10 Things You Didn't Know About Final Destination

Every horror movie needs a good villain, but what about a villain nobody can see, hear, or, more importantly, stop? What about a villain that has had a presence in literally every other horror movie ever made, but never like this? What if the bad guy was Death itself?

This was the question posed by a film that came out in the year 2000; one that was made by a first-time director and performed by a young cast, but would go on to spawn a highly profitable and popular franchise.

Final Destination was the first of five pictures that would eventually form the Destination-verse (not the official name), charting the plight of a group of teenagers who, after a premonition from one of them saves the group from a plane crash, find themselves being hunted down by the invisible reaper. Though subsequent instalments would dip in quality, there's still a lot to like about the first movie, and plenty of interesting stories to tell from behind the scenes.

With a sixth film - Final Destination 6: Bloodlines - on the way, it's time to go back to where it all started for the most paranoia-inducing series in all of horror.

Final Destination was directed by James Wong, who also helped co-write the screenplay with Glen Morgan and the man who came up with the idea in the first place, Jeffrey Reddick.

Reddick had been working at production studio New Line Cinema when he first imagined a story about a group of people who cheat death, only to be pursued by the Grim Reaper. Except, at the time, he didn't envision it as a feature film.

Initially, Final Destination was a spec script - an unsolicited screenplay usually penned by new authors to get attention - for an episode of The X-Files. Reddick was going to write the script in the hopes of getting a TV agent, but a colleague at New Line suggested he could stretch it out into a longer format.

It just so happened that both Wong and Morgan were working on The X-Files at the time. They saw the script, liked the idea, and offered to help Riddick get it made. The rest, as they say, is history.

Interestingly, in Reddick's original idea, the man who had the premonition was none other than Scully's brother. How different things could have been.