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'Anytime I get on a plane, I think of Final Destination': The horror film that traumatised millennials

Twenty-five years ago, the first Final Destination terrified by making everyday scenarios into death traps. Now, after a 14-year break, a new sequel is tweaking the formula.

Those are the unsettling words of all-knowing mortician William Bludworth (played by Tony Todd) in the first Final Destination (2000), a horror film without a masked killer, bloodsucking vampire or brain-eating zombies to torment its victims – just the looming spectre of death and a cruel reality: no matter how far we run, or how much we hide, it will come for us all. Back in the original film, death certainly didn't come peacefully for a group of high school kids and their teacher, who narrowly escaped losing their lives after getting off their plane, the ill-fated Flight 180, just before it exploded, thanks to one of their number having a premonition – only to find that the Grim Reaper wanted to take revenge on them for cheating its design. "Most horror films drop 50% in their first weekend, and we were watching the movie climb the box office," recalls Reddick, who got to work penning the next script with a fresh twist: the new cohort of teen and adult characters had all escaped their original intended death, before the events of Final Destination 2, because the FD1 survivors had got off the notorious Flight 180, "so that you saw a spider web effect tying into the fact that our lives are all connected."

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