Few contemporary movies have left audiences with images quite as visceral as the one that opens “Final Destination 2,” one that has been making drivers avoid logging trucks on the freeway since 2003.
The franchise, which celebrated its 25th anniversary this year ahead of the latest installment, this week’s “Final Destination Bloodlines,” is also responsible for such indelible scenes as 1. becoming a bag of bones during a gymnastics routine (“Final Destination 5”), 2. being liquefied by a swimming pool drain pump (“The Final Destination”), 3. and reinforcing all manner of phobias about planes (“Final Destination”), 4. suspension bridges (“Final Destination 5”), 5. and rollercoasters (“Final Destination 3”). “Bloodlines” doesn’t disappoint in this arena (though several of its most spectacular kills are bafflingly spoiled in its trailers), with a particularly gnarly scene involving an MRI machine.
Related Stories
The series banks on the premise that Death is a supernatural force coming for us all and we cannot mess with the order of it. But, said J.J. Makaro, stunt coordinator on the first, third, and fifth films, that doesn’t mean that the creators and craftspeople behind the films ever wanted to disobey the hard-and-fast laws of physics.
“I was lucky to do the first one in the franchise, because we came up with what rules to make and the logic we would follow,” he told IndieWire during a recent interview. “Everything had to happen properly in the physical world. Water couldn’t defy gravity, or if a rope was to come loose, it had to do something that would actually happen physically. … We were grounded, physically, [in] how things should move.”
That said, they weren’t exactly doing physical calculations on set. “It was all trial and error. We came up with all the different processes for a death to work, then tested them to see what would physically happen in each of these situations,” he said. “There wasn’t a lot of math involved. In retrospect, you can calculate it.”
And that’s exactly what we did.
IndieWire spoke to Thomas Plunkett, PhD candidate in astrophysics at the University of Tasmania, Australia, who confirmed that, unfortunately for those aforementioned phobias, these are all plausible ways to die. We picked our favorite kills from each of the first five entries, along with added commentary from some of the crew who worked behind the scenes to ensure that these graphic deaths didn’t actually kill anyone.
“Final Destination” (2000) — Tod’s Bathtub Strangulation
The scene that has stuck with me after all these years is Tod’s (Chad Donella) clothesline strangulation in the bathroom, perhaps because it’s one of the franchise’s more understated deaths, and one that could easily occur in the slippery location. “It was all about trying to make it practical and believable. We weren’t trying to make something spectacular out of the action. It [spoke] for itself,” Makaro said.
“The physics behind it is that, when you have an object that decelerates really quickly, like when Tod has slipped over and gets caught in the wire, rapidly coming to a stop, there’s a big force being applied to his neck and vertebrae,” said Plunkett. “Depending on how big that drop is and how quickly you come to a stop, you can sever the spinal cord.”
One might posit that Tod should be able to stand up to reduce the force of the cord on his neck, however the tub is wet from a previous shower, not to mention the presence of soap and product residue, preventing his bare feet from gaining purchase.
“The way I would explain the wire going around the neck is that you have to conserve momentum,” Plunkett continued. “Momentum is the mass of an object by its velocity, and there’s something called angular momentum, which is a rotational version. When that wire is coming off and he has the end bit wrapping around, that’s the wire trying to conserve its energy as it spins around.”
There’s also the question of the height of the clothesline. Unless you’re really tall, most tend to be above head height. In “Final Destination,” this is where camera angles play a part. Notice how Tod interacting with the clothesline is always shot from below, allowing it to be positioned at a height that would allow the stunt person to “fall” onto it at neck height, as confirmed to IndieWire by Makaro.
“Final Destination 2” (2003) — The Logging Truck
You didn’t think we were going to do a physics breakdown of “Final Destination” and not talk about the logging scene, did you?
“Whilst the logs would initially travel forward after falling from the truck as they are at that point moving at the same speed as the truck, they would slow down fairly quickly from friction with the road which I expect to be quite high due to the wood being very brittle on the surface,” said Plunkett.
The police car being the first victim is likely because it’s traveling at the same speed forward, while the logs have slowed down. “This is a concept called ‘relative motion’, which makes it appear like the log is traveling backwards relative to the police car,” he added.
Where reality and movie magic diverge, though, is in the nature of the car accidents, specifically the explosions. “You need vaporized fuel and a bunch of oxygen, but when you’re in a crash you probably sever your fuel lines and the fuel is still a liquid. It’s more likely to catch on fire,” he said.
There’s also the matter of how long it takes everyone to stop. Granted, it’s a wet road — owing to production designer Michael S. Bolton needing to soak down the tarmac to prevent skid marks, he told IndieWire — but it seems as though everyone’s brakes are failing.
“For a dry road at a speed of 62 miles per hour, the average stopping distance — distance traveled from the time when noticing and applying breaks to coming to a stop — is 321.5 feet. However, when conditions are icy or wet, this can increase to greater than 393.7 feet,” said Plunkett.
“Final Destination 3” (2006) — Erin Being Shot by the Nail Gun
We could have focused on some of the more spectacular death scenes in “Final Destination 3,” such as the roller coaster, the train crash, or even the tanning beds, but Erin’s (Alexz Johnson) death by nail gun in the hardware store is “simple, clean, very effective and very scary,” according to Makaro, who said they loaded up the scene with a lot of “eye candy” that would swerve the viewer from picking who was really next on Death’s list until the very last moment.
There’s a reason why construction workers wear hardhats and thick gloves and boots around nail guns: “the typical human bone can withstand roughly 2,000 – 4,000 newtons of force before breaking. For a typical nail gun, we have a pressure of roughly 69,0000 newtons per square meter in the compressor. This can result in nails being projected at velocities of around 100 – 150 miles per second,” said Plunkett.
The skull is much thinner than bones in other parts of the body, so it shouldn’t take much force for the nail gun to puncture it. But could the nails travel through the back and front of Erin’s skull and impale her hand, which she reflexively if futilely raises to protect her face? “Nail guns [could] easily puncture through the skull and, depending on the exact pressure in the compressor, could travel through the brain and hand,” said Plunkett.
There’s also a reason why nail guns have two safety mechanisms in place, at the front where the nail comes out and at the trigger, where the user applies pressure. Both have to be engaged at the same time in order for the nail to come out. So how would Erin get shot with the nail gun if there was no pressure on the trigger?
Makaro said there’s a well-known, if dangerous practice on construction sites of workers securing down the trigger so that they can quickly and easily lay down a large number of nails. “But that’s a piece of exposition that gets in the way,” he said. “We didn’t justify the trigger being pulled on camera, we had justified it ourselves that it could happen.”
“The Final Destination” (2009) — Hunt’s Swimming Pool Death
I’m not going to mince words, unlike Hunt’s (Nick Zano) insides, which become mincemeat when they are sucked out through his anus via a swimming pool drain pipe, splattering unsuspecting swimmers with his viscera, amongst other things: this has happened!
“Maybe not completely liquefying, but there have been documented cases of people having their intestines pulled out,” said Plunkett. “The pump is sucking out the air and other things, so it’s creating a region of low pressure, and then you’ve got the pool itself and the human body, which are two places of high pressure, they’re going to flow to that area of low pressure. If there’s enough of a pressure difference between the two, you can have intestines and other things sucked out.”
“Final Destination 5” (2011) — The Bridge Collapse
Suspension bridges like Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver, which was used for this scene, work by utilizing a large number of wires, all connecting to a metal membrane that supports the weight of the bridge by distributing it across those same wires.
“When an engineer makes that kind of bridge, they’re going to put redundancies in place, so if there are one or two that snap incidentally, the rest of the weight will be redistributed across the remaining wires and tension,” said Plunkett. The bridge’s particular predicament in “Final Destination 5” is, in many ways, a comedy of errors, with a lot of elements, all failing at once (thanks, Death!).
Two elements that Plunkett pointed out as being physically questionable are Isaac (P.J. Byrne) falling fast from the bathroom at the back of the bus to press up against the front windshield while the vehicle was already in freefall (Plunkett deduced that they’d be traveling at roughly the same rate), and Olivia (Jacquline MacInnes Wood) being crushed by the car falling on her in the water (she’d already be dead by the impact of the 200-foot fall, according to Plunkett). Makaro countered that, because the water was in motion, it would cushion her fall, which Plunkett acknowledged, though he stands by his calculation.
As we approach the sixth installment in one of modern horror’s most enduring franchises, what tends to stays with audiences the most is that we’re all just one wrong turn/misstep/unheeded warning away from Death’s design coming for us. No, it might not be the goriest or the scariest, but it’s that realism that makes “Final Destination” stick with us.
“The very best thing about ‘Final Destination’ is having the director come to me and say, ‘I want to do this and I want it to be believable,’” Makaro added.
A Warner Bros. Pictures release, “Final Destination Bloodlines” is in theaters Friday, May 16.
