Final Destination showed that it’s near impossible to escape Death’s design, but before the movie’s triggering event, it subtly showed how three characters were going to die. Directed by James Wong, the supernatural horror movie Final Destination was released in 2000, seizing the success of teen horror movies that began in the 1990s with movies like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. The box office success of Final Destination led to a media franchise with four sequels, which continued to explore Death, its design, and whether it could be avoided or not.

Final Destination followed Alex Browning (Devon Sawa), who boards a plane with his friends and classmates for their senior trip to Paris. Before take-off, Alex has a vivid premonition that the plane will explode mid-air, killing everyone on board. Alex panics and a fight breaks out on the plane before it departs, and Alex and six others are removed from the plane… and then watch it explode mid-air. However, as they were supposed to be on the plane, Death starts taking them one by one in strange and mysterious deaths – and three of those were foreshadowed before and during the plane’s explosion.

Final Destination Subtly Showed How Tod, Terry, & Billy Would Die In The First 20 Minutes

Tod, Terry, & Billy Couldn’t Escape Death’s Plan

Alex was removed from the plane along with his best friend Tod (Chad E. Donella), Carter (Kerr Smith), who Alex fought on the plane, Carter’s girlfriend Terry (Amanda Detmer), Billy (Seann William Scott), Clear (Ali Larter), and teacher Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke). Unfortunately, all of them except Alex and Clear didn’t survive Final Destination (with Carter being the final and surprising death right at the end), and the first one to die was Tod. On the plane, before Alex had the premonition, two classmates asked him to change seats after Tod refused to, and Tod made a gesture of hanging himself.

A bit over a month later, a strange chain reaction in Tod’s bathroom caused him to be accidentally hanged in his shower on the day of the memorial service of the victims, of which one of them was Tod’s brother. Next was Terry, who was run over by a speeding bus, but this was hinted at when they were at the airport. Immediately after the plane exploded, as they all stared at each other in shock, Terry was shown with a photo of a bus in the background.

Following Ms. Lewton’s death and Alex saving Carter, Billy died when an oncoming train knocked shrapnel into the air, cutting his head below the nose. Billy’s death was also foreshadowed in the first minutes of Final Destination, seconds before the plane’s explosion. As Billy stared at the plane while it took off, the plane’s reflection crossed Billy’s face right where the shrapnel would go on to cut his head and decapitate him.

Final Destination Foreshadowed Clear’s Death In Final Destination 2

Clear Couldn’t Avoid Death For Long

After learning that Death could skip the next in line if they were saved, Alex did his best to save Clear. A weird chain of events led to Clear being trapped inside her car and surrounded by loose electrical cables and gasoline leaking around her. Alex grabbed a cable, allowing Clear to escape before the car exploded. Final Destination 2 revealed that Alex died sometime between both movies as he was hit by a falling brick, so Clear was next.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t keep avoiding Death, and Clear died when she entered a hospital room with an oxygen leak, causing an explosion. Clear successfully avoided dying in an explosion in Final Destination thanks to Alex, but Death had planned to kill her in an explosion and did so in the sequel. Final Destination showed that Death can’t be cheated, no matter how hard those in his design try to avoid their fates.