Fourteen years after its last outing, the Final Destination franchise makes a long-overdue return to the big screen with Final Destination Bloodlines: a film to remind us that death works in mysterious ways and that there are far worse things to inherit than a receding hairline.
Final Destination and Final Destination 2 boast some of the series’ most iconic kills, but the signature, playful groove only really arrived in later sequels. Thankfully, Bloodlines is very much in tune with the irreverent brand of horror of those later instalments, offering a reminder of how reliable ($300M box office and counting) this franchise can be. I would happily pay to see a new one every summer.
As we wait patiently and hopefully for all that, here are ten more movies to watch after Bloodlines that might scratch the itch.
Final Destination 2 (2003)
In all honesty, you could watch any one of the five original films after seeing Bloodlines, but if you can only do one, I’d have to suggest Final Destination 2. The franchise is nothing if not uneven, but that also means that each film has its own distinct flavour. None, however, is referenced more in Bloodlines than Final Destination 2.
Released in the colour-washed years of the early ‘00s, David R. Ellis’ Final Destination 2 is the most brooding, self-serious and scariest instalment in the series, and Bloodlines contains multiple callbacks for fans of it to pick up on. None more obvious than a recurring wink to the iconic opening highway sequence from Ellis’ film: A kill so gruesome it changed the way an entire generation thought about log trucks.
Saw X (2023)
Four years after the first Final Destination was released, James Wan seemed to rejig the film’s formula with 2004’s Saw—and if you come to Final Destination for its inventive kills, I’d highly recommend diving into this long-running franchise.
Exchanging death’s traps for Jigsaw’s man-made contraptions, and offering the victims not just a worrying description of what awaited them but the option of a grizzly way out, the original Saw spawned one of the most prolific and horrific series of all time.
That said, the creators seemed to be running out of ideas before Saw X, a movie that breathes fresh life into the series in 2023, much like Bloodlines has for Final Destination. Come for the kills, stick around for a surprisingly touching meditation on death.
Cube (1997)
While we’re on the subject of deadly traps, if you’re a fan of the intricate kills in movies like Final Destination and Saw, I’d recommend going back to Cube, Vincenzo Natali’s 1998 cult horror about a group of people who wake up in a maze of booby-trapped rooms and have to band together to find a way out—or, you know, die.
The series faded away after some middling straight-to-DVD sequels in the early 2000s, but a proposed project at Lionsgate in 2015 and a recent Japanese remake suggest the IP is still in circulation. Whatever the case, we’ll always have Natali’s inventive original.
The Monkey (2024)
The Final Destination series has inspired many imitators, most recently Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, so this recommendation is basically a no-brainer. In Osgood’s movie, Theo James plays Hal and Bill Shelburn, twin brothers who rediscover their old toy monkey only to find that it might have been the cause of a series of random, improbable, hilarious, and increasingly gruesome accidents 25 years ago. Sound familiar?
The kind of movie that seems to take pleasure in dreaming up creative ways to decapitate and disembowel, not to mention a Stephen King adaptation directed by the son of Psycho’s Anthony Perkins—I mean, talk about Bloodlines…
The Cabin in the Woods (2011)
It took a little bit of time before the Final Destination movies decided to drop the lore and focus on delivering what the audience really wanted. That self-awareness is commonplace in a lot of horror movies these days, but few have approached it in as fun and interesting ways as The Cabin in The Woods did in 2011. If you like horror movies where everyone seems to know they’re in a horror movie (think Scream or Wes Craven’s New Nightmare), this is the one for you.
The brainchild of Buffy the Vampire Slayer collaborators Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, The Cabin in the Woods crams about as many horror tropes as humanly possible into a 95-minute runtime, then proceeds to pick them apart. It’s a film that works as both a nightmare vision of a choose-your-own-adventure story and a wonderful satire on the satanic possibilities of reality TV.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
Speaking of Craven, barring the 1984 original and New Nightmare, the director’s name was absent from the credits of every film in the Freddy Krueger franchise aside from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, a wildly creative cult classic from 1987—and a movie in which fans of Final Destination’s most creative kills will find plenty of demented stuff to enjoy.
Dream Warriors is the first movie in the Elm Street franchise in which Freddy’s victims took back some control in the dream world. Among the kills, Phillip getting strung up by a giant Freddy puppet is probably the most inventive and Taryn’s death by syringe glove the most harrowing, but who can forget the bionic arms protruding from the television set to grab poor Jennifer? Welcome to primetime indeed.
Insidious: The Red Door (2023)
Noisy and magnetic, solitary and claustrophobic—when you think about it, it’s surprising how few horror films have weaponised the MRI machine. Final Destination Bloodlines now boasts the most outrageous kill to feature one (oh, that Prince Albert…)—but if you’re looking for a more chilling take on all the awful things that might happen in that compact tube, try Patrick Wilson’s Insidious: The Red Door from 2023.
The most recent film in the popular Blumhouse franchise was not the strongest in the series by any means, but the scene in which Wilson’s Josh Lambert discovers he’s not alone in an MRI’s darkened passage will make you think twice before getting your next scan.
It Follows (2014)
Released by A24, David Robert Mitchel’s It Follows is one of the great modern gems of indie horror—and one I’d recommend to any horror fan, especially if you like the woozy ‘80s vibes of John Carpenter movies.
It Follows‘s pace and mood might be a far cry from that of Bloodlines, but if you like the idea (similar to Final Destination) of a sinister, voiceless force moving through brutal kills in a specific, unflinching order, it is definitely one to seek out.
Maika Monroe stars as a college student pursued by an uncannily slow-moving and shape-shifting entity—a curse that can only be passed on to someone else by sleeping with them. There are things being said here about the hormonal urges of young people and their anxieties about having sex, but never to the point of interfering with the movie’s capacity to terrify. The rotating, 360-degree panning shot, in which the titular follower is only gradually revealed, is just one of this film’s brilliant inventions.
Candyman (1992)
One surprisingly poignant moment in Bloodlines is Tony Todd’s last appearance as William Bludworth, the mysterious mortician who knows an awful lot about death. So, if you’re a fan of Todd’s presence in these movies, be sure to check out the original Candyman. It’s more of an old-school slasher than the FD movies, but if you’re looking to brush up on the horror canon, there are worse places to start! The classic 1992 horror also helped Todd make his name in the industry—just don’t say it too many times.
Bludworth is the FD franchise’s one true recurring character (he featured in all but 2009’s The Final Destination), and actually became Todd’s last performance. Filling happened while he was already fighting a battle with cancer—it was shot last Spring, just months before he passed—making his reportedly unscripted monologue about enjoying the life you have left all the more moving.
Back to the Future (1985)
Wait, hear us out! Watching a head get crushed in a trash compactor might not exactly scream Bob Zemeckis, but anyone who comes to the Final Destination movies for their demented spins on Rube Goldberg machines will feel right at home in the opening minutes of Back to the Future.
It was tempting to mention the Wallace and Gromit movies here, but Zemeckis beat Aardman to the punch with this unbroken shot of a machine that turned on the TV, made some toast, and fed the dog. The contraption completes these tasks to varying degrees of success, but hey, at least no one dies.
