Final Destination hit theaters 25 years ago today, spawning a franchise that’s still going with this spring’s Final Destination: Bloodlines. That original film stood out among the early 2000s teen-horror craze, providing gruesomely creative death scenes that spiral from the idea that the killer isn’t a masked slasher—it’s Death itself, chasing after people who dodged their intended moment of demise. In a new oral history, the series’ creators look back on the film’s origins, including more details about something that’s a well-known part of its history: its ties to The X-Files.
Speaking to Variety, writer Jeffrey Reddick recalled reading a magazine article about a woman who avoided a plane crash after a premonition told her not to fly—and how it sparked the idea about Death not taking kindly to being “cheated.” He thought of the perfect vehicle for such a story: The X-Files, which was then in its original run. “I wrote that idea as an X-Files [spec script] … so it was very serendipitous that we ended up having the film go to [The X-Files executive producers] James Wong and Glen Morgan, who were two of my favorite writers of all time,” Reddick said.
“The original story was very A Nightmare on Elm Street-influenced, where Death played with their survivor’s guilt or some secrets that they had to drive them to suicide, which was pretty dark,” Reddick added. His original script focused on adult characters, but when it was reworked for the movie, they were changed into high-school students—a studio request in the era of Scream‘s success.
Wong, who directed Final Destination and shares a screenplay credit with Reddick and Morgan, revealed a little bit about what Final Destination might have looked like in an X-Files context: “You would be concentrating on Mulder and Scully and how they react to [a series of deaths]—and they had to survive.”
However, Wong said, the story really was better-suited to a feature film. “As a movie, the main thing is that you had the time and the budget to make something spectacular that really drew the audience in and give them the surprises you want. In a TV show that’s almost impossible.”
Head to Variety to read the full piece, which has some fun reminiscences about Final Destination‘s filming, including crafting those creative death scenes, the (excellent) decision to change the original ending from hopeful to bleak—and how the film’s legacy lingers today.
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