The Final Destination: Death Needs Attention
The Final Destination franchise has sidestepped real-life tragedies while serving as a blanket metaphor for grief and America’s inability to cope with disaster. The first three films serve as a loose trilogy, each (often unintentionally) prophetic and harmonious with America’s general tenor, with Columbine and 9/11 serving as unspoken backdrops for anguish and paranoia. But it’s 2009 and a brand new decade is on the horizon. Solemn horror based on notions of human life’s fragility would stick out like a severed thumb in the same summer of The Hangover. Now, like a Mike Tyson cameo, you needed a hook. 2007 saw the release of the universally panned, first digital 3D horror film Scar3D , and two years later the genre had embraced the fad completely, with both a Night of the Living Dead and My Bloody Valentine remake utilizing it. The mid-to-late aughts flirted with gimmicky cinema repeatedly. 2006 saw David R. Ellis’ Snakes On a Plane - a meme-filled, reshot-by-t...
