Final Destination, the giddy and splatterific franchise where the grim reaper finds increasingly cartoonish and comical ways to get back at those who think they’ve cheated death, has been sitting things out for more than a decade. Maybe that’s telling.
In the time since, we saw the rise of so-called “elevated horror”, a trend that arguably began with 2014’s The Babadook and enjoyed its biggest success with last fall’s Longlegs. Those earnestly artful films tend to shrug off the horror genre’s baser pleasures to instead mine drama, trauma and influences such as Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski and Nicolas Roeg. For those feeling a bit trauma-fatigued, I’m happy to say Final Destination is not only back but better than ever.
