The Grim Reaper proves that you can’t cheat Death by getting off Flight 180

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN FANGORIA MAGAZINE, JANUARY 2000

By Steve Newton

There have been a few movies that effectively preyed on people’s fear of flying–Alive, Fearless, and the “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie being among the best.

Now, Flight 180 wants to take its place among the aerophobia elite.

The film, which lensed in Vancouver, Canada, stars up-and-comer Devon (Idle Hands) Sawa as a high-school student who, while on board for a field-trip to Paris, has a mind-boggling premonition of disaster. In the ensuing chaos, he and his classmates–including Ali (House on Haunted Hill) Larter and Dawson’s Creek hunk Kerr Smith–leave the plane, which shortly thereafter explodes on takeoff.

But they’re not safely off the runway of horror yet, because Death doesn’t like it when prospective souls slip from its grasp.

While New Line Cinema (which has scheduled a February opening) hopes to scare up several air-travel cancellations with Flight 180, it also wants to do more.

“Despite the fact that the stars are teenage,” says producer Craig Perry, “this is a movie that really does appeal to everybody, because it’s ultimately about how one lives his or her life. Although you might think this is a horror movie in a classic sense–just death and blood–we’re trying to work a little bit beyond that.

“We’re trying to hark back to classic films such as The Omen, The Exorcist–movies that operate off of atmosphere and suspense, that don’t require someone in a slicker and a hood hacking up scantily clad young people.”

Two things that Flight 180 has going for it–which should lift it out of the realm of teen-slasher fodder like I Still Know What You Did Last Summer–are director/writer James Wong and producer/writer Glen Morgan. With mucho experience creating top-notch terror for The X-Files and Millennium, they should bring a serious sense of dread to the proceedings.

Yet as Perry reveals, it was difficult for the film’s backers to get the dynamic duo signed on to the movie, which is based on an original screenplay by Jeffrey Reddick.

“Hugely!,” he exclaims. “When we first put together a list of writers we wanted to work with, they were on that list, but of course they were busy doing Millennium, so we didn’t have the opportunity to take advantage of their skills. For almost a year we went through a process of meeting with other writers, who had different takes on the material, always hoping in the back of our minds that the tree would be shaken a little bit, and the opportunity would come when we could work with [Morgan and Wong]. Thankfully, their agent also saw an opportunity in their schedules, and here we are.”

With the Grim Reeaper itself on the trail of Flight 180‘s death-defying passengers, you have to wonder how pronounced the film’s supernatural elements are.

“That’s one of the things that was special about the take that Jim and Glen had on the movie,” says Perry, “that they didn’t want to show what Death looked like. You know, for hundreds of years people have been personifying Death as a cloaked man with a scythe, even in other movies such as The Frighteners, where they had that sort of flying, amost Wicked Witch of the West. Great visuals, and I really liked that movie, but we said, ‘You know, that’s kind of a tired image.’

“We figured it would be much more interesting to take the approach that death is somewhat aligned with fate, the elements that are around us and conspire to cause our demises–or to allow us to live. The arbitrary quality of that is what is really scary. We want people to react to this movie like when they stop at a red light and say, ‘Well, if I had actually tried to go through this, what would have happened?’ We want them to look at their world with a little bit of a sense of paranoia, and with that do for planes what Jaws did for sharks.”

While Flight 180 may be aiming for scares on a higher intellectual level than most horror movies, it doesn’t skimp on the gory bits.

“Oh, it’s got the good juicy stuff,” promises Perry, a die-hard horror fan who claims he has the first 10 years’ worth of Fango sitting in his parents’ attic.

“Without wanting to give away too much, there’s one bit where one of the actors gets beheaded. Now, a beheading is boring, you know–‘OK, stump of the neck, blood, blood, blood’–but what we decided to do is have it to be half, so there’s still movement in part of the face; it’s sort of subtle.

“[Vancouver-based] Flesh & Fantasy are the effects people doing it, and they are just terrific, really smart. They come up with quite a number of well-executed splatter effects.”

Shortly after this article was published the name Flight 180 was changed to Final Destination, which would became a horror franchise still popular today. Here’s the followup Fangoria set-visit piece I wrote on the original film, which includes interviews with writer-director James Wong, writer-producer Glen Morgan, screenwriter Jeff Reddick, makeup-FX artist Ryan Nicholson, and actors Ali Larter, Devon Sawa, Kerr Smith, and Sean William Scott.