Why We’re Still So Scared of That Log Truck Scene From ‘Final Destination 2’

This week sees the release of Final Destination Bloodlines, the sixth installment in one of the 2000s’ most enduring horror franchises. This latest movie, a direct sequel to 2009’s The Final Destination (the fourth movie — try and keep up), sees a woman try to keep her family alive after Death comes to collect his debts.

We know what to expect from this series and that is wild and unexpected deaths. Audiences have grown to love the ways in which Death, more an unseen force of malice than a classic slasher villain, picks off his victims. Why just stab them in the back when you could have them fall foul of a Rube Goldberg-esque series of ridiculous accidents that would be hilarious if they weren’t so horrifying? Everyone has their favourite death from the series: a grill explosion, acupuncture needles, a broken pipe to the face via an airbag activation, a pool drain, a tanning bed… the list goes on and on. But admit it: when you think of death in Final Destination, you think of the log truck.

In Final Destination 2, our intrepid protagonists are heading to Florida for Spring break when one of them has a premonition of a deadly pile-up caused by a logging truck. Everything that could go wrong goes. Logs go flying. Cars pile up. Things go boom. Blood is splattered across the highway. In a franchise full of highly memorable scenes, there’s just something about those damn logs that lingers longer in our imaginations. Certainly, the marketing people at Warner Bros. Canada know this and were smart/evil enough to use it in selling the latest movie. A bloodied log truck with a ‘How’s my driving?’ sticker on the back will be making the rounds across Ontario and Quebec this month, ensuring that drivers everywhere decide to stay at home for the foreseeable future.

Ask any person who’s seen Final Destination 2 and the chances are they’ll express genuine fear of logging trucks because of this scene. Movies often inspire new phobias. How many of us are terrified of clowns because of It? The Final Destination movies have elicited more than a few irrational worries about the safety of tanning salons or laser eye surgery, thanks to the elaborate ways they become murder weapons in Death’s hands. But the logging truck feels different, and the why of it gets to the heart of what makes this silly but mightily impactful series work.

Horror is designed to make us confront our greatest fears. The most effective films capture the grizzly realities of our fragile status as living beings in a cruel world. Sometimes that can be darkly funny, and other times it makes us want to claw off our own skin. It’s often been said that audiences aren’t as easy to scare in the 2020s as they were when horror cinema was born and that’s true to some extent, but we’re not as jaded as we’re prone to claiming. Postmodern irony had a huge influence on horror in the ’90s with films like Scream, wherein our awareness of the most well-worn tropes of horror were flung back in our face and made all the scarier for it. Final Destination feels cut from a similar cloth to that franchise. Audiences watch Final Destination and our knowledge of how horror movies work is rewarded with visceral displays of blood and terror. We know these people will die. The clockwork precision of the how of it is where the surprises are.

Most people don’t die the way that characters in Final Destination do. We’re more likely to be struck down by cancer than a plane crash. But even our understanding of this doesn’t quash that voice in the back of your head that always thinks of the absolute worst possibility for any given moment. What if the elevator crashes while you’re in it? What if the hairdryer in the next room somehow finds its way into the bath? What if the rollercoaster is derailed by a stray leaf? Utterly neutral acts could lead to your demise: the wrong turn on the road, the placing of your drink on the bar, the crossing of the road. Logging trucks drive across the country with no problems all the time. If they were truly a risky endeavour then no company would ever use or invest in them. We know this. And yet… We’ve all seen a car accident. It’s not that hard to imagine that two-car pile-up become twenty…

While Death became more of a conventional slasher in their vengeful hunts in later movies, the idea of an impish unseen force of near-bureaucratic precision remains effective. They’re just doing a job and you tried to f*ck it up by screwing with the numbers. Death doesn’t care if you try to reason or plead or mock their work. Everyone will meet the same fate eventually, and using the tools available, the chances are it’ll be a brutal one. There’s catharsis in that because we love to watch messy and gross stuff, but the unfairness of it is also what makes us so scared. Maybe Death has a plan for us, a design that must be accomplished, but ultimately, it comes for us all and there’s nothing about it but hope it’s quick, painless, and dignified. And for a lot of us, it won’t be. A lot of people die in car crashes, after all.

One of the reasons that the work of Ari Aster is so upsetting to me is that he acutely captures that paranoid feeling we all get occasionally that life is out to get us, that our worst fears are true and, yes, it’s all going wrong for us and only us. The Final Destination films are strange bedfellows with the likes of Hereditary and Beau is Afraid in that regard. Being chased down by the greatest villain of all and having their machinations be so astonishingly cruel just for our benefit is perhaps the biggest nightmare of all. Even if you don’t believe in an almighty figure making such decisions, the inherent injustice of life and death is unavoidable. So, you can’t be surprised when people see those logging trucks and decide to change routes on their drive home. Irrationality could kill or cure us. Which risk do you want to take?