‘Final Destination’ at 25: How an ‘X-Files’ Spec Script Led to One of Horror’s Most Unkillable Franchises

Before “Final Destination,” cheating death never seemed so fun.

Directed by James Wong from a screenplay he wrote with Glen Morgan, based on a story by Jeffrey Reddick, the film came out of nowhere on March 17, 2000, to hit moviegoers like a bus. Based around its characters dying from an intricate but outwardly mundane sequence of events, its premise would quickly become cultural shorthand for dangerous, naturally occurring Rube Goldberg scenarios and spawn a beloved horror franchise whose sixth installment, “Final Destination Bloodlines,” arrives in theaters May 16.

Yet even before “The X-Files” executive producers Wong and Morgan got involved with the project, “Final Destination” would never have existed without the science fiction television show. It was Reddick’s favorite at the time, and he wrote the original story as a spec script for the show to land a TV agent before producer Chris Bender recommended he develop it as a feature. In precisely the sort of coincidence that would become synonymous with the film series, Wong and Morgan picked up Reddick’s premise and ran with it, building out a mythology that has led to increasingly elaborate set pieces — and even bigger commercial success. Meanwhile, even if it hadn’t let their characters survive death’s invisible design, the film additionally helped catapult a series of young actors to greater success, including Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Kerr Smith, Seann William Scott and Amanda Detmer.

To commemorate the 25^th anniversary of “Final Destination,” Variety spoke with key members of the film’s creative team, and several actors who helped bring it to life.

(These interviews have been edited and condensed.)

“Final Destination” began as “Flight 180,” a script Jeffrey Reddick says he conceived after reading a magazine story about a woman who had a premonition about flying, and disembarked from a plane that ended up crashing.

Jeffrey Reddick (Story By): When I read the article, it just went into my head: what if she “cheated” death, and what would that look like if death decided to come after her? 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.

James Wong (Cowriter/ Director): Exploring [this premise] as an “X-Files” episode, you would be concentrating on Mulder and Scully and how they react to [a series of deaths] — and they had to survive. But 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.

Reddick: 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.

Glen Morgan (Cowriter/ Producer): Our agent said, “Here’s this treatment — these guys at New Line want you to do it.” It was like 15 pages, but I never read past page three because Death was like [the Death character in] Woody Allen’s “Love and Death.” It had a sickle and a hood, and it had a potbellied sheriff going after him. And Jim and I were like, “No.”

Wong: I think New Line and Bob Shaye were afraid of the idea of little inanimate objects becoming your demise, so they wanted some kind of explanation or feeling of that or something else out there.

Morgan: On the way into New Line, Jim and I were like, “What are we going to do? You can’t see Death. That’s ridiculous. And you can’t kill Death — that’s even more ridiculous.” And we had a meeting with [executive producers] Richard Brener and Brian Witten and they go, “Look, it goes like this, death is a force. You don’t see it.”

Reddick: What I loved was when James and Glen came and wrote the shooting script is they fought to make sure that there was no death. And I think their idea to do the Rube Goldberg thing where death kind of uses everyday things around us was genius.

Kerr Smith (“Carter Horton”): When I got hired, the name of the film was “Flight 180” — not a good title. I was talking to either [producer] Craig Perry or Glen on set one day and I was like, “This title’s terrible.” He goes, “Yeah, I know. We’re figuring it out.” And I’d say a week later he comes back and he goes, “Final Destination.” I was like, “Oh, that’s perfect.”

Reddick: I have to give my friend Brett Leitner complete credit, because he came up with “Final Destination.”

With a handful of foundational elements in hand from Reddick’s story, Morgan and Wong started working on the shooting script. The duo layered in references that created an ominous tone, and name-checked horror legends of yesteryear.

Reddick: I wrote [the characters] as adults was because that was what I had done in the “X-Files” spec. But “Scream” came out and the studio said, “Why don’t we make them teenagers?” So I used a lot of the teen archetypes in the original script that also are in the shooting script that James and Glen wrote.

Morgan: Where it all started for me was the Universal monster movies, and I just wanted to pay homage to them so hopefully some kid, if they liked this movie, they would go, “I’ll go see a F. W. Murnau or a Tod Browning movie.”

Wong: We wanted Alex to be an everyman. We wanted him to be the kids that we were in high school that Glen and I were — we weren’t complete nerds or anything, but just a normal kid that kind of skated by in the middle ground and nothing actually happens to these kids. The main audience, all of us mainly are middle ground kids.

Morgan: To counter that, you need a character [in Clear, played by Ali Larter] that’s like, “No, I kind of believe in what you’re saying.” And in high school, those girls are always the ones reading “Tropic of Cancer” [like Clear is in the film].

Wong: We had an assistant, her name was Clear actually. She was very spiritual and an artist, so we just based the character on her being this kind of more enlightened, artistic person. Then we wanted the Kerr Smith character as, we all know that guy and we’d love for him to die, but we want to keep him alive until the very end.

Morgan: And it was nice to have an adult in there who could watch Alex and go, “I’m really afraid of you.” That’s [the teacher] Valerie Lewton. What I find interesting is how many kids when they’re younger say, “I hate that character because she’s mean to Alex.” And then when they’re older, they understand.

Kristen Cloke (“Ms. Lewton”): I always saw Ms. Lewton as the emotional chorus for the movie. She’s not one of the kids and she’s not the detective. She’s this character that’s there, and every time you see her she’s telling you, “If you were living through this, this is how you would be feeling, because it’s really weird.”

Wong: After working on a show with FBI guys, and one of the first thing we thought was, “Well, how do we explain some of these things that people are saying in their heads without their parents talking about it?” And these authority characters gave us the opportunity to say things to each other that would explain why they were or weren’t being scrutinized.

Roger Guenveur Smith (“Agent Schreck”): Daniel [Roebuck] and I tried to work against the typical buddy cop thing where I’m the good guy, you’re the bad guy. There were opportunities there to do as supporting actors, but we were able to create a certain psychology.

Morgan: Then you needed a comic relief, which is Sean William Scott. And then you needed “a guide at the edge of the forest.” Jim and I had just had a catastrophic TV series where we had met Tony Todd and we’re like, “It’s Tony Todd,” to be [William Bludworth], that guide.

Reddick: The great thing that James and Glen did with Tony Todd is introducing him as a mortician — just kind of laying down enough rules so that you wonder if he’s death or if he’s connected to death.

Wong: [William Bludworth’s speech] basically is the theme of the movie, and it could have been nothing without the right actor. God rest his soul, he gave it the right amount of gravitas, but also the right amount of entertainment. He always has that kind of lilt or something where you go, “Is he with me?” So he’s just perfect.

Some of the actors had more experience than others: Devon Sawa started working in 1994 at age 16. Kerr Smith was then a series regular on the WB teen drama “Dawson’s Creek.” Roger Guenveur Smith and Kristen Cloke were established film and television actors. Ali Larter, Seann William Scott (“Billy Hitchcock”) and Amanda Detmer (“Terry Chaney”) were just beginning their careers.

Kerr Smith: It was a mismash of personalities.

Cloke: Devon was interesting because even though he was younger than I was, we probably had been going at it for a similar amount of time.

Kerr Smith: Seann and I hung out quite a bit. He had just finished “American Pie.” It had not come out yet, so nobody knew who he was yet. And I was telling him, “Dude, you’re about to be famous. Get ready.”

Roger Guenveur Smith: I was one of the few adults in the asylum, so I had to come with an adult energy, and we all stayed in the same hotel. So I’m in the gym with Ali Larter and Kerr Smith. I had to find a way of flowing with this new generation of talent, hopefully with respect and with diplomacy.

Rather than surprising the audience with the plane crash that sets off Death’s design, each iteration of the script opens with a sense of foreboding that something is wrong.

Morgan: It was probably [inspired by] the people that Jim and I looked up to, like Alfred Hitchcock. It’s 30 minutes until Janet Leigh gets in the shower [in “Psycho”], but there’s just such a tone of dread. So it was just a choice we made that it might be a minute before he got on the airplane and you should have a feeling that something’s coming.

Wong: Really it starts with a title sequence, when the pages flip, and Alex’s dad talks about taking the tags off of the suitcase because it is good luck. I think Glen and I were more superstitious when we were younger than we actually are now. So that was just part of our personality, thinking, well, this movie is about this premonition, so these guys are already on that path where they’re going to die.

Reddick: James and Glen are masterful visual story tellers, so things like Alex’s birthday being the same as the flight number, it just starts you off feeling on edge.

Morgan: The other stuff is just, as a writer, you collect things. I was at Vancouver airport and it was a Buddy Holly song [playing over the loudspeakers] and he died in a plane crash. I turned it around because [John Denver’s] “Rocky Mountain High” is a little weirder.

Wong: The John Denver thing, we were shocked that we’d gotten the rights to it. Maybe they didn’t read the whole script. But something that was a pop culture thing — like he happened to die in a plane crash — we thought that it was a good connection.

Morgan: It’s just things in life that you become superstitious about. One of my things is, if I’m getting on a plane, I look at the door to see if the paint is chipped. I’m like, “Is this maintained?” And we have a little push in as Alex is getting on the plane, and I can’t tell you how many people in 25 years have gone, “I do that too.”

Determining how the characters would die took some imagination.

Wong: The hardest thing to do was really the plane crash, because it was the biggest, logistically, to pull off. There’s lots of characters in it, and you have to set the mold of how things would work in this movie and the details we want to put into it.

Morgan: That plane was enormous. It was on a big gimbal and you had to walk everybody up 10 or 20 feet up in the air, with a joystick and explosions. That was really tough. And we had a line producer, Art Schaeffer, who had worked on movies with Michael Mann, to help us out.

Kerr Smith: There was an effects guy with a joystick on the side rocking this thing like a roller coaster. And son of a bitch if it didn’t break like 10 minutes into it. The whole thing broke like this, and we all had to climb out with a ladder.

Wong: The problem with the “Final Destination” movies is that the beginning set piece was always so much bigger and better and more exciting almost than anything else that followed, so it became a real challenge to top yourself with each set piece.

Morgan: For the bus hit, I had been one summer to the Hollywood Bowl, and I was on Highland and waiting to go across to the parking lot. Hundreds of people are just waiting for the light to turn, and the guy next to me takes a step off the curb and the person behind him grabs him and pulls him back just as a bus goes by. Everybody gasped. It really was frightening and stuck in my head. And when Jim and I sat down and started thinking, we go, “You know what’d be great? To have that thing where a girl gets hit by a bus.”

Wong: When we tested it, it worked so well that people didn’t even hear the next scene because people are still reacting to it.

Morgan: But the bus hit, when we did it, it didn’t work. It was a $30,000 prosthetic Amanda, and it got hit by the bus and we were like, “Oh.” So the editors, Logan and Jim Coblentz, came back and they used the bus as a wipe. We knew that you had to have some reactions, so we immediately went out and got Kristen and Devon and sprayed blood on them with a paintbrush. And I don’t know why, but Amanda has that line, “You can go fucking drop dead.” That has an importance to the effect of the bus hit too. I don’t know why, but I think it distracts people or something like that.

Wong: I think Miss Lewton, the way she dies is the most kind of torturous. She dies like three times before she succumbs to her injuries.

Cloke: I’m a little claustrophobic, so having to do a body cast and a face cast for me is never my most favorite thing, but that was a big part of it, and then I’m buried under the floor, and people just walked over my head during the day. So I became a fixture of the floor for a couple of days.

Morgan: She’s a wonderful actor, so Kristin has been killed or gone crazy in everything we’ve done because it’s hard to do and Jim and I really trust her. I think it was more to it — I don’t know if she burned up or somebody trimmed it. I remember the first time her dad saw it when I had it in a rough cut, and he was like, “Make it stop.”

The original ending of “Final Destination” was more philosophical about the film’s premise. The creative team quickly realized horror audiences wanted something punchier.

Wong: In the beginning, in the first iteration of the movie, we decided that the only way we can cheat death really is the next life, so it’s a much softer landing where Clear is pregnant and she’s going to have a baby.

Morgan: We were like, let’s give it a try. It’s the kind of thing we would’ve done on “The X Files.” And we did it, and it’s not bad, but the air just went out of that theater.

Wong: [Studio head] Bob Shaye was the first one who sat us down and said, “Hey, okay, you got to change the ending.” We were at that point still going, “We have a vision to convey.” And so to [New Line production head] Michael De Luca’s credit, they gave us another test screening. I had made some changes in edit because we thought, well, maybe it was something that is not clear in the body of the movie. And the scores pretty much came back the same, and we realized that, “Okay, Bob, you’re right.”

Morgan: He was like, “I want another bus hit that ends this movie.” And I knew that what we had was not the answer, so Jim and I went to the Santa Monica Formosa, and Jim goes, “They go to Paris.”

Wong: We had to go at least try to do it in a way that made sense to close the stories of these characters. So we had this kind of time skip, which allowed us for them to fulfill their quest, which is, “We’re going to go to France to do what we didn’t get to do when we first started out this adventure.” So, we came up with the bigger ending where you basically said, you can’t escape death.

Morgan: It was amazing — after the first test screening, you get those ridiculous sheets and all the words are written misspelled and written with a big pencil like, “Morons,” and like, “I liked it. It was violent.” “Acting sucks, more violence.” Oh, it was depressing. And then without changing a frame other than the new ending, all those notes went away. And pretty much by the third film, we were just going, “Okay, let’s just kill everybody.” The test screening basically gave us the format for the movie and the subsequent movies.

“Final Destination” opened in theaters with $10 million, and lingered in the top ten for seven weeks, earning $112 million worldwide. Its four sequels each earned more than $90 million each, and 2009’s “The Final Destination” earned more than double that during its theatrical release.

Wong: It was my first movie and I’m proud of it, and I’m very happy that I was part of it. It gave me a lot of opportunities and I’m pretty happy that it is a success. I still point to it and go, “Wow, we did something that’s 25 years later still going…” So I’m very proud of that.

Morgan: I’m proud of what Jim and I brought to this, which I got to say I think is extensive, the whole Rube Goldbergness. But it was, Reddick had an idea and then New Line produced it, and it was really collaborative. There was a lot of people that made it work along the way, and I appreciate it, and I was really honored when you see, “Wow, somebody made a sequel out of something I did.” I couldn’t believe it.

Kerr Smith: It was my first big film, so it’ll always have a special place in my heart. When I was a young actor, I used to think, “Man, I’d love to be a part of a franchise.” And then sure enough, “Final Destination” becomes this huge, huge thing. So that’s pretty special for me.

Roger Guenveur Smith: It was refreshing being exposed to the eagle in flight, to the Orca, to the bear, having that opportunity to breathe in nature. Shit, it got me health insurance. I’m not hating on it at all. And [my character] survived. So I was hoping that I would come back for more. The FBI investigation maybe goes on and I’m part of it and become the head investigator.

Cloke: I rarely look at “Final Destination” through the lens of myself. I think it’s easier to view it through Jim and Glen’s success, and I feel so proud of him and Jim, and the creation of that franchise, which was so, so clever what they did and how they made that work I think was so smart. And they created a franchise. It’s pretty amazing. I feel grateful to be part of it, but I certainly take credit for nothing.

Morgan: My last gig was, I had worked on Jordan Peele’s “Twilight Zone,” and they used Lily Amirpour and Justin Moorhead and a lot of younger directors. And at some point during the shoot — not when they met me, but it would take them a minute to go, “I just got to tell you what ‘Final Destination’ means to me.” It’s interesting because it used to be, “I’ve got to tell you what ‘The X-Files’ means.” And now that that movie has an influence on young filmmakers the way that AIP movies or Spielberg and Hitchcock movies did to me. I’m not equating them — I’m not nuts. But that you excited some filmmakers to go, “I want to do this,” that’s the best part of this series doing well.