Tuesday, March 15, 2005

in death, there are no accidents, no mishaps, no coincidences and no escapes

{sunday, march 13, 2005}


James Wong, who makes his directorial début with Final Destination, is but one of several people on the team with connections to The X Files and/or Millennium. The phrase something about death (see also: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly?) is rather apt about all the devices employed in this above-average scare-flick. The quote from Con Air that is but one embellishment for the left pane of this blog only adds some ironic coincidence to the milieu. In addition to some interesting death sequences, there's also a deplorably brief cameo from Tony "Candyman" Todd. But I derived the most from all the references in the film (to famous people in the horror filmmaking business, and to death).

Filmmakers: Murnau (Nosferatu), George Waggner (The Wolf Man), Browning(Dracula, Freaks), Hitchcock, Lewton(produced Cat People and I Walked With A Zombie), Weine (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Chaney (need we say more about the Man of a Thousand Faces), [and two characters whose names are not mentioned on-screen: Whale(Frankenstein) and Arnold(The Creature from the Black Lagoon)]

Death references: John Denver (died in a plane crash) songs abound in the diegetic soundscape (including a French version of Rocky Mountain High!), a magazine featuring coverage of the crash that killed Princess Diana. The murals in the boarding area foretelling the different ways that our characters meet death later in the film. The number of the beast on the luggage cart.

What a coincidence to find another reference to John Denver's death in killing your users the following day.

No comments:

 
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.