OVER FIVE FILMS, THE EVER-POPULAR FINAL DESTINATION SERIES SERVED UP SOME OF CINEMA’S MOST INVENTIVE DEATHS YET. NOW, WITH BLOODLINES, IT’S BACK WITH A BLOODY VENGEANCE

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

Craig Perry has death on his mind. The home office of the man who produced the American Pie series, and other notable movies, is tastefully furnished —posters for exploitation films Young Sinners, Reefer Madness and Death Race 2000 hang on the back wall. But right now, all he can see are deathtraps. “I have a library of bookshelves. I know that they’re not particularly attached well, because the drywall is 100 years old,” he says. “So all it takes is a little tremor and they’re going to be mopping me up. And I might get speared with [genre trophy] the Saturn Award, because those things are heavy.” He pauses, looking around to see where else death might lurk. “My threat matrix is constant,” he laughs. “I can’t walk into a room without triangulating how I might die.”

This may seem like unusual behaviour for the man behind Jason Biggs fucking a pie. Until you realise that “other notable movies” also counts a beloved horror franchise which has redefined how many of us see death. Because as the producer of all the Final Destination films, Perry has spent the last 25 years making sure death is on everyone’s minds.

EVEN IF YOU’VE NEVER SEEN A FINAL Destination, you’re probably aware of the premise: a group of people avoid being wiped out in a terrible disaster, only to find themselves being picked off one-by-one in a series of accidents, seemingly set in motion by Death itself, pissed off that they managed to avoid being on its list. Sometimes those accidents take the form of incredibly complicated chain reactions. Sometimes, you get splatted by a bus without warning. Either way, you can’t cheat death. And, somewhere along the way, it became part of our cultural fabric. As Aimee Lou Wood’s Chelsea says in The White Lotus, “This could be some Final Destination shit!”

“It’s crazy,” laughs Jeffrey Reddick of that reference. “It means a lot to me.”

Reddick is, in many ways, the father of Final Destination. The daddy of Death. It all began with him, more than a quarter of a century ago. “I read an article about a woman who was on vacation, and her mother said, ‘Don’t take the flight you’re on tomorrow; I have a bad feeling about it,’” recalls Reddick. “And the plane crashed. So that got the idea in my head. What if she was supposed to die in that crash? What if she cheated death? And then death started coming after her?”