“For death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart.” (Eccl. 7:2)
A few weeks ago, I was getting ice from our freezer when a cube fell to the floor somewhere out of sight. I looked for it in vain as it was clear that the errant icicle had disappeared somewhere in the unexplored regions beneath my kitchen cabinets and appliances. I grabbed the drink that would have been the cube’s final destination and turned to leave when I felt the shift in the air around me, and I realized death was close at hand.
We do our clearest thinking about the nature of life at funerals.
I suddenly had a vision of that ice cube melting somewhere lethal. I saw the pool of icy water growing slowly near a frayed wire, like a ticking bomb. A spark leads to a tripped breaker. The house plunges into darkness just as I get out of the tub. And in the gloom, I feel myself stumble and fall towards my end. And with that, I exit the mortal stage.
I did not die that day; otherwise, I would be writing this from the great beyond, in Sunset Boulevard fashion. But I have come to realize that I am not wrong in thinking that death is nearer to us than we’d like to admit. My former pastor, the late Tim Keller, used to note how we do our clearest thinking about the nature of life at funerals, especially when we contemplate the reality that we all come into this world with an unknown expiration date. As he wrote in his book On Death, we hear the voice of God in that moment telling us that “everything in life is temporary… This is reality.”
Fans of the Final Destination movie franchise have been hearing the same message since the horror series debuted in 2000. You might even say the franchise is preaching the gospel truth.
The first film in the series, Final Destination, directed by James Wong from a script he co-wrote with fellow X-Files scribe Glen Morgan, debuted towards the end of the short slasher movie revival that began with the one-two punch box-office success of Wes Craven’s Scream in 1996 and Jim Gillespie’s I Know What You Did Last Summer in 1997.
Instead of featuring an embodied killer… in Final Destination, the slasher is the invisible hand of Death itself.
Unlike those films, Final Destination immediately made a splash by tweaking the time-honored slasher formula with an innovative conceit. Instead of featuring an embodied killer who terrorizes some unlucky group of generically attractive young people a la classic horror villains like Friday the 13th’s hockey-masked Jason Voorhees, or A Nightmare on Elm Street’s razor-gloved Freddy Krueger, in Final Destination, the slasher is the invisible hand of Death itself.
Instead of wielding an axe, a knife, or a chainsaw, in Final Destination and each of its five sequels—the latest of which, Bloodlines, premiered earlier this summer—Death does the deed through baroque causal chains involving everyday objects and activities, like, say, a discarded soft drink leading to a lethally timed short circuit at a tanning bed facility, or a loose screw from a ceiling ventilation unit resulting in a gymnast’s fatal dismount during a high bar exercise. These elaborate centerpieces of death have become the franchise’s cinematic calling card to the point that New York magazine felt compelled to rank them.
In each film, a group of young people miraculously survives a mass casualty event like a plane crash, interstate pile-up, or a collapsing bridge, only to be picked off by Death one by one at a later time. In the words of film scholar Ian Conrich, in the Final Destination films, Death becomes the “grand slasher.” And as the marketing tagline for the first film warns: “You can’t cheat Death.”
In his book Projected Fears, Kendall R. Phillips, a professor of communication at Syracuse University, attributes the success of certain horror films to their ability to “resonate” with a culture’s preexisting anxieties. With five sequels, nine novels, and a comic book series spread over twenty-five years, the Final Destination franchise appears to have achieved enormous success by depicting death in a way that resonates with American audiences’ deep-seated fears about the subject.
For Jesus, death is not a Dickinsonian personage kindly stopping for us on the way to eternity, but an unwelcome interloper in his Father’s ultimate design for the world.
This success is even more remarkable when one considers that modern Americans prefer to live in denial about their final destination, as many historians, mental health professionals, and sundry cultural observers have pointed out at various times. Steven Mintz, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, has noted that in American culture, “death is often kept out of sight, with few everyday depictions of it…. which can make death seem distant and abstract.”
In the world of Final Destination, by contrast, death is not only ever-present, but close at hand—like an intimate stalker. Despite the characters’ best efforts, death can find them anywhere, anytime: crossing the street, in the kitchen while making dinner, in the shower. And when it finds them, death is neither gentle nor kind, taking a graphic interest in the various ways bodies can break. Final Destination taps into our fear that death is not some benign stage in the circle of life, but an unnatural, relentless enemy.
In the gospel of Luke, Jesus tells a story that very much fits into the Final Destination tradition. It is a tale about a certain rich man who sought to prolong his life by stockpiling grain in shiny new barns he built expressly for the purpose. After finishing the work, the man made plans to enjoy his newfound lease on life, only to be told by God that death would come for him that very night, and all his effort was for naught. “Who will get what you have prepared for yourself?” (Luke 12:20, NIV) God rhetorically asks the doomed entrepreneur at the end of the story.
Death, in fact, was very much on Jesus’s mind during his time on earth. He spent much of that time opposing it by feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and, on occasion, literally bringing dead people like his friend Lazarus back to life. Indeed, more than any other place in the gospels, it is at Lazarus’s tomb that Jesus makes his feelings about death abundantly clear. English translations of the gospels tell us that Jesus “wept” at his friend’s tomb. Still, the original Greek text can more accurately be rendered as “to bellow with anger,” leading theologian B. B. Warfield to conclude that “Jesus approached the grave of Lazarus in a state, not of uncontrollable grief, but of irrepressible anger” at what the grand slasher did to his friend.
For Jesus, death is not a Dickinsonian personage kindly stopping for us on the way to eternity, but an unwelcome interloper in his Father’s ultimate design for the world. Death is “the last enemy” in the words of the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:26.
And though the gospels foretell of the enemy’s eventual defeat at the hands of the same Jesus who, according to the Apostle’s Creed, “rose again from the dead” on the third day after his very public execution, death remains a bitter cup that has not been taken from us. And as the barn entrepreneur in Jesus’s horror story discovered, it is a cup which may come our way at any time—something the Final Destination franchise understands well.
The popular theologian J. I. Packer once pointed out that “all truth is God’s truth.” In the latest Final Destination movie, Bloodlines, the franchise’s closest thing to a recurring character, the eerie mortician Mr. Bludworth (played by the great character actor Tony Todd) poignantly brings some of that truth home.
As the franchise’s lore master, Bludworth is the character who alerts each new batch of clueless protagonists to Death’s supernatural designs on them, sometimes offering cryptic advice on how to stay ahead of what’s coming. However, when asked for advice in Bloodlines, Bludworth takes a different tack. “I intend to enjoy the time I have left, and I suggest you do the same,” Bludworth informs the latest collection of victims before exiting the scene stage right. “Life is precious, enjoy every single second. You never know when.”
Todd had terminal stomach cancer at the time of filming. Suspecting this would likely be his last screen role in a career that had spanned almost forty years, he asked the producers if he could improvise Bludworth’s last lines. Death caught up with the actor six months later. And, fitting for a film about the nearness of death, Todd infused Bludworth’s last words with some of that clear thinking Tim Keller was talking about.
Even when done for profit, horror films cannot help but reflect the truth about God’s world when they mine our psyche for primal fears. And in their blunt fashion, the Final Destination films tap into the gospel truth we try to avoid with protein shakes, exercise routines, and Cadillac healthcare plans: nobody cheats Death.
Well… almost nobody.
