had a couple days left to live anyway. “Turns out Roy had an enlarged blood vessel in his brain so big, it was about to burst. ” And Bludworth is also pretty adamant that you can’t escape Death, so it seems quite possible that this letting Death have someone in your place business is just an unproven theory that he’s testing.

Otherwise you’d probably have a bunch of immortal serial killers running around the world of Final Destination. This is New York… not Haddonfield. It doesn’t take long for the boss, Dennis Lapman, to be done in by a flying wrench.

Sales manager Peter Friedkin decides to take out Molly, hoping to gain her years, but ends up settling for an FBI Agent named Block instead, shortly before Sam finishes him off with a… what is this thing called? I’ll just call it a meat skewer. On May 13th, 2000, Sam and Molly decide to start a new life together in Paris, but before their flight takes off, a 17 year old student named Alex Browning has a vision.

He sees the plane malfunction and explode, causing him to freak out and demand to be removed from the aircraft. Six others from his French class are also removed in the commotion. Alex’s foresight comes true, and Sam and Molly perish in the crash.

A piece of the aircraft flies back towards the city and crushes Nathan and several others, completing Death’s list from the North Bay Bridge collapse. But because 6 of the Mt. Abraham High School students and one teacher got off the plane that they should have died on, Death must start a new list to clean up these survivors.

At this point, you probably have a lot of questions. The previous disasters that I’ve talked about have been relatively self contained. So if Sam had never had a vision, and the Presage Paper employees had died on the bridge collapse, would Flight 180 still have needed to crash?

Or did Death take Sam’s vision into account? Was the plan all along for him to survive the bridge collapse so that he could die on Flight 180? The way I see it, once your time is up, your time is up, and when that time comes, you may be able to put it off a little bit, but you really can’t change history; you can’t alter the bigger picture.

I’ll be able to fully explain why by the end of the video, but for now, think of it like this. If Sam had never had his vision, the Presage employees would have died on the bridge, but Flight 180 was always destined to crash whether their seats were filled or not. Because Sam and Molly did survive, Death altered its schemes just slightly to put them on Flight 180, which was going to crash anyway.

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What else could you really ask for? Alex Browning’s best friend Tod Waggner is first up on Death’s new list, but before Death reaches him, it’s likely that he did something to extend the life of a man named Evan Lewis, but we don’t really know exactly what. All we do know is that Evan is added to a new list, that Death would deal with later.

In June of 2000, Tod slips on some leaked toilet water in his bathroom, ultimately causing him to accidentally strangle himself on this clothesline. This is the point where I’d say we have proof that Death is a force of nature, but also a character, a grim reaper trying to outsmart its victims, because after killing Tod, it cleans up after itself by receding toilet water to make Tod’s death look like a suicide. This was likely to throw off William Bludworth, who was now giving advice to some of the accident survivors.

Death didn’t want Bludworth metaling with its plans. It doesn’t work though, Bludworth is still able to determine the real cause of Tod’s death. This tells me that Death is powerful, but not perfect, and Bludworth’s teachings to Flight 180 survivor Clear Rivers would continue to be a problem for Death going forward.

The next Flight 180 student that Death reaches is Terry Chaney, who is hit by a bus, but this also causes a woman named Kat Jennings, who was on that bus, not to reach the hotel she was supposed to die at, so she is now added to the second list behind Evan Lewis. Death goes after the teacher that got off of Flight 180, Valerie Lewton, by blowing up her computer monitor, setting her home on fire, and finally letting her drop a kitchen knife into her own body. Later that night, Alex saves his classmate Carter Horton from being hit by a train.

Death skips Carter and moves onto the next in line, Billy Hitchcock, who is killed by a piece of scrap metal that shoots out from under the train. A police officer named Thomas Burke is dispatched to investigate Billy’s death, causing him not to be there for a shootout that kills his partner. Since Burke was also supposed to die in the shootout, he is added to Death’s second list.

The next day, a teacher named Eugene Dix is called in to substitute for Ms. Lewton’s class, causing him to be absent during an attack that took place at the school he would have otherwise been teaching at, so he too is added to the second list. It seems like Death is just letting this second list grow until after it’s taken care of the first list.

At some point Nora and Tim Carpenter are also added to the second list, probably as a ripple effect of something Alex Browning did. Something he would not have been able to do if he had died on Flight 180. The next victim is Clear Rivers, but Alex manages to save her, so the target moves to him.

Six months go by before Death makes another attempt. With Clear’s warning and Carter’s quick action, Alex’s life is saved. Death cycles back through the list, so it’s once again Carter’s turn.

He isn’t so lucky and he’s struck by a fallen restaurant sign. The commotion causes Rory Peters, who is nearby, to miss his show at a local theater, which would later collapse, and he would also be added to the second list. Death makes dozens of attempts, going back and forth between Clear and Alex, before finally, Alex is knocked out of the picture by a falling brick.

Clear goes into hiding in a padded room where Death is unable to reach her. This is another reason I think Death is more of a character making conscious decisions, because if it were simply a set of rules, it wouldn’t move on to that second list until Clear was taken care of. But with Clear locked away in isolation, it didn’t really matter if Death focused on other things, because she was unlikely to save any other lives while she was in there, and if she did come out, Death would have an opportunity to finish her.

But before that happens, is when I believe the events of Final Destination: Spring Break take place. We know this happens around March, because that’s when Spring Breaks tend to happen. I think it’s in the year 2001 because it seems to be after Flight 180.

There’s a point where a character sees that her flight is also 180 and her eyes go wide. But it can’t be too far into the 21st century. They still have standard definition TVs in the hotels.

Carly Hagan and her friends are vacationing at the Hotel Grand Tzolk'in in Cancun, Mexico. Before arriving, she has a premonition of her hotel exploding. When she sees the signs from her dream starting to come true, she urges her friends to go outside with her.

Because it’s her birthday wish, they do, just in time so see the explosion that would have killed them. Throughout the rest of the vacation, Death comes for each of them. Kris is chopped up by a boat propeller.

His girlfriend Katie breaks a thermometer on herself and then trips and falls on some sharp skeleton bones. Gino crashes through a glass bottom boat while scuba diving. Drena tries to leave Cancun, but falls off the jet bridge after it’s struck by a runaway forklift.

Jeremy falls down during this and also dies. They’re unable to leave the country with an incoming Hurricane. Amanda drowns when the automatic pool cover turns on while she’s swimming underwater.

Matt’s abs are not strong enough to stand up to fireworks. Jake is chopped up by a rescue helicopter. Bryan tries to hide from the Hurricane in a coffin, but he never manages to make it out.

And Carly… Well, I’m not sure exactly what happens to her. She sees the creepy Shaman in the mirror, and then… she just kind of disappears. I don’t know.

Dust in the wind I guess. After soaking up the sun in Cancun, Death returns to New York, still needing to take care of that second list, and see if anything can be done about the hermit, Clear Rivers. But before doing that, there are a couple more disasters with unintended survivors.

One involved 38 year old Doris Fenwick, who is saved from drowning. Her fate after that is unknown, but we can assume Death comes for her. The other is a larger incident that becomes known as the infamous Lakeview fire.

We don’t know if it was a premonition that caused some of the victims to survive this time, but given the track record of the series, it probably was. All of the survivors passed away in what is described as an eerie string of deaths, but one of the last survivors was a teenager named Brian Gibbons. However, before taking out Brian, Death decides now is a good time to try to reclaim the lives of Evan, Tim, Nora, Kat, Rory, Eugene, Clear and Thomas.

Clear is still in the padded room though, so she’s off the board for now, so Death’s new plan is to take out all the others in a massive highway pileup. I’ll also note that the order they were going to die in during the pile up doesn’t match up with the order in which they were interfered with by the would-be Flight 180 victims, because that order isn’t necessarily the order they would have died in. If that explanation sounds confusing, think about it like this.

Burke could have gotten shot in that shoot out, but not died from his injuries for another couple days. We don’t know, because we don’t see any of that. What I’m trying to say is just don’t worry too much about the order here.

Death’s designs are thwarted once again by William Bludworth, who seems to somehow make contact with a young woman named Kimberly Corman… just before her very own Flight 180 style premonition. Kimberly’s vision not only saves those who were on that second death list, but also herself, leading her to basically just be added to that list. Also, Death starts working backwards at this point.

So the last one that should have died in the Route 23 pile up, Kimberly, is now the first target. Why does Death decide to go in reverse here? This is twice that this set of victims have gotten away, so it might be to try to catch them off guard.

Flight 180 has become kind of a mainstream story at this point, and maybe Death is worried that the victims are figuring out its MO. Death comes for Kimberly immediately in the form of a barreling truck, but Officer Burke pulls her out of the way, so her spot is skipped for now. Evan is crushed by a ladder, Tim is crushed by a glass pane and Nora is decapitated by an elevator.

Eugene tries to just give up and take himself out, but he’s physically unable to do so because it isn’t his turn, as explained by Clear, who is now helping the new victims. I’m not really a fan of this rule, but it doesn’t matter, this is how it is. You literally cannot die until death has decided it’s your turn.

And it’s Kat’s turn. Her airbag goes off, sending her head into a sharp pipe. Rory actually encounters the Lakeview fire survivor, Brian Gibbons, and saves him from being hit by a news van, thus extending his life a little bit longer.

Then, we see the importance of Death taking them out in the correct order again, because it actually knocks down a tree branch in order to move Burke out of the way so he isn’t hit by the barbed wire fence that slices through Rory. Next up is Eugene, who is taken out in an explosion that also incinerates Clear. Now you might ask why Clear was able to die right here if it isn’t her turn?

I think it’s because she’s technically still on the Flight 180 list. Not the Route 23 list. So on that list, it’s been her turn the entire time; she’s the last one.

With a last ditch plan, Kimberly decides to drive into a lake, hoping that because she’s next to the hospital, she would be treated quickly and someone would be able to revive her. This would theoretically invalidate Death’s list, according to what she was told by Bludworth… . .

. and her and Burke would be saved. This is the second theory proposed by Bludworth.

This one actually has a little bit more going for it, because we’ve now seen Patti Fuller’s grandmother, Patti Fuller herself, Louise King and now Kimberly Corman all survive using this tactic. It’s possible that they all died shortly after, but none of them are confirmed dead. In fact, Kimberly and Burke reunite with the Gibbons family for a barbecue at the end of that summer in 2001, and the grill explodes on Brian, thus wrapping up the list of victims from the Lakeview fire.

It would be a couple more years until Death would have to start another list. I mean, obviously this kind of stuff is probably always happening off screen, but the next Final Destination story would be Final Destination: Death of the Senses taking place in 2003, a few years after Flight 180. Jack Curtis was the driver of the bus that ran over Terry Chaney in 2000.

You know, the one that Kat was also on. He would lose his job because of this, and become homeless. And it is because he is homeless that he’s in the right place at the right time to save a police officer named Amy Tom from a serial killer.

That means all the victims that the serial killer would have gotten are now safe, so Death has to take out each of them. The serial killer is referred to as John Doe, and yes, he’s very similar to the John Doe from Se7en, but instead of basing his crimes on The Seven Deadly sins, he planned to base them on the five senses. For sight, he was to take out a beautiful reporter named Chelsea Cox.

Death gets her with an icicle. On the air! "WE'LL DO IT LIVE!

F-" For smell, the target was the man in charge of municipal trash collection, Dawson Donahue. His car explodes. Taste was going to be food critic Dominique Swann.

Death blows up her wine bottle and she’s choked by a glass shard. Touch would have been Katie Astin, a talk show host and televangelist, who was electrocuted. And for sound, the victim would have been Joshua Cornell III, a rapper-producer whose head is cut off when his platinum record is launched through the air during an equipment malfunction.

Of course, there is one more, and that is the officer that Jack saved: Amy Tom. She is impaled by her own art piece, and then Jack also dies even though he wasn’t technically on the list, because Officer Tom’s partner thought that he was the killer. Oopsie!

On May 13th 2005, the five year anniversary of Flight 180, and the four year anniversary of the Route 23 pile up, there are two more psychic visions. I would definitely understand if this is becoming one of Death’s least favorite days of the year. The first is in Miami during Final Destination: Looks Could Kill.

Woman named Stephanie Pulaski (also known as Sherry) is part of a modeling group called “Cellar” where each model is nicknamed after a different type of wine. During a party on a yacht called the Coral Clipper, Sherry has a vision of a fatal crash, and she convinces her boyfriend and some of the other models to exit the boat before it departs. When the crash occurs for real, a piece of debris strikes Sherry in the face, sending her into a coma.

While she was being hospitalized, a similar disaster would occur further up the Atlantic coast during a special grad night at McKinley Park. That night in McKinley, Pennsylvania, a yearbook photographer named Wendy Christensen has a vision about a horrific accident on a roller coaster called Devil’s Flight. She causes a scene and several other high school students get off the ride before it crashes, but Wendy loses her boyfriend and her best friend, because their car’s restraints were not released.

Wendy sees the ominous signs of Death in her photographs from that night and tries to figure out their meaning so she can warn each of the others before they are crossed off of Death’s newest checklist. Popular girls Ashley Freund and Ashlyn Halperin both become victims of a tanning bed incident, pervert Frankie Cheeks becomes a Motorhead… and not in the heavy metal kind of way -- and football star Lewis Romero is all brawns and no brain… literally because his head is crushed by a pair of giant weights. Wendy and her friend Kevin Fischer are able to prevent the death of Ian McKinley, so the next target is his girlfriend Erin, who is spiked by a nail gun.

Wendy’s sister Julie was also on the ride, and with the help of Kevin, Wendy’s able to rescue her, but her friend Perry is not so lucky and gets impaled by a flagpole. Wendy and Kevin are both able to dodge death, so it comes back around to Ian, who is crushed by a falling sign. So Wendy, Kevin and Julie are safe… for now.

. . In August 2005, Sherry is released from the hospital stay that began with the yacht crash, but she’s forced to wear a mask to cover her now disfigured face, and she thinks her life is over.

But like Eugene, she’s unable to end it herself. She then receives a phone call from Death, or at the very least, someone or something posing as Death, who offers to make her a deal. We’ve never seen Death be compromising or try to make a deal with any of the victims in the series, so I think it stands to reason that this caller is an imposter.

They meet at a café, where he appears as an elderly black man. He asks her to help get rid of the survivors that should have drowned that day. In exchange for that, he would restore her face.

Not only has Death not taken a human form before, but it’s never really needed help killing anyone. A fellow model named Chablis is eaten away by spilled chemicals. Shiraz’s scalp is torn off and her head is twisted around on a music video set.

Chardonnay hits her head and drowns in a hot tub. Rose’s organs are vacuumed in a botched liposuction surgery. Sherry’s boyfriend, Brut, is run over by a subway train after falling into a manhole.

And a photographer named Gunter was crushed after being pinned by the loading platform of a delivery truck. For each of these deaths, Sherry has either played a hand, or watched idly as they happen. But she can’t bring herself to kill her best friend Cabernet, and because of this, she’s broken the deal.

Cabernet is also pregnant, and the delivery of her child may be what saves her. Remember the clue. .

. “Only new life can defeat Death. The introduction of life that was not meant to be… that can invalidate the list.

Force Death to start anew. ” We’ve only seen the “new life can defeat Death” cheat used successfully for people who were revived, but back in Final Destination 2, Kimberly’s original understanding of this clue was that if someone who was supposed to have died creates new life by giving birth, they would essentially be off the hook. Anyways, after publicly screaming about her deal with Death, Sherry is admitted to a psych ward.

In November, Wendy and Kevin are now in college, and Julie meets both of them by chance on the subway when Wendy has another vision. This time, she sees their train crashing, but unlike the roller coaster, they aren’t able to get off. We don’t see what happens after this, but there is a possibility that some of them survived, since every other vision in the series has resulted in at least one person being saved, so it stands to reason that these visions are always a clue about how to avoid the hand of death.

During the six months that follow Sherry gets better, and even goes through a facial reconstruction program. On May 13th 2006, Sherry is crossing a street to meet up with Cabernet when she receives a phone call. The caller ID simply says: Death, and Sherry is struck down by a bus.

As you can probably tell, Death seems to be a gearhead, and loves vehicular accidents. Just freaking adores them. So in 2009, the most vehicle oriented disaster of them all would occur.

The Megatech 300 would be held at the McKinley Speedway, where a… guy… we don’t really know what he does, named Nick O’Bannon would experience his own Flight 180 phenomenon. He envisions a huge pile up where race cars crash and tumble into the stands, taking out many fans, so he pulls his friends away from the action. In doing so, he inadvertently starts a fight and is chased out of the stadium by several people.

Their lives are saved when his vision comes true, but Death gets to work quickly. A woman named Nadia is obliterated by a flying tire, Carter Daniels is dragged down the street and lit on fire by his leaking truck, Samantha is shot in the eye when a lawnmower ejects a rock, and Andy is diced by a fence. Nearby, there’s kind of a side disaster that happens nearby, when an out of control truck crashes into a coffee shop and runs over three McKinley High School students.

Nick’s friend Janet is able to avoid Death’s first attack at the car wash, but their friend Hunt is not so lucky, as he’s drowned and sucked into a pool drain. A man named Jonathan Groves is crushed by a bathtub that falls through from a floor above at the hospital, just like Rinoka from Final Destination: End of the Line, and a security guard named George is hit by an ambulance. Just like seemingly half of the population in this franchise being killed by vehicles.

The remaining three are Nick, his girlfriend Lori and their friend Janet. Nick has a new vision, which leads him to save the girls from an exploding movie theater, so Death goes back to one of it’s most reliable methods, and hits them with a truck. At the time of making this video, this is the last major death to occur.

So, by going through literally everything, all 1,458 confirmed kills -- and that’s not including Carly -- we’ve learned a lot about the rules and tendencies of Death, but like the actual concept of death in real life, there are still some things that we’ll never understand. However, in looking at the bigger picture, we can get a better idea of how this all works. Here’s what I’ve gathered.

Death is unstoppable. The only way you may be able to avoid it is with the introduction of new life that was never meant to be, but since we never see any of the characters who tried this later on down the line, we can’t say with 100% certainty that this works. So you can’t avoid it, but you can put it off.

But if you do cheat Death, don’t expect it to last long. The only one who survived for an extended period was Clear, and she did so by locking herself away and not really interacting with anyone, thus not doing anything to change the course of history in a major way. The best comparison I can make to the nature of the Flight 180 phenomenon, is Stephen King’s 11/22/63.

That story involves a teacher named Jake Epping who goes back in time to try to prevent the assassination of John F Kennedy. But he also tries to fix other things while he’s in the past, which he believes will make the world a better place in the present. But whenever he tries to change history, the universe fights back, and “corrects” whatever he does.

And this makes it very difficult for him to change a major historical event, like a presidential assassination. So in essence, he’s able to change little details, but things just get smoothed over and eventually go unnoticed. He can’t do much to change the destiny of the universe.

And I think this is basically how it goes in Final Destination. If you have a vision about the future, you may be able to save yourself for the time being, but before long, Death will correct your actions, and you will be the one to pay the price for it. Click the video on the left to see my analysis of other Final Destination characters, and if you love horror remember to subscribe to CZsWorld for new horrors every week, ring the deathbell for notifications and I’ll see you in the next one.

Assuming we both survive. If you want to actually beat death, use a facemask and social distancing.