I wouldn’t classify the Final Destination movies as great. They decidedly are not.

However, what I appreciate about them is that they focus on the implacability of death and even better that they are horror movies with no monster, no identified embodied antagonist and no one is ever sure if they’ve won — and know for sure in the long term they definitely have not.

The conceit is very clever, and the execution of some of the set pieces when death finds those who have cheated it are pretty darn genius.

Having no monster, nothing to fight except the world and the Moirai themselves — that makes the films completely sui generis. And breaking the pattern of those daughters of necessity means only that the doom jumps to someone else, just as in our everyday lives, just as if we cheat death we’ve only made sure we get to watch someone else precede us there. What sort of demented Boschian vulgarian thought of this? Of course, am I talking about the films or the world?

Yes. That is what makes them brilliant.