Final Destination: Bloodlines takes our anxieties and cranks them all the way to eleven right out of the gate. After nearly 25 years with this franchise, we began to ponder a real chicken or the egg type of situation — was Final Destination born out of an incredible collective anxiety, or has this killer franchise created more anxiety stirring deep within us than ever before? The cast of Final Destination: Bloodlines shared some of their theories with us.
Kaitlyn Santa Juana believes, “Maybe it’s a little bit of both. I think little things in life can make you a little anxious, but what’s so interesting about this franchise is that the creators were like, ‘I’ve noticed that people get anxious over little things, let’s play on that.’ And it kind of united us as a world.”
Rya Kihlstedt added, “In some ways, I think this is the perfect time to bring back a new one because everybody’s anxious as hell right now. The world is crazy, everybody’s running high and fast, our phones refresh every two seconds. It’s a constant. So now to match that and create a little release is kind of perfect.”
The cold open for Bloodlines is not messing around with the setup. “It doesn’t waste its time. It gets right into it right off the bat. I mean, we’ve wasted enough time over the last how many years not having a new one,” said Santa Juana.
“There’s a lot of anxiety from the beginning,” added Kihlsted.”You have no idea where you’re going at the beginning of this one. It feels so left field, even having read the script and knowing, I had no idea where this was and how this was possibly going to turn into a Final Destination movie.”
As the title suggests, Bloodlines follows familial ties. Kihlstedt plays the mother to Kaitlyn Santa Juana and Teo Briones’ brother and sister characters. That family angle drives the anxiety home pretty hard. “I think you also just care about the characters more,” said Briones. “You want to see them live, and you want to see this family come back together at the end of the day and survive all this.”
To Briones’ point, as much as death employs the Rube Goldberg effect in this franchise, there’s also a bit of the Rube Goldberg effect happening in Bloodlines as it pertains to family trauma and all the judgment and pain that festers from not knowing the full story. On the flip side of that coin is the pain that comes with the burden of knowing and the burden of protecting. At the heart of this story is a family we are very much rooting for.
Anna Lore plays an extended member of this family doing their best to outrun death: “I think Final Destination is relevant as long as anxiety is relevant. It scratches an itch that only Final Destination can. It’s fun, it’s tense, it’s funny.” Owen Patrick Joyner, who plays Lore’s sibling, added, “It’s thrilling. It makes light of dying.”
“I think because we have anxiety, we enjoy it,” Lore confirms. And then adds, “But I mean, it also does create anxiety. The log truck…”
The third Campbell sibling is played by Richard Harmon, who interjects, “It doesn’t help! It’s not helping.” Joyner suggested a tried and true method for tackling those anxious feelings as they creep up: “You just keep it deep down in there and it comes out and kind of relieves itself when you watch a Final Destination movie.”
In addition to creating widespread anxiety around logging trucks after six installments and nearly fifteen years, the franchise has also provided us with a cornucopia of freaky deaths from seemingly mundane objects and circumstances. And all those original deaths come with a hefty amount of gore.
“I don’t mind gore, but anything to do with fingernails or eyes or stuff like that, I can’t. Teeth! I can’t,” Briones shared. The cast got a little squeamish recalling their top picks for the most iconic deaths in the Final Destination series.
Kaitlyn Santa Juana went with an all-timer from Final Destination 5: “The gymnastics one. The buildup, the anticipation leading into it.” Kihlsted and Briones wholeheartedly agreed. “My favorite is in the gym. The equipment breaks on him, and his head gets squished,” Briones said while pantomiming a violent head squish from Final Destination 3.
Kihlsted also goes with Final Destination 5, but this time for the eye gore, “I think I have to say the Lasik eye surgery. It’s deeply uncomfortable. I’ve had Laski, and I did it, obviously, way before I saw that. I don’t know if I would be able to do it now.”
Final Destination may have been birthed by anxiety, but there’s certainly no arguing it has contributed to making us a bit more anxious around mundane objects. But in a way that potentially helps us exorcize that anxiety in a cathartic way as we watch folks on screen get absolutely obliterated by tanning beds and gym equipment. Stay safe out there.
And watch Final Destination: Bloodlines in theaters May 16. Watch our full interview below.
