Death Plays D&D: Final Destination and Columbine

Of course, I knew what death was at 14, but the ages of both the 15 deceased and two perpetrators at Columbine High School were terrifyingly close to home. Columbine was in Colorado, just a state away diagonally on the US’ famed Four Corners, a tourist trap that older Arizonans often talked about with a weird pride. I also spent a few days in Colorado Springs, an hour outside Littleton, and found it beautifully peaceful. It wasn’t difficult to imagine a serene, early morning full of ambient sough broken by the harsh crack of gunfire, and people around my age hitting the floor.     

To a middle schooler, Columbine instantly transformed into a Bruce Willis movie. Before they could even consider the carnage, students drew up plans on the crude campus maps included in their daily planners. Three were expelled within a week. At the graduation assembly that year, Mr. Keegan, a Spanish teacher, thumbed through my paperback edition of American Tabloid, in case I hollowed it out and encased a .22.  We were going to take this seriously if it meant a permanent backpack ban and the threat of metal detectors. 

Death was coming, and while it dawned on us, the adults charged with our safety seemed woefully unprepared.  Lockdown drills all but replaced those for fire, not one without arguments from students about strategy. 

“Isn’t this a bad idea, lined up against the wall like this? We’re easy targets.”

For the first time, death was not as far off in the future as previously envisioned. A year later, I went to see Final Destination in theatres. 

Written as a spec script by Jeffrey Reddick for what would have been a killer X-File, Final Destination was released in March of 2000 and served as an unconscious catharsis for a generation of school kids. After seeing a vision of the airplane taking his class to France exploding after liftoff, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) panics his way off the flight.  Minutes later, the plane blows, and Alex and the others forced off the plane (Billy Hitchcock, Valerie Lewton, Terry Chaney, Todd Waggner - last names all obvious but endearing references) are not only under suspicion from the FBI, but stalked by Death Itself.  Their survival was a flaw in an otherwise perfectly plotted air disaster, and he still has to wrap up the gig.  

The invisible, malignant force goes unseen throughout the franchise, given character only in a harbinger who appears as the recently late, great Tony Todd. Todd is William Bludworth, an ambiguous mortician in the first film who fills Alex and his newfound goth love interest Clear Rivers (Ali Later) on death’s M.O. 

“Your friends’ departure shows that death has a new design for all of you. Now you have to figure out how and when it’s coming back at you…remember the risk of cheating the plan, of disrespecting the design….could initiate a fury that would terrorize even the Grim Reaper. And you don’t even want to fuck with that MacDaddy.”

In reality, our killers had shapes and names not dissimilar to our own. But as parents struggled to imagine that their child might one day fill that shape, picturing our classmates was equally impossible. Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, which examines a school shooting from the perspective of the perpetrators, would only come two years later and instantly met with outrage in the mainstream. Two episodes of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” were postponed for months due to campus violence onscreen. Stephen King pulled his 1977 school shooter novella “Rage” from publication. With fewer resources from the past to draw comparisons, Columbine felt unnecessarily, shockingly new. You can now easily find lists of school shootings that came before and after, some in the very city where I would later move. Nonetheless, new was still impossible to fathom, and an anonymous, looming malignancy that could take us at any moment felt uneasily apropos enough.

It was also funnier. Final Destination excels at another aspect of necessary coping: black comedy. With some minor edits and a change in score, the death scenes are great slapstick. And there’s undeniable schadenfreude in watching Ms. Lewton (Kristen Cloke), a teacher who had fearfully rebuffed the students when they asked for help, die in an absurd Rube Goldberg contraption. Death is many things to many people, but in the Final Destination films, he’s a giant, obsessive nerd setting up meticulous games of gory Mousetrap. 

Death is an edgelord in the franchise, punching when people are down and adding a final twisted punchline to a grisly end. The death scenes are purposely convoluted. Water drips from a leaking bathroom pipe, following on the heels of a teenager preparing for bed. He could slip or get accidentally electrocuted or drive the nose clippers he’s holding into the base of his brain. Director James Wong wrenches tension not out of if they’ll die but precisely how. Meanwhile, one can sense Death’s growing frustration, like he’s trying hard to win at a claw machine. At the film’s best moments, it’s simultaneously funny and frightening. 

It’s still Death, and as fun as it gets with its contraptions, the result is felt. Be it the gasps of “Holy Shit!” that echoed through the theatre when Terry Chaney (Amanda Detmer) is suddenly struck by a bus or the grim, overcast Vancouver location where a school memorial is held. When Todd (Chad E. Donella), Alex’s nerdy best friend, sheepishly reads a well-worn Bible passage, it’s too easy to recall CNN footage. 

The plane crash in Final Destination was already controversial due to similarities with a real-life crash from New York to Paris in 1996, its manifest complete with a group of students. Roger Ebert, who enjoyed the film, described it “in the worst possible taste.”  Wes Craven’s Scream 3 was hassled with severe production issues (despite not featuring school shootings or even teenagers). Miramax was getting cold feet over releasing a violent film so close to the massacre.  Yet surprisingly, Final Destination remains a pristine relic of its era, sidestepping post-Columbine hysteria unscathed. 

It’s less surprising that Final Destination 2, released in 2003, features no airplanes.