I’m Still Terrified of Trucks Because of Final Destination

For a quarter-century now, the Final Destination franchise has tried to shake viewers with the existential dread of knowing that death is always lurking around the corner, one moment of bad luck away. However, for many of us it also instilled a disproportionate fear of a particular every day objects or activities, as it was used for gruesome violence in the movies. Some say they would never try gymnastics after seeing the parallel bar scene in Final Destination 5, while others refuse to try tanning after seeing Final Destination 3. Personally, these horror classics have given me an unhealthy wariness of trucks in every form.

Final Destination is a horror series about a supernatural phenomenon where one character glimpses the future, allowing themself and a few others to narrowly avoid death. However, the characters are now marked for death, and they can’t escape it no matter how they try throughout the movie. It’s a brilliant commentary on mortality and a great setup for a wide variety of gory scenes. For better or worse, the gore is what really sticks in our heads.

The whole point of this setup is that these deaths are highly unlikely — they grow more outlandish as each movie goes on and death becomes more and more desperate to claim the characters. Hyper-specific deaths like the airborne barbed wire in Final Destination 2 might stick in your head without really causing you fear, while deaths in unfamiliar settings might make you think twice about visiting those places — like the weight machine death in Final Destination 3 or the industrial winch death in Final Destination 5.

The Trucks of Final Destination

[RELATED: Final Destination Deaths Ranked by How Bad They Would Hurt]

Where the series really gets you is deaths that your subconscious mind can correlate to things you see every day, and when it comes to trucks, we get several of those. The pattern starts where you probably suspect — the freeway pileup in Final Destination 2. IN the sequel, the crash really gets bad when a logging truck loses its cargo and fresh timber is suddenly careering through rush hour traffic. It smashes through windshields, topples cars over, and impales some unlucky victims.

This is often cited as an unforgettable moment for the franchise, but even if it sticks with you, it’s not too hard to avoid logging trucks specifically. If a horror movie makes you more cautious on the highway, that’s probably a net positive. However, if you’re unfortunate enough to link this fear to all the other truck-related deaths in the series like me, things get a little complicated.

In the very next movie, Final Destination 3, the true terror of the combustion engine comes to the foreground. We cheer to see the despicable Frankie (Sam Easton) leave the plot, but we should stop and take a look at how it happened. Frankie was in line at a fast food drive-thru when an out of control box truck crashed into the back of the line, smashing all the cars together. The impact was so great that the engine of the pickup truck behind Frankie burst through the grill, it’s rotors still spinning. These blades cleaved into Frankie’s head, making him practically unrecognizable.

Even I know enough about cars to know this is probably unlikely, but it still stands out in my memory whenever a massive truck looms behind me. It doesn’t end there, either — the fourth film, The Final Destination, shows us the gruesome potential of a tow truck when Carter (Justin Wellborn) is dragged down the street, immolated, and exploded by his “service vehicle.” The movie then ends with three characters who think they’ve survived being run over by an 18-wheeler, which crashes into the coffee shop where they’re sitting.

We can count several other deaths as “truck-related” if we stretch a bit — driving is one of the most dangerous activities we do regularly, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that it features heavily in Final Destination‘s goriest scenes. The collapse of the suspension bridge in Final Destination 5 comes to mind, even if Candice (Ellen Wroe) is ultimately impaled on a sailboat mast rather than any truck parts. I’d also like to draw attention to the death of Billy (Seann William Scott) in the first Final Destination. He is decapitated by a piece of debris flung at him by a passing train. This creeps into my mind every time I hear truck tries flinging tiny pebbles into the air.

The Final Destination franchise has a unique way of presenting its audience with many different fears but challenging us to face them head on, not because we have nothing to be afraid of, but because there is no alternative. The series has been on hiatus for over a decade now, but this spring, we’ll finally get a chance to face our fears again in Final Destination Bloodlines, premiering in theaters on May 16th, 2025. Hopefully it retains that empowering message we all need, and for my sake, hopefully there are no truck-related death scenes.