Final Destination is one of the biggest horror franchises out there, and for good reason. Each film follows a different protagonist who has a premonition of a major disaster that results in the deaths of their loved ones, and sometimes random bystanders. But what makes this series great is that this premonition causes them to intervene, saving a group of people from said disaster and escaping their deaths. However, by interfering with Death’s design, Death then comes back for the survivors in sick and twisted ways, often in the order that they died in the protagonist’s vision.
It’s been 14 years since the last film in the Final Destination franchise was released, and the newest film in the series has proved that after all these years, Death has remained petty. In Final Destination: Bloodlines, the formula has changed. After Iris (Brec Marie Bassinger, Gabrielle Rose) has a premonition in 1968, she saves the guests of the Sky View restaurant. Decades later, Death has decided to come for her family, who wouldn’t have existed if Iris hadn’t intervened with its original plan.
It’s a great change of form, and one that adds some of the most spectacularly brutal kills to the franchise’s roster. This list will rank every main character’s death in inal Destination: Bloodlines by how gruesome they are.
7. Darlene: Lights Out
In the last act of the film, Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), Charlie (Teo Briones), and their mother Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt) make their way to Iris’ cabin in an attempt to escape Death’s wrath. As Darlene and Charlie get out of their RV, it crashes and tips over into a body of a massive puddle. Still inside and trapped by a faulty seatbelt, Stefani begins to drown. The cabin then explodes after a chain reaction, burying Charlie under debris. Darlene is thrown back in the explosion, but manages to save Charlie and instructs him to save his sister.
As she attempts to get back to the cabin to save her children’s lives, a large lamp post falls and cuts Darlene into a bloody mess. Unlike this film’s best kills, this one happens so fast that we don’t have time to sit in its brutality. For a film that delights in torturing its audience, this death is its most unsatisfying.
6. Iris: Lovely Weather
Although she escaped death in 1968, Iris spent most of her life holed up in a cabin in an attempt to outlive death. Now riddled with cancer, she meets her granddaughter Stefani for the first time, who has been having her own dreams of that fateful night. When Stefani attempts to leave, Iris ventures outside for the first time in years to prove to her granddaughter the danger they’re in.
The moment Iris steps outside and hands Stefani her journal filled with her research on how Death operates, a chain reaction begins to unfold. A weather vane falls and impales her through the mouth, ripping her face open and, in turn, splattering blood all over Stefani. While it’s a vicious first kill, like her daughter Darlene, Iris’ death happens so quickly that we’re not really given much time to absorb it.
5. Stefani and Charlie: A Surprising Homage
After seemingly cheating death, the film’s epilogue sees Charlie getting ready to attend his high school prom. With Stefani and their father by his side, Charlie’s crush’s father tells them that because Stefani’s heart never stopped, the siblings didn’t actually cheat Death at all.
The two are given a split second to look at each other in horror before a derailed train comes crashing into the neighborhood. Just when it seems like they might escape Death once again, two logs from a log truck that was caught up in the train’s derailment fall and crush both of them to death. It’s a great way to wrap up the film; however, it is one of the least impactful deaths of the film. As a call back to Final Destination 2, this death feels like one of the ones that will result in the audience laughing gleefully at the screen.
4. Howard: Mowed Over
With the matriarch of the family now gone, next in line on Death’s list is her eldest child, Howard (Alex Zahara). At a family barbeque, a shard of broken glass is accidentally placed in Charlie’s drink, and Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner) jumps on a trampoline that has a metal rake under it. Finally, Bobby falls through the trampoline, which startles Julia (Anna Lore) and causes her to knock over a tower of blocks, which then knocks Charlie’s cup over and sends the shard of glass onto the ground. There’s a moment of reprieve before Howard steps on the glass and falls backward, just as the rake, earlier placed safely by the backyard fence, falls onto the lawnmower.
Howard falls onto the grass just as the lawn mower turns on, gliding over his face and shredding it with its blades. It’s one of the film’s most surprising deaths and feels like it’s straight out of one of the franchise’s earlier films.
3. Bobby: It’s The Little Things
In an attempt to cheat death, Bobby and his brother Erik (Richard Harmon) make a plan to induce anaphylactic shock so Bobby’s heart stops before they bring him back to life. Death has other plans, and rigs the MRI machine in the hospital room they’re using to enact their plan. The machine’s intensity level rises as Bobby eats peanut butter-infused candy, causing every metal object in the room to hurl toward the machine. Chaos ensues as Bobby goes into anaphylactic shock, his head ballooning and turning red, before he manages to find his EPIPen and stabs it into his leg.
As Bobby stands up, a nurse bursts into the room, causing the spring from a vending machine to come sailing through the doorway. It impales Bobby through the head, spinning around like it would have in the machine, killing him instantly and providing an end to one of the series’ most haunting sequences.
2. Julia: Getting Trashed
While Julia and Stefani were once close, she doesn’t believe her cousin’s warning that Death is coming for their family. As she gears up to go on a run, Julia stops beside an operating garbage truck. In a chain reaction that Stefani predicted moments before, a soccer ball hits Julia in the head, causing her to tumble into the trash can right before the truck picks it up. She gets dumped into the back of the truck, as Stefani, Charlie, and Erik attempt to get the driver to stop. Finally, Stefani climbs to the top of the truck and grabs Julia’s hand, but the compactor has already been turned on.
Just when it seems like she may get pulled out, it slowly crushes her head, making an awful popping sound, before tearing off the arm that Stefani was holding. It’s one of the few deaths that looks mostly practical in a film that is often too preoccupied with CGI, making it even more gruesome and impactful.
1. Erik: Heavy Metal
Although he cheated death earlier in the film, Death came back for Erik with a vengeance. As the MRI machine in the hospital room he and his brother Bobby are in goes haywire, Erik’s septum ring starts to move in the air. We’re forced to watch as each piercing is ripped from his body, from ears to groin, before a wheelchair glides through the air and pins him to the MRI machine. The magnetic force is so strong that the wheelchair begins to push him into the machine, folding and crushing his body slowly. It’s brutal in a way that some of the kills in this film are not, and is reminiscent of the franchise’s cruelest deaths. It will undeniably go down in history as one of the most violent kills in Final Destination: Bloodlines, and one of the most gruesome in the entire series.
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