Finally, the return of silly horror.

Last year, as I sat in the cinema watching Longlegs, I remember thinking 'I'm so sick of this'. What is 'this', you ask? The final reverberations of the late 2010s boom of so-called elevated horror, where it's all metaphor and mood, and no actual scares.

Call me a normie, call me a hater, but the truth of the matter is that when I sit down in the darkened cinema to watch a horror film, I actually don't really care about how artfully the film is shot, or how layered the themes are, or how well-acted the performances are, or how much it makes me think. I'm there to be scared, and that's… kind of it, actually!

THANKFULLY, I'm here to inform you that we are so back, folks!

Watch the trailer for Final Destination: Bloodlines. Article continues below.

Over the weekend, I went to see Final Destination: Bloodlines, the sixth film in the Final Destination franchise, and the first since Final Destination 5 in 2011.

Final Destination: Bloodlines opens with a sequence I have been lovingly calling 'Skytanic' — it's like Titanic, but in the sky, get it?

It's the 1960s, and our opening starlet, Iris, has been brought to the Skyview Restaurant tower by her boyfriend, Paul. They're a little out of place at this fancy pants establishment, sure, but it's a special night, and Paul is pulling out all the stops, because he's about to pop the question.

Until now, the thing about the Final Destination franchise has been that, outside a couple of plot twists here and there, they all have the same plot.

The lead character opens the film with a catastrophic, violent premonition of the events to come, stops Death in its tracks, and then the survivors who avoided their fate by heeding our lead character's warning get picked off one by one as Death catches up with them. The deaths are bone-crunchingly over-the-top, but somehow manage to avoid veering into Saw's torture porn territory — probably because it's hard to take a film that turns a character into soup via a glass pane dropping from the sky all that seriously.

But the scares in Final Destination don't come from the actual kill so much as the tension in the lead up to it, and that's what Final Destination: Bloodlines gets so right.

From the moment Iris and Paul enter the tower and step into the creaking elevator, you know what's coming. But what you don't know is how it's going to happen, or when it's going to happen.

Death is lurking in every creak of a bolt that's not secured properly, every chip in the glass that's sure to break and hurtle every guest to the ground below, every gust of wind, every little detail.

The scene takes its time letting the tension build, until finally, a penny thrown off the balcony of the tower jams a vent, and boy-oh-boy, are we off to the races. It's violent, it's explosive (literally), and it bombards you with so many kills in such quick succession that you barely have a moment to catch your breath.

Then, just when you think the film is about to propel you back to the beginning, where Iris will prevent the disaster, the film subverts our well-worn expectations. Cut to: Stefani, who wakes up from her vision-nightmare in class screaming in terror.

Suddenly, we're in 2025, and we're about to dive deep into the decades-long fallout of the Skyview disaster that Iris successfully prevented back in the 60s. Stefani is, of course, Iris' granddaughter, and the only way for her to stop Iris' premonition from plaguing her nightmares is to try to break the generational curse that Death has placed on their family.

Having had many horror movie deaths spoiled for me by trailers over the years, I try to go into them blind so that I have no expectations of what's to come. Imagine my surprise, my delight, when I realised that FD: Bloodlines was going to shake things up! Reader, I was locked in.

The end result is a film that delivers the absurd, violent kill sequences that the franchise is known for in a fresh and exciting way. It's less paint-by-numbers than its predecessors, and it opens the door for future films to explore the lore further. For the die-hard fans of the franchise, there are plenty of nods to the previous films, and the film's love for FD2 is evident, which I appreciated!

With all of that said, is it a perfect film? Absolutely not.

It does get a little bogged down with the amount of lore it tries to add, and any horror girlie who's seen Halloween (2018) will clock that adult Iris' storyline has essentially been copied and pasted from Laurie Strode into the Final Destination franchise — it's giving Jamie Lee Curtis on the press tour saying "this is a movie about trauma" over and over again.

And if you're hoping to see stunning, state-of-the-art visual effects that have been rendered to perfection, you will have to look elsewhere, because there are moments (most notably in the Skyview scene) that look… undercooked.

Still, the film brings a fun, fresh energy to a long-dormant horror franchise, and it works as both a standalone film and as a sequel. It's a real return to form; the strongest entry in the franchise since the second film, and even in its silliness, it delivers thrills, chills and scares galore. Even better? I didn't have to go home and ponder metaphors or sit with the themes — the only 'elevated' thing about Bloodlines is the Skyview Restaurant, and thank God for that. In a time when we're being bombarded 24/7 with harrowing, real-life horrors that have very real, grim global consequences, sometimes you just want to switch your brain off and watch things go splat.

If you're curious, my ranking of the first five films is as follows:

5 — The Final Destination: The fourth and worst film in the franchise by a country mile, this is the one that begins with the NASCAR race sequence and was released in the post-Avatar "let's make every horror movie 3D!!!" boom. It's giving "how much s**t can we throw at the audience", it's giving "we forgot to add a plot", it's giving "this doesn't work in 2D".

4 — Final Destination 3: A perfectly serviceable threequel, FD3 opens with a fun rollercoaster kill sequence. However, the tanning bed scene is one of the best kills in the franchise, if only because the cut from the tanning beds on fire to the twin coffins at the joint funeral of Ashley and Ashlyn is so funny and so unserious.

3 — Final Destination 5: Honestly? They kinda ate with this one! A nice little return to form after the abysmal fourth film, Final Destination 5 adds a bit of lore into the mix when, plot twist!!! It turns out that Final Destination 5 is actually a prequel to the original film. Fun! A slay!

2 — Final Destination: The film that started it all! Credit where credit is due, Final Destination is a great time, and at the time of its release, it gave its mostly-teen audience something that felt fresh and exciting in a sea of post-Scream slashers.

1 — Final Destination 2: I spent far more time than necessary considering the ranking of the top two here, to be honest, but ultimately, I think Final Destination 2 takes the win on the basis of cultural impact alone. The opening sequence of Final Destination 2 is widely and frequently memed, but it's also what cemented the franchise's place in the horror history books. Also? It's a genuinely terrifying, thrilling sequence that holds up on rewatch, even all these years later. Beyond that, FD2 helps push the franchise into what it became known for: big kills, gore, and terror, in a way that doesn't take itself very seriously. And that's what we're here to talk about today.

Final Destination: Bloodlines is in cinemas now.

Feature image: Warner Bros.