Five creepy Final Destination facts

MANILA, Philippines - With Death waiting at every street corner, lurking in restaurants and even hovering around the office water cooler, the filmmakers of Final Destination 5 hope the film will be the most heart-pounding installment to date.

“I think fans are going to eat this up because it delivers everything that makes this a great horror/thriller movie: compelling characters, some of the best deaths that have ever been conceived for a Final Destination movie and incredible and totally unexpected twists they won’t see coming,” says director Steven Quale, “It’s a major adrenaline rush.”

As the film opens in Philippine theaters today in 3D and regular format, New Line Cinema shares creepy Final Destination facts that are totally out of this world.

1. When the first draft of the screenplay for the first film in the Final Destination franchise was delivered to New Line Cinema, the project executive brought it with him to read on a flight to New York City. When he opened the envelope, he saw that the screenwriters had titled the script, Flight 180. Then he looked at his plane ticket … and realized he was on Flight 180 from Los Angeles to New York. Needless to say, he didn’t read the script. He put it back in the envelope and prayed the plane would land safely. It did.

2. When Final Destination 5 needed a massive steel gimbal knuckle to support the large section of bridge being built on-stage to augment the practical shooting on a suspension bridge in Vancouver, B.C., the plan was to manufacture it from scratch. Then the special effects team found someone who was selling the large gimbal he’d had sitting in his warehouse gathering dust for over a decade. They quickly purchased it and discovered that it was, in fact, the original gimbal knuckle manufactured to support the plane body in the first Final Destination. It had been missing for years.

3. During production on Final Destination 5, one of the extras was taking some down time to sort through old boxes of paperwork. Inside one box, he found a call sheet and set of script sides from the original Final Destination … on which he’d been an extra 11 years earlier.

4. During the shooting of Final Destination 3, the schedule had the entire cast on a real rollercoaster for an important establishing shot. As it started up the first incline, the car suddenly stopped halfway up, stranding them for nearly 30 minutes. They were not as excited to shoot the rest of the sequence after that.

5. The writers of the first film, 1990’s Final Destination, named several characters after real life figures in the history of horror films, including Lon Chaney and Tod Browning. Since then, character names have paid homage to a “Who’s Who” in horror, from William Castle to Roger Corman to George A. Romero.

And there’s more: In the first film, the original plan was to have Death as a much more obvious entity, as illustrated when the character Tod sees a shadow in the mirror and the water running back into the toilet to “cover its tracks.” Subsequently, it was decided to have the deaths appear simply as accidents.

In Final Destination 3, two characters hear the song Love Rollercoaster, which refers to the rollercoaster that should have killed them.

The opening titles of The Final Destination (the fourth in the series) recreate death scenes from all three of the previous films. The fourth film holds the distinction of containing 11 “kills,” the most of any film in the series.

In The Final Destination, when he is hit by the bus, the character George is in the middle of stating, “My wife said that Deja Vu is like God’s way of...” and then he’s cut off by the impact. Some viewers wonder what the end of his sentence was going to be. The answer is that of a common expression “...telling you that you are in the right place at the right time,” hence the irony of the situation.