Death's Q Drops: Final Destination 2 and Post-9/11 Hysteria

There are no airplanes featured in Final Destination 2. If it wasn’t a studio mandate, screenwriters had to be conscious of how sensitive America still was to onscreen plane crashes. A teaser for the upcoming Spiderman was already running in theatres before the attack, which involved the hero webbing up a helicopter between the Twin Towers. The studio pulled it instantly. The pilot of 24 featured a plane explosion, leading to a delay in its premiere and some editing. And Disney’s Lilo and Stitch had to undergo extensive reshoots to the climax; originally, Lilo hijacked a Boeing 747.  Outside of Spike Lee’s 2002 film 25th Hour, any stark reminders about 9/11 were verboten. 

Nonetheless, the same way its predecessor managed to sidestep the larger pitfalls of the Columbine Massacre while still brushing against it, Final Destination 2 can’t help but feel plugged into post-9/11 hysteria and the world of hopeless conspiracy theories. 

The first film's events are retold and reconceptualized as conspiracy as the opening credits run. Kimberly (A.J. Cook) is sleeping during a news report about the first anniversary of Flight 180 in which an unnamed man with short-cropped hair is interviewed. Once again, the man explains the “unseen, malevolent presence” that decides when we live or die, and that interfering with its plans is futile. The aftermath of Flight 180 has spread like an urban legend, and the wiry stranger, unconnected to the rest of the franchise, has been touched by it. But he’s reached peak-theorizing; he’s only hopeless now. 

An unseen, malevolent presence will soon again be looming over a (still mostly white) cross-section of early 2000s American young adults, who we’ll later see in padded cells with newspaper clippings strewn up against the wall with yarn links. As Final Destination 2 played theatres, the Bush II administration created a cloud of confusion around the reasons for the upcoming Iraq invasion, including potential links to 9/11 and nuclear weapons. Seven days after the towers fell, citizens heard word of anthrax in the mail, and questions were already forming about the collapse of Tower 7. No one seemed certain of what had happened, nor if it would happen again near them. Columbine graduated. 

Again, the inciting calamity is pulled from current events, this time a traffic collision involving 125 vehicles in Ringold, Georgia. Kim and her friends (the attractive blonde, the stoner, etc.) gather in the SUV for the classic horror movie Spring Break setup. Soon after, though, Kim experiences a premonition of an enormous traffic collision that would kill them and is pulled over by a cop (Michael Landes) while panicking, blocking an onramp of random drivers. Kim gets out, but the SUV gets smacked by a semi, killing all her friends and ruining a perfectly ordinary horror narrative. 

The crash uses no CGI automobiles, though they used CGI wood for the logging truck that derails only because the real lumber wouldn’t bounce properly. Aside from that, the pile-up is one of the most impressive of the 2000s. But even before the crash, late director and former stuntman David R. Ellis proved adept at building tension, casually jumping from one car to the next but always giving a sense of space on the road. The logistics of how the pile-up happens are equally important to the spectacular gore on the other side. A tragedy has occurred, and we’ll spend the rest of the runtime trying to make sense of it. 

Kim and the new band of survivors quickly catch on to the plot they’ve found themselves in, relying on rumour and friend-of-a-friend gossip for what to do next. During a police interrogation, the core group pieces it together from news reports and word-on-the-street. Survivor Eugene (TK Cater) relates it like campfire hokum.  

“Surely you must have read bout the kid who had a dream about a plane blowing up, so he got all his buddies off the plane, and then the thing blew up just like in his dream? Did you hear what happened after? A month goes by. Everything seems cool. And then the survivors die one by one... some people even said Death Itself was stalking them, hunting each one down.” 

By the end, they’ve each contributed a piece of gossip or an anecdotal connection to Flight 180 - all incredibly weak tangents. One missed a play in Paris due to a sign landing on Kerr Smith’s character at the end of the first film, the cop cleaned up Sean William Scott’s body, and Kim’s mother was shot while she was distracted by a news report about Chad E. Donnella’s hanging. It could be written off as lazy writing, but piecing together elements of a tragedy or a conspiracy - be it through trauma or schizophrenia - is often just as haphazard. There’s also a little perverse rubbernecking that occurs after tragedy. Everyone has a 9/11 story, even if they lived in Alaska at the time. Soon, they realize their only hope is the only survivor of previous events: Clear Rivers (Ali Larter).

Clear has committed herself in an insane asylum (the same one used at the start of Halloween: Resurrection), in a padded cell safe from sharp objects, heavy machinery or any harmful gas. Here, among her conspiracy den, with newspaper articles about the plane crash and her yarn, we see how she’s kept safe. Before visiting, a nurse checks them for anything potentially dangerous, no matter how outlandish. She warns her visitors to “watch for signs.” If you see a flock of pigeons in a window, they may somehow be involved in your demise. 

Pictured: Clear Rivers (Ali Larter)

The characters in the Final Destination franchise are doomed twice over. First, they may die graphically, but if they live, they are forever looking over their shoulder, doomed to an endless cycle of riddle-solving. Every word in the newspaper they look at askew is a subtle hint from the grim reaper, every reflection in the window a prognostication of their grisly end. One might imagine acclimating to such a lifestyle, expecting clues to drop irregularly. The clues may be obscure, one may have to examine them closely or use other references to understand better what they mean. After newspapers fall out of fashion and the internet becomes the main curator of news, one might scour it for more answers. One might eventually find those answers on 8chan.  Clear wasn't forced into an asylum, she opted for the lifestyle. 

RIP

It’s not Clear, but Bludworth, the coroner (Tony Todd), who returns to provide a vague, ultimately unsatisfying way out. “Only new life can defeat death,” he tells them before smiling sinisterly and exiting the film.  At first, they assume the obvious: a pregnant woman who would have died in the pile-up must give birth. But after the child is born safely, most of the survivors are killed save for Kim and the cop. They misread a clue. 

Eventually, Kim sacrifices herself after glancing at a news article about a drowning survivor given a “new life”, another piece just lifted from the headlines. She’s revived, but another child who was involved in a close call earlier gets blown to pieces in a barbecue explosion before the credits roll. Death is still out there, with purpose and direction, though we’ll never be able to ascribe a proper name or face to it. 

This franchise’s unseen killer serves as a tabula rasa for societal threats, be it a school shooter, a terrorist attack, or even the subtle implication that other, more shadowy forces are at work.  And if it isn’t supernatural, the only forces capable of such monstrosities are painfully obvious. Two films into the franchise have neither suggested that these premonitions have happened before nor that this flaw has been a regular historical feature. At the turn of the millennium, a new fear was born. Before 9/11, tragedy could be random. Now everything had motive; the key was finding it, no matter how obscure.  The answers may depend on your politics.