Final Destination’s Most Disturbing Death Scene Is Actually In The First Movie

The Final Destination franchise includes numerous disturbing death sequences and events, but the original movie features its most unsettling one to date. While death follows every character to their fateful demise, the survivors of Flight 180 fight against life’s most morbid design. Here’s why Final Destination’s Tod Waggner (Chad Donella) has the most disturbing death out of the entire movie series.

James Wong’s movie was initially a spec script written by Jeffrey Riddick for The X-Files, starring David Duchovny as Fox Mulder and Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully. With such an impeccable story, he took it to the next level by writing a feature-length screenplay which transformed into Final Destination. When Alex Browning (Devon Sawa, Idle Hands) has an eerie premonition of the plane he and his classmates are on exploding shortly after taking off towards Paris, France, he quickly discovers that the sole survivors have altered death’s grand design. The original movie introduced a brand new theme to horror movies with an innovative take on the inescapable fate that the living must all accept — death. Following the release of Wong’s first installment, the franchise quickly expanded to include five movies, with a sixth in the works.

Each installment follows the same basic structure: a character has a premonition, they save a small group of people from death, and death comes to resolve the design they’ve disturbed. As of this writing, the series has explored a plane crash, a massive freeway pile up, a roller coaster ride gone wrong, a deadly auto race, and a catastrophic bridge collapse. While the upcoming installment promises to have a plot perfect for the 2020s, it will inevitably include several disturbing deaths. However, even with modern technology and innovation, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to top Tod Waggner and his brutal hanging death.

Tod Waggner’s death was the first to take place following Flight 180’s explosion. A month following the event, Alex and Tod attend the mass funeral for their classmates, but go their separate ways shortly after. As Alex attempts to uncover how it is that he could possibly have a premonition of such magnitude come true, his friend is in the bathroom shaving his face. Death causes water to pool by his feet. After that, Tod takes a quick turn, slips, and gets wrapped in a clothing line that grips tightly across his throat. Gasping for air, Tod’s eye bulge and blood vessels burst, he is unable to break loose and inevitably dies. The police categorize his death as a suicide.

Despite the fact that the movie series includes other gruesome deaths such as the falling glass scene in Final Destination 2 and burning bodies trapped in a tanning bed in Final Destination 3, Tod’s is the most disturbing. It is one of the most prolonged instances of someone dying in the franchise. While others are brief and only last a few minutes, his goes on for approximately five minutes, forcing the viewer to watch as he writhes in pain with fear in his eyes. Other survivors have the opportunity to avoid their death, but Tod was the first that hinted to Alex that death has a design for those who made it off of Flight 180. He never had a chance to be saved, he was unaware unlike those that followed him, and the gruesome depiction of accidental suicide is upsetting to say the least.

Most television series and movies leave suicides rather ambiguous by having other characters relay information about it or have them discover the darkened figure of an unmoving body. While Tod’s death isn’t a suicide, it resembles one. As such, Final Destination includes a drawn out scene where a character dies by accidental suicide. It’s disturbing due to shock value, which forces viewers to recognize the effects of hanging on the human body. It also evokes the fear that this—and all the other deaths in the franchise—could happen to anyone. One wrong move on something as innocuous as a puddle of water could be fatal. Final Destination constantly works at upping its death scenes and sequences in order to make each installment more gruesome than the last, but they’ve never been able to achieve one as disturbing as Tod’s since the 2000 movie released over 20 years ago. Sometimes, simpler is better.

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