If you want to see a kill that sets the tone for the entire Final Destination series, you have to look at the death of the teens’ teacher, Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke). Although there’s a Rube Goldberg-like death earlier in the movie when Tod (Chad Donella) gets strangled in the shower, the Miss Lewton scene is better at amping up the ridiculousness and also understanding the darkly comic beats that would become one of the series’ trademarks. Lewton not only gets hit with an exploding computer (because as we all know, a small spark from a short circuit will make your monitor shoot glass at you) but as she’s already bleeding out, a kitchen knife impales her, and then a chair falls on it to plunge the blade even further for good measure.
The movie does spice things up with some sudden kills like Terry (Amanda Detmer) getting hit by the bus (back when audiences didn’t always expect that to happen when a character walks into an open street) and Billy (Seann William Scott) getting decapitated, but the Lewton kill is a prime example of what sets Final Destination apart from other horror franchises.
Speaking on the film’s 25th anniversary, director and co-writer James Wong explains that they wanted to use the Tod kill as its own kind of fake-out for Miss Lewton, leading the audience to believe that she would also die in a single location, and instead they would keep upping the ante. “I remember the moment when the knife block falls on her, and we thought, ‘That’s pretty cool,’ but it wasn’t enough,” he tells me. “Okay, then the oven explodes and the knife plunges deeper into her body. We started to challenge ourselves: ‘What’s the next step? What’s another way we can add to the horror and add to the fun of it?’ Because it becomes a little absurd with the Lewton kill, and it’s our way of winking at the audience.”
