I have long been a fan of horror and suspense movies of this type. Now when I say fan I don’t mean I particularly enjoy watching them, since I tend to spend most of the time in the theater with my glasses off or watching the action out of the corner of my eye as I admire the long curtains modern day movie theaters sport on their walls. The gore and shock value of these movies don’t move me, but interestingly enough, their simple plots and narratives sometimes do.
Like any genre of film, horror movies have their conventions and their attempts to match or break those conventions.
There are ways of citing older films, sometimes blatantly copying, other times paying homage, and then there are attempts to break into new territory. Every horror movie that seems to have dozens of mindless sequels that make you question the existence of God, most likely started off as something unique, intriguing or innovative. That original success thus leads to the kitsch-factory output of sequels where that initial striking concept is rebranded, reprocessed, rebooted by switching locations, switching murderous animals, types of monsters, historical limits, ethnicities and even color schemes. While this process can appear to drain every creative and original drop out of a story, for me that initial plot, that initial attempt to tell a compelling frightening story still stands out.
For those who don’t know the “Final Destination” movies, the plot is always the same. Right before a horrific catastrophe takes place, someone experiences a vision and saves a group of people from dying. Although they first appear to be lucky to have cheated death, we soon learn death is a force that does not like to be cheated, and the survivors one by one are killed off in new gruesome, but to everyone else seemingly accidental ways. In each film, the characters attempt to figure out death’s new design and find a way to survive.
What has always drawn me to the “Final Destination” films is the way they transform the landscape around us from something we take for granted — the things in our closet, in our car, on the floor of our apartment, just a menageries of harmless objects — into a menacing network of potential instruments of death: a loose screw on an air con, a nail gun sitting on a shelf, a puddle of water on the floor, a lawnmower cutting grass. At one moment, these things just seem to be happening in the world; but in these movies, an anonymous vengeful force called death arranges the seemingly random into a series of ridiculous execution scenes.
All humans are gamblers. We see the world through lenses of risk and danger. There are things you feel you should worry about and you feel comfort in your ability to take them for granted, and things which frighten you with their very existence. You get by in life by betting on what things you should worry about and what you can ignore, and simply accepting these things as being OK, then moving on. People often worry when riding in airplanes or fear dying in a terrorist attack, yet you are more likely to die while driving in your car. You would never intentionally travel to a war-torn country, but probably don’t react with as much fear to what you put into your body every day. The U.S. appears to be a safe and secure place, but a child in the U.S. is far more likely to be killed with a gun than in the majority of other industrialized nations.
Although this might be a lesson lost on nearly everyone who watches horror movies, I enjoy the “Final Destination” movies because they are a grim reminder of how quickly something you take as normal can become fearful. We can easily become stuck and see the world a certain way, but we always have to be ready to dust off the world we take for granted, and look at it again with cautious, perhaps curious eyes.
MICHAEL LUJAN BEVACQUA
Mangilao, Guam
