Since I Binged the Final Destination for Nathan Rabin's Bad Ideas I've Been Hyper-Aware of the Deadly Dangers Surrounding Us
When I am working on a big project, a medium-sized project, or even a small, modest project, it tends to affect how I see the world.
During the many, many years that I worked on The Weird Accordion to Al, as first a column, and then a book, and then, somehow, a coloring book, I saw life through the joyful prism of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s life and career.
I put out The Weird Accordion to Al in 2020 and The Weird A-Coloring to Al in 2021. Yet I still cannot hear a song that Al parodied without immediately thinking about him and his spoof.
I spend a lot of time in restaurants writing, so I hear a lot of songs Al parodied because he exclusively spoofed pop’s most popular, ubiquitous hits, and also the poorly received Mick Jagger solo single “Ruthless People.”
On a similar note, when I was deep into my Every Episode Ever project, I saw everything through the filter of Saturday Night Live. That’s similarly a massive window because, in its FORTY-NINE YEARS in existence, Lorne Michaels’ brainchild has touched just about every pop icon, whether through parody, hosting, impersonation, or music, with the notable exception of “Weird Al” Yankovic.
For the last three years, my primary literary preoccupation has been writing The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about all American movies about moviemaking. When someone dies, for example, my dumb brain fixates on the movies they made about filmmaking.
At my Substack, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas, I’ve been doing deep dives into lowbrow franchises that my paid subscribers choose through polls.
The most recent poll pitted Halloween films against the Child’s Play, Saw, Friday the 13th, and Final Destination series. I expected Child’s Play to win but Final Destination finished first.
I’ve needed dumb escapism more than ever because something very bad recently happened to me, our country, and the rest of the world recently. It’s so cataclysmic that I don’t even have to tell you what that unfortunate event was.
So I welcomed the opportunity to turn off my brain and lose myself in the franchise’s murderous magic and mirth of the guilty pleasure film series about people who temporarily cheat death but only for a little while.
The Final Destination movies were just what I was looking for. I watched them all in less than a week. I am legitimately annoyed that I will have to wait until next year for the release of the sixth entry in the series Final Destination: Bloodlines.
Binging the Final Destination has had a profound, albeit undoubtedly temporary, effect on how I see the world and my place in it. In the wonderful horror franchise, death is ever-present. It’s a voracious, insatiable, and extremely creative monster that will stop at nothing to realize its sick ends.
In The Final Destination, the personification of Death has a real Rube Goldberg thing going. The cursed souls in it are frequently hit by buses or have statues fall on their heads, but the Grim Reaper frequently chooses a perversely involved, circuitous route.
Characters will avoid death thirteen times by fleeing a burning apartment, only to perish once outside.
Death is EVERYWHERE in the Final Destination. Since I watched the series, I’ve paid way too close attention to the many things in my day-to-day life that could result in my freak death, both individually and as a group.
That’s one of the wonderfully wacky things about the Final Destination series: it’s all about chain reactions that start out slow, mundane, seemingly harmless, and end with someone being impaled by steel rods or beheaded.
Death sneaks up on you in the movies, so I have been keeping an eye out for the many different ways I could die a horrible death.
When I am outside my house, I am on high alert. Even within my home, I’m way too aware of the many dangers in my daily life.
For example, I never put my hand in a garbage disposal out of fear that it will go on unexpectedly and I will lose my hand or life in the process. I know that this is not a sane or reasonable fear, but fears are not necessarily sane or reasonable.
Watching the Final Destination movies made me feel better about that decision. The chances of dying in a freak garbage disposal accident are indeed tiny, but if I never put my hand in there, there’s NO CHANCE whatsoever of a hideous, bloody accident.
There is no reality to the deaths in the Final Destination movies. It’s so gimmicky, convoluted, and over-the-top that death becomes painless, even ridiculous.
There’s something deeply reassuring about that that helps explain how a film series about the inevitability of death and the myriad awful ways people can die is tons of goofy fun rather than a grim nightmare.
It’s good to be diligent and aware. Yet, there comes a point when diligence and awareness can lead to paranoia and obsession. Thankfully, I have not reached that point yet.
I’m sure I’ll stop paying so much attention to the potentially lethal dangers posed by seemingly harmless household objects now that I’ve officially wrapped up my journey through the series.
But I’ll always keep a little bit of it and its weird world with me in the form of an at least mildly heightened awareness of the furtive, deadly dangers all around us.
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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