The sixth installment of Final Destination has hit theaters and people are losing their minds over the opening set-piece. But is this actually great horror filmmaking, or are we just so starved for theatrical horror that anything with a good kill sequence gets called a masterpiece? Pick a side.
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Add your commentmy therapist is going to have a field day when i tell her a movie about an inescapable death list made me feel genuinely seen
My mum worked as a nurse for 30 years and she watched this with me expecting to be bored. She covered her face for the last 40 minutes and then sat in complete silence during the credits. She said 'I've seen real trauma and that still got me.' That means something.
Went with my whole friend group (7 people). Six of us loved it. One person said it was 'morally irresponsible to make death entertaining.' She also didn't laugh at the raccoon scene which tells you everything.
The opening sequence on that rooftop party alone is worth the price of admission. I genuinely grabbed a stranger's arm in the theater and I am not ashamed. That's what horror is SUPPOSED to do.
I was 11 when the first one came out and my older cousin showed it to me at a sleepover and I genuinely could not look at escalators for a year. Taking my own 13-year-old to see Bloodlines this weekend and I hope it does the same thing to her. That fear is a rite of passage.
calling any final destination movie a horror revival is insane when we literally had Hereditary, Midsommar, The Black Phone, Talk to Me, and Longlegs all in recent memory. This franchise is a theme park ride not horror. Fun yes. Revival no.
Is this a horror revival? No. Is this exactly what a Friday night movie should be? Absolutely yes. Not everything needs to be elevated. Sometimes you just want to watch a domino chain of chaos unfold for 90 minutes and feel alive.
Final Destination has always been secretly about anxiety. The entire franchise is a metaphor for health anxiety and the sense that danger is hiding in ordinary objects. This new one leans into that harder than any of them. In a post-pandemic world it hit different.
I want to push back on the nostalgia argument a little. Final Destination 2 has one of the statistically best opening scenes in horror history — the highway pile-up. Bloodlines clearly studied that energy and updated it for a generation that grew up watching fail compilations on YouTube. That's not cheap. That's knowing your audience.
People calling this a 'revival' are doing the same thing they did with Halloween 2018, Scream 5, and Texas Chain Saw whatever-number. Every legacy sequel gets called a revival for one month and then the honest conversation starts. Let's just skip straight to the honest conversation.
What nobody's mentioning is the sound design. Turn off your brain about the plot for a second and just listen to how they built the audio tension in the swimming pool scene. That's genuinely sophisticated craft work that most people absorb without noticing.
Actually Final Destination 3 was the peak and I will die on this hill. The tanning bed scene invented a genre of paranoia that we are still living in.
The fact that horror as a genre is having this conversation at all — whether a mainstream wide-release studio film counts as a 'real' revival — shows how dramatically the genre has split in two. You have A24-style cerebral horror and then you have this. Both are valid. The snobbery from one side is exhausting.
The franchise peaked in 2000 with the original. The whole point of the first film was dread and inevitability. Every sequel including this one just became a kill competition. They lost the philosophy and kept the gimmick.
respectfully the bar for 'horror revival' should not be 'better than the last three sequels we all pretended not to see.' that's a very low bar
The problem with every Final Destination movie including this one is the characters exist solely to die. I don't care about any of them. The kills are inventive sure but there's no emotional weight whatsoever and modern audiences are apparently totally fine with that which says a lot about us honestly
i dont care about any of the discourse i just want to know if the premonition sequence slaps like the old ones did. someone tell me yes or no without spoilers
I think the Bloodlines title is doing a lot of work here. The generational curse angle is genuinely new territory for the franchise and it gives the movie an emotional backbone the others didn't have. It's not perfect but it's trying something and that matters.
it's fine. it's a fine movie. nobody is going to be talking about this in october when actual awards season horror drops. we do this every time a franchise comes back — hype it to death (pun intended) and then forget about it in 3 weeks
ok genuine question: does death actually have logic in this one or do they just invent new rules whenever convenient? because part 4 completely broke the internal mythology and it never recovered for me
the CGI in the last act is genuinely bad and nobody is talking about it because the practical effects earlier distract you but go back and look at the third act set piece frame by frame. it looks like a video game cutscene from 2019
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