10 Films Which Exploit Common Phobias

4. Final Destination (Aerophobia)

What makes air travel inherently stressful is most of us have no clue how flight is even possible. Planes are huge, heavy, make an unholy amount of noise and burn thousands of gallons of fuel to accomplish what birds make look effortless. One can never totally escape the notion that flight was never something humans were meant to achieve, and we€™re arrogantly defying nature each time we buckle in and complain about the food. Of course we€™ve all heard the old cliché that air travel is statistically safer than driving a car. But that€™s little comfort to anyone who fears flying because car accidents don€™t occur thousands of feet in the sky. Not only that, we feel somewhat in control of our own fate behind the wheel. Once you step onboard a plane, you give up that control, placing your life in the hands of technology, Mother Nature and a pilot who hopefully didn€™t include a few shots of Jim Beam with his breakfast. The Final Destination films are little-more than gory variations of Rube Goldberg concepts and Road Runner cartoons. But the spectacular opening set-pieces of each, where one character has a terrifying vision and manages to cheat Death (along with a few buddies), ingeniously present worst-case-scenarios we€™ve all entertained at one point, such as massive highway carnage, bridges collapsing or roller-coasters jumping the track. The original Final Destination is especially effective in exploiting one of the most common phobias in the world, aerophobia. Dozens of movies have shown us more epic air disasters, but Final Destination heartlessly makes us one of the passengers, holding on helplessly as the plane breaks up and bursts into flames around us.