The movies cannot hurt them.Ĭapital-D Death has made several appearances in film-most famously, as the ultimate chess grandmaster in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal -but the Final Destination movies hold the special distinction of making a slasher villain out of Death in the abstract. That’s why Heather and company never stop running the camera in The Blair Witch Project : As long as there’s this intermediary between themselves and the threat, they’ll be okay. The movies themselves, defined by impermanence, are a natural medium for it: To quote the aging actor in David Cronenberg’s brilliant six-minute short “Camera,” “When you record the moment, you record the death of the moment.” Horror fans will tell you that the genre is a good way to confront and exorcise that demon, to neutralize it temporarily by confining it to the realm of harmless, gory fantasy. The fear of it is the constant, inescapable feature of our existence-magnified tenfold, of course, by the gnawing uncertainty of what happens next (or doesn’t). It is disorderly and arbitrary, often cruelly unjust. There’s nothing scarier in real life than death.
