Hana Flint
with the BBC
25 years ago, the first sequel terrified people by turning everyday scenarios into deadly traps.
Today, after a 14-year hiatus, Last excursion: Heritageand he upgraded the formula.
"In death there are no accidents, no coincidences, no mishaps, and no escape."
Those are the disturbing words of the all-knowing undertaker William Bloodworth (played by Tony Todd) in the first The last excursion (2000), a horror film without a masked killer, a bloodthirsty vampire, or a zombie devouring the victim's brain - there is only the omnipresent specter of death and harsh reality.
No matter how far we run or how well we hide, it will come for us all.
Back then, in the first film, death certainly didn't come peacefully for a group of high school students and their teacher, who narrowly escaped losing their lives when they exited the ill-fated Flight 180 just before it exploded.
And this is thanks to one of them having a premonition only to discover that the Grim Reaper wants revenge on them for thwarting his plans.
And so for the next 90 minutes, the audience watches in horror as this invisible antagonist prepares some of the most elaborate and shocking deaths imaginable for each survivor, involving all manner of routine objects, from knitting needles to kitchen knives.
Young audiences from all over the world left the cinema afraid of everything around them.
"I was 15 years old, watching a movie with my friends, and we were holding each other."
"The plane thing was pure genius, because every time I got on a plane, I would think of The Last Excursion," Diana Ali Chayer, a millennial and filmmaker, tells the BBC.
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The brainchild of screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick, Last excursion followed in the footsteps of teen horror classics, such as Scream (1996) and I know what you did last summer. (1997), to huge box office success, shocking an entire generation of moviegoers along the way.
"As millennials, we grew up on slasher films from the 90s, and they all had that cool blend of young stars of the time with the perfect balance of scary and fun -Last excursion "It seemed like it was part of that wave," Mike Manser, the podcast host, tells the BBC. The evolution of horror.
"I remember seeing posters for it and thinking, 'This is my kind of thing,'" he adds.
But thanks to its brutal, nihilistic plot, it also moved the needle for teen horror, Manser adds.
"We no longer had a masked killer, there was no motive, we just watched people die and be surprised by something completely unexpected."
The film eventually spawned four sequels, each of which kept the basic formula but each time raised the stakes with even more elaborate ways to end human life, before going on a 14-year hiatus.
But now he's finally back with a sixth installment, Last excursion: Heritage, whose plot connects every previous film.
"It was very important to us to thread the needle so that the film was clearly part of the franchise canon and part of the lineage of all the previous films."
"But we also wanted it to be incredibly fresh and unpredictable for all the people who love these films," co-director Zach Lipowski tells the BBC.
From idea to screen
The franchise began when 27-year-old Redick read a newspaper article while flying from New York back to his home state of Kentucky.
The news story described a woman who avoided a plane crash because she switched flights because of a bad feeling her mother had about the original plane.
This inspired him to write a "spec script," or uncommissioned script, for his favorite TV series. The X-Files, in which "Scala's brother had this hunch," Reddick explains.
"I thought, what if they cheated death and now death starts chasing them."
Working at the time for New Line Cinema, Reddick showed the script for this episode to colleagues who were so inspired by the originality of the concept that they convinced him to write it as a completely separate feature film.
"There are hints of The Foreshadowing in The Last Excursion, where you have this little devil child Damien who says bad things happen to people.
"But I think it's otherwise quite unique," says Manser.
The script went through numerous changes before filming began in 1999 on Long Island and Vancouver.
"In the original story, death was the force that took control of the detective investigating the case," Reddick explains.
"You find out that his heart stopped at the same time as the plane crash, so the essence of death entered him and now he's killing the survivors of the crash."
But as for Craig Perry, who worked on every film in the series, he wanted the film to focus on "the intersection of all the coincidences and the 'what ifs'" from the original three-page synopsis.
"Everyone has experienced a premonition at some point in their life, or that strange, uncomfortable feeling that something bad is going to happen," he tells the BBC.
"Or, conversely, when you almost escape death, and you start to wonder, if I hadn't turned left but right, maybe I would be dead now."
Since the essence was so bleakly fatalistic, mischief was thrown in to balance as soon as veteran X-Files writers James Wong and Glenn Morgan jumped into the story.
They turned Death into a much more playful character through his detailed murder plans, inspired by the late American illustrator Rube Goldberg's famous drawings of "his chain reaction devices" - fictional inventions "where A has to hit B, which has to hit C, which has to hit D, in perfect sequence for the machine to work," says Perry.
And yet the studio couldn't imagine an antagonist you couldn't see.
"Usually you have Freddy, or Jason, or some visualization that the protagonists have to fight, so the studio made me put this real angel of death in the script," Reddick recalls.
The idea was for a physical figure to appear from the shadows to stalk the protagonist Alex (Devon Sava), who had a bad feeling.
Fortunately for Reddick, Wong and Morgan resisted and ultimately had their way, with the original vision of death as an abstract force that becomes tangible only through elemental disasters, such as a gust of wind or a leak of water, that signaled the presence of death and its fatal machinations.
"We wanted to keep it within the more natural elements, which are part of the arsenal that death uses," says Perry.
"So water, wind, electricity, simple soil erosion, gravity - these are all things that death had easy access to, to manipulate inanimate objects."
In The Legacies, the personification of death was further advanced, when the filmmakers began using IMAX cameras to show the audience that death had arrived.
"And in the version of the film shot like this, the perspective of death expands on the screen."
"Every scene where death arrives, we switch to IMAX so you can feel death coming with every close-up of everyday objects," says co-director Adam.
Making something banal sinister was key to the "traumatizing factor" Recent excursions, as Perry puts it, with everything from coffee mugs to nose hair trimmers becoming potential threats, but it wasn't always easy to pull off.
"Making the sequence of accidents work is quite difficult," says Perry, "because when you're creatively designing something, you have to imagine how all those things are going to collide with each other in a believable way so that the audience isn't thrown out of the moment."
What drives these scenes is the dramatic irony of the audience's awareness that, whether in the dentist's chair or in a tanning bed, the characters are unaware that they are in the middle of a deadly trap.
"The audience knows that something in the room is manipulating the elements, so they immediately begin to identify with the characters, pointing at the screen and screaming."
"And so you look at a can of tuna and after two or three frames, it's no longer a can of tuna, it's an instrument of death," Perry adds.
Switching the main characters from adults to teenagers was a key element of the first series' appeal. Last excursions.
Teenage horror was the main thing at the time and already recognizable actors such as Sava, Ali Larter from Varsity Blues, Ker Smit from Dosonovog sveta and Sean Williams Scot on American pies they were a magnet for a younger audience.
"I watched Devon Sava in With vain hands", says Chayer, referring to the 1999 horror comedy the actor had filmed shortly before that.
"And that's why when I found out that he was also acting in The last excursion, I wanted to watch her."
For die-hard horror fans, the inclusion of Todd, famous for his role as Candyman in the 1992 film of the same name, as a key character who explains the entire premise was practically icing on the cake.
"He gives you horror legitimacy."
"This supernatural evil coming for you, the idea of a curse, it all ties into Candyman," Manser explains.
Upon appearance, Last excursion earned $112.036.870 worldwide, on a production budget of $23.000.000, and a sequel was immediately approved.
"Most horror movies drop 50 percent after their first weekend, and we watched the movie climb at the box office," Reddick recalls.
He was given the opportunity to work on the next sequel with a fresh twist - a new cohort of teenagers and adult characters manage to avoid the original intended death, even before the events of Last excursions 2, because the survivors of FD1 got off the infamous Flight 180.
"It shows how the spider's web of effects fits into the fact that all our lives are connected," he adds.
Key elements of a franchise
Every movie in the series Last excursion is connected in some way, small or large.
From one character cheating death because another character, in a separate film, took the last movie ticket meant for him, to a huge twist Latest excursions 5 that it is a prequel to the original film - the main character survives until the very end of that film, only to perish on Flight 180.
"That's part of the main fun of this franchise."
"Wouldn't it be fun to see how all this connectivity actually comes to fruition?"
"The web of death is much more detailed and higher mathematics than we could have imagined."
"From sitting up in bed and saying to yourself, 'I don't even want to get up,'" Perry says.
When it comes to specific creepy sequences, Last excursion 2 delivered one of the most memorable scenes of destruction in the entire franchise with the opening scene of a massive highway accident involving a log truck.
"I still get log truck memes every other day," Reddick says.
But, more broadly, she really set the pattern for all these deaths.
"There's always at least one moment in a chain of events that a character sets in motion that makes you feel like your actions really do determine whether you live or die," Perry says.
"And there has to be a moment of just dumb luck, just the fickle Finger of Fate tapping you on the shoulder and saying, 'Pay attention.' Everything else is just the coordination of all those natural elements."
And that coordination involves a lot of misdirection.
Take for example the death of Evan Lewis, the surviving lottery winner from Latest excursions 2, caused by spaghetti - Lipovski's favorite moment from the entire franchise.
He slips on the spaghetti and you think it's going to kill him, but it doesn't.
The cadence of that scene was a guideline for him and co-director Adam Stein.
"Last excursion is very predictable, you know that all the characters are going to die one after the other.
"And so we're always trying to figure out ways to turn that on its head," Stein says.
"It's very common in previous films to cut to a character who's alone in some dangerous place and the audience immediately knows that he's finished."
"We take that expectation, then twist it, change it, and turn things upside down so that you're constantly saying, 'Hey, wait a minute, I don't know who's next,'" adds Lipovsky.
And yet in every film, the story must give the characters a chance to deal with everything.
U Inheritances, that attempt is played out through a student who wants to pull her family out of the cycle of death set in motion by a prophecy from her estranged grandmother who cheated death in the sixties.
"How do you achieve existential horror when death is chasing you and you still give the characters the power to thwart those efforts?" Perry asks.
In the fifth The last excursion, it becomes clear to the characters that they can cheat death by killing other characters.
"If you kill someone, you get as many lives as they had left, which raises the moral question of whether you're willing to do it or not," Perry says.
And indeed, these heavy and serious themes are as much a part of the franchise's appeal as the inventive death sequences.
They force the audience to think about their own mortality as well as questions that are common to all: What would you do to survive?
If you knew death was coming, would you hide, like Ali Larter's character in Last excursion 2, or would you live life to the fullest?
The fact that the franchise doesn't tie itself to any particular belief system makes the existential ideas it tackles all the more relatable.
"I didn't want to tie death to any specific religion or culture."
"Our films don't try to force any messages on you, but, with any luck, what the audience takes away from them is that life is precious," says Reddick.
This ethos has particular weight in Inheritances because of Todd's presence.
The actor passed away in November 2024, and here he appears in his final role on the big screen, which includes a poignant and, as it turns out, improvised monologue.
"We told him to drop the script and tell us whatever was on his mind, and he said, 'Cherish, embrace, and love every moment you have, because you never know when it's going to end.'"
"And that suited the character and the franchise, but it's also him, as an actor, speaking directly to the audience about his own legacy, his own work, his feelings about life and death, all wrapped up together," Lipowski recalls.
Heritage and cultural influence Recent excursions are still going strong, especially today when you recognize him in other films like this year's Majmun, with similarly complex death sequences.
And as for a franchise powered by the countless ways we can die, there are also countless possibilities for sequels.
If Legacies does well at the box office, we could see the universe expand deeper into history - Stein and Perry believe the ideas of a pirate ship and "Game of Thrones what luck The last excursion" have already been considered for future parts.
But no matter where each individual's story ends Recent excursions, there is one constant - death equals us all, so just stay vigilant and watch for the signs.
"If I'm driving and there's a log truck in front of me, I'll move into the other lane," says Chayer.
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