Final Destination
dir. James Wong
New Line Cinema

One of the most interesting phenomena of the ’90s is what a devil of time we had being scared.

While that may sound like I’m drawing particular attention to a particularly unimpressive subset of horror movies — the fire and brimstone of Bless the Child, Devil’s Advocate, End of Days, Lost Souls and Stigmata failed to set anything on fire, and Fallen wasn’t so much a success with audiences as it was a truce — the truth is that the genre as a whole is deep into a recession.

Without getting too Noël Carroll on you, the psychological good of art-horror is cathartic: We’re fascinated by monsters because they’re transgressive not only of morality but of the laws of nature — their origins are the deepest mysteries because they exist outside of what’s provably true. The collective fortitude to seek to understand the unpleasant truth of the monster is an encouraging national character trait — or, at least, it used to be.

(Aside: Taking another page from Carroll, horror as discussed here requires a certain supernatural element — otherwise it’s just a thriller, or art-dread. As such, movies like The Silence of the Lambs, Seven or American Psycho are disqualified from this discussion.)

The horror auteurs that led the nation through the late ’70s and ’80s — Brian DePalma, Wes Craven, Clive Barker, John Carpenter, David Lynch, David Cronenberg — made wildly different movies, but they were churning in the same primordial slop distilled from a nation afraid of its government, afraid of its youth, afraid of feminism, afraid of its own dark impulses. But those same filmmakers’ best ’90s efforts in the horror genre are mostly interesting exercises flecked with familiar themes, with no single work likely to warrant much attention in 10 years.

The exceptions are Craven’s four meta-horror movies: Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and the Scream trilogy. New Nightmare showed Craven playing with the idea of a horror movie about horror movies — in this case, Craven’s own Nightmare on Elm Street — but the idea fully blossomed with Scream, a psycho thriller about a psycho killer whose modus operandi is rooted in an awareness of horror movie conventions with which his intended victims are equally conversant. Tension was ratcheted up every time the topic turned to horror movies because the audience — equally familiar with the genre — could see every nuance of the film as a miniature self-fulfilling prophecy.

Scream set off two shockwaves — the return of the teen exploitation film in all genres, and a resurgence of horror movies, but this time with a veneer of hip self-awareness. Whereas the horror movies of the previous 20 years had been chronicles of a national psychic exploration, Scream is about know-it-alls who knew what there was to know about monsters ’cause they’d all seen it before in movies.

Of course, they still got killed off regardless of their level of knowledge, but even though that underscored their vapidity it nevertheless reflected the same on its audience — that exploration and deep thought were over, that any interest in subtext was a thing of the past. And once Scream’s crucial layer of meta-awareness was stripped away, a profound hollowness waited, as evidence by the resulting slew of empty horror movies, including but not limited to Disturbing Behavior, Urban Legends, The Faculty, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Final Destination.

It’s hard to pick the nadir from among those, but Final Destination suggests itself readily — its hubris allows it to fall that much harder. Start off with a plane full of students bound for Paris that explodes in midair ... only this time, one student’s premonition and the ruckus that follows cause a handful to be ejected from the plane prior to takeoff. Suddenly convinced he can cheat Death, but also convinced that Death wants to correct its mistake with prejudice, Alex (Devon Sawa) launches into a race against time versus the decrepit, Alzheimered spirit of Rube Goldberg; while Alex and his friends wax philosophic about fate, death, life, the universe and everything, Death is contriving the most asinine domino chains imaginable to off the survivors — natural causes have never been so unnatural.

For instance — and stay with me now — a cup of tea spilled into a vent causes a monitor to short and explode; the expelled glass severely cuts the jugular of the computer’s owner; the bleeding victim, prone, goes for a towel and destabilizes a knife block which earns her a cleaver in the sternum. Oh, and then the house explodes.

Similarly, the movie talks a convoluted, but entirely unconvincing, game — pseudo-insightful gab from these know-nothing know-it-alls. Even for someone attuned the particular morality of slashers, there’s nothing here but the movie’s own grisly machinations. It’s so resolutely on the surface that it actually prevents deeper readings — and the same can be said of its many peers.

At its best, horror takes us deeper into ourselves; at its worst, it betrays its ability to deliver insight for a half-dozen more gasps or trots out a happier ending for another $5 million in receipts. (To be fair, that particular problem plagues The Faculty far worse than it does Final Destination.) But the problem is really an outside-in one; I’d say these filmmakers are engaging the audience at the level on which a very contented culture wants to be engaged. Put another way, better horror movies will only come when we’re ready for them.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)