I have a confession to make: even as a horror fan, the Final Destination franchise never fails to unsettle me. There’s something uniquely sinister about how the series plays with your anxiety, each new entry escalating the complexity of its kills. I mean, sure, some deaths would feel more at home in a Looney Tunes skit, but don’t tell me you’re not deathly afraid of trucks carrying logs thanks to Final Destination 2. That scene defined (and scarred) a generation.
It’s hard to believe the first Final Destination movie came out 25 years ago. Granted, some of the special effects and the, let’s say, questionable fashion choices certainly date the movie, but James Wong’s saga remains one of the most unique concepts in the horror landscape.
The premise of a group of people escaping certain death, only to be cornered into a gruesome demise later by an invisible force, sounds great as it is; however, according to Jeffrey Reddick the first drafts of Final Destination wanted to take the story in a more paranormal direction. Oh, and it also could get disgustingly gory, so much so that some scenes would never see the light of day.
Final Destination Death, Ghosts and Gore
Something very unique about Final Destination is how it alludes to Death being an otherworldly entity, without ever showing it on camera. Death’s presence is always implied throughout the movies, instead of relying on the usual creepy guy with a dark robe thing that many films do. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it would have certainly changed the tone of Final Destination.
However, that famous restraint almost didn’t happen; the original draft of Final Destination did feature hauntings and ghosts as a central theme, with deceased characters tormenting the survivors. Instead of dealing with survivor’s guilt, Final Destination would instead follow characters tormented by literal apparitions that drove them to suicide.
That first draft was noticeably darker than the movie we got. Surprisingly enough, screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick first tried to make Final Destination into an episode of The X Files. However, considering how disturbing the first script was, it’s no wonder Mulder and Scully never came close to this case.
Too Hard to Stomach
Compared to the rest of the series, the deaths in the first Final Destination movie are rather tame. The truly violent deaths would come later in the series. That said, the film’s first draft featured Terri (Carter’s girlfriend, who gets run over by a bus) as a ghost haunting Carter.
In this draft, Terri had an eating disorder – bulimia, to be precise. She appears before Carter in a subway station, taunting him from the other side of the tracks. Suddenly, her ghost shows him what she had to do to “Look beautiful for you,” before she starts vomiting her own intestines. Reddick confesses that the scene is a reference to Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead, also known as The Gates of Hell in some releases. Don’t look that up – it’s positively gruesome.
It’s easy to see why the scene never got filmed. Not only is it considerably more disgusting and visceral than any of the other death scenes in the first Final Destination, but the whole “Ghosts driving people to suicide” thing isn’t exactly what the final cut of the movie was going for. Still, for a decade that saw the smashing success of the Saw series, it’s good to know there are some boundaries not even the most disturbing horror films were willing to cross.
RELATED: How the Final Destination Franchise Could Have Been Radically Different
