A beloved horror franchise returns after more than a decade with Final Destination: Bloodlines. Daniel Rutledge revisits the series and the most disgustingly literal ways it messes with heads onscreen.
Spoiler alert: This piece includes two scenes from the newest film. If you don’t want to know what happens, turn back here.
It’s been 14 long years since we last had a Final Destination movie and damn it’s good to have Death back. This series delivers a purer joy than most horrors, leaning into the silliness without tipping into self-parody, and serving up bucketloads of gore without a hint of grimdark misery. While the victims meet their ends in all sorts of inventive ways, one of the most common—and most enjoyable—is by extreme head trauma. So here is a celebration of the finest fatal cranial injuries of all six Final Destination movies released so far.
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Olivia Castle – Final Destination 5
This franchise is adept at tapping into our natural fear of everyday situations where we’re vulnerable—strapped into a dentist’s chair, locked in a tanning bed, pinned to a pedicure bench—not to mention getting stuck in elevators or carwashes. One of the best examples has sneaky old Death crank a laser eye surgery machine up to burn-you-to-a-crisp mode. Poor Olivia gets her peeper fried nastily, then stumbles through a window and plunges from a high-rise, landing face-first on a car with a wet crunch, before we get a final pop of eyeball violence.
Julia Campbell – Final Destination: Bloodlines
Death by head crushing is always a brutal way to go, and this new one is an instant FD classic. Julia gets trapped in a rubbish truck just before its compactor activates. Her desperate attempt to escape ends with her arm being severed clean off as it’s gripped by a would-be saviour, while her head is caught between two unforgiving slabs of metal. Her eyes partially pop out, her jaw snaps off and finally her skull ruptures like an egg dropped on concrete. It’s brief but feels wonderfully lengthy due to the extremely graphic brutality.
Frankie Cheeks – Final Destination 3
One of the most visceral deaths of the franchise is helped out a lot by how heavily it relies on practical gore, along with a touch of VFX splatter. Sleazy camcorder creep Frankie is rear-ended at a drive-thru, with the engine block of the vehicle behind him bursting through into his car. The radiator fan purees the back of his head, getting lodged in his skull for a short while before a delayed final spin knocks him forward and splashes one more arc of blood onto the wall nearby. You can really feel this one.
Nadia Monroy – The Final Destination
What really sells this quick kill is the gloriously revolting aftermath. Silly Nadia is mid-sass when a rogue tyre rockets off a racetrack, clears the stadium, and smashes her head and left arm off. It’s one of the fastest and most unexpected FD deaths, coming just after the main characters escape the fiery pile-up opener. The fatal hit is over in a flash, but then we get a shocking longer look at the spasming corpse with a simply wild amount of head splatter strewn about before the opening titles slam in.
Billy Hitchcock – Final Destination
Goofy ’90s comedy star Seann William Scott features in this semi-decapitation highlight of the original film that started it all. Just after a few characters narrowly miss being hit by a train, said train hits a stray sheet of metal that’s unfortunately been left on the tracks. Uh-oh. That goes airborne, flies fast at Billy’s face, and slices his head clean off from the jaw up. The effect is entirely practical, with a charmingly unconvincing dummy corpse, but still a lovely lopping off of a noggin.
Isaac Palmer – Final Destination 5
One of the franchise’s many lecherous sleazebags, Isaac makes unwanted advances on wellness practitioners as his final ever act with other humans. He’s then left alone on a massage table with a couple dozen acupuncture needles sticking into him when a fire breaks out, causing a particularly nasty accident with those needles. As he’s pulling them out and evading the flames, a large Buddha statue he’d earlier mocked topples and flattens his head like a sledgehammer onto a pumpkin with a big, red squelch.
Lewis Romero – Final Destination 3
The most ludicrously hyper-masculine sequence of the series unfolds in a gym full of jocks grunting performatively and slamming weights machines to loudly punctuate the aggressive nu-metal. When Lewis yells an insult about rival team The Bruins, several surrounding primates immediately bark back “fuck the Bruins!”. He then redirects his raging testosterone at Death itself, braggadociously declaring: “I’ve already faced death down and won. It’s my bitch! I’m untouchable, bitch! Woo! I control my own destiny!” Moments later, two large weights pulp his head in a big, brilliant red splash.
Kat Jennings – Final Destination 2
FD delights in allowing its characters to narrowly escape death and sometimes even get away alive, but more often be savagely killed just as they seem safe. This is a masterclass in just that. Several minutes after surviving a serious car accident, Kat is smoking a fag while being rescued from the wreckage by a firefighter. Suddenly, the airbag deploys, forcefully snapping her head back and skewering it with a broken drainage pipe. It’s a startling rug-pull moment with nasty practical gore creating perhaps the definitive impalement of the series.
Dennis Lapman – Final Destination 5
While the elaborate Rube Goldberg machine kill sequences are the main course of this franchise, it’s made all the better by being served with sides of sudden death. In this blink-and-you-miss-it example, an industrial wrench falls into a rapidly spinning belt sander which hurls it spinning into Dennis’s face at enormous speed. The metal embeds itself in his skull at eye-level, killing him instantly, with just a split-second shot of his corpse to confirm what happened after shockingly little warning or build-up.
Bobby Campbell – Final Destination: Bloodlines
The final punchline of an extended double death centred around a malfunctioning MRI machine is a wonderfully inventive moment of gore. The dislodged coil from inside a snack vending machine breaks through its cracked glass casing and flies through the air and smashes right through the top of Bobby’s head, stuck to the extreme magnetic force of the machine behind him. As skull, blood and brain remnants fall away, the coil rotates gently around, helping squish the gross stuff out.
Hunt Wynorski – The Final Destination
Look, there’s zero head injuries in this scene, but no FD list would be complete without saluting this incredible death. Perhaps inspired by the infamous decompression scene in notorious Hong Kong shocker Men Behind the Sun, this unfortunate jock meets his comeuppance shortly after engaging in casual sex near a pool he had just bullied a young boy in. Death gets him good as the pool goes into drain mode and he gets pulled onto the fiercely sucking hole, which grips his butt and doesn’t let go until his intestines are violently yanked through it and spewed up by the pump.
