Dreams and Premonitions in Weapons and Final Destination: Bloodlines | Who’s in Control?
Dreams are probably the scariest thing imaginable to me, something about the illogical ways our brain connects the randomness of our thoughts and feelings of the day has long kept me up after experiencing the vividness of our world beyond reality. I used to train myself to remember my dreams in hopes to lucid dream more consistently, and while I've given up on that feat, the habit of remembering dreams has formed solidly in my brain. When people tell me about their dreams, I lose myself in their details for a moment, and I'm terrified, full of goosebumps, shivering. I love how I never know where it's going, and when it'll end. After watching Weapons and Final Destination: Bloodlines with my partner last weekend, I immediately dwelled on the dreams and premonitions of both movies. I love connecting loose threads between anything I experience, but these movies both tackle this in quite different ways. One for the better, and the other not so much. Let's start with Weapons.
SPOILER WARNING: If anyone hasn't seen either movie, I will be discussing the major plot points of both Weapons and Bloodlines. I at least recommend watching Weapons before reading, Bloodlines follows many paths other Final Destination films cover, but Weapons is a great experience and a great film that I'd hate to spoil for you.
Justine/Archer
Most people saw the poster of Weapons and said “I'm in.” The concept alone is sold, and I don't believe I saw anything past the first trailer before seeing it in theaters. Zach Cregger once again crafted a worthwhile horror film that carefully reveals the plot character by character, similar to his first film Barbarian. This time around, the movie is focused around a small town struggling with a mystery of missing children, and there is more to dissect than the smaller scope of “the house” in his first film.
We first start off with Justine, the teacher of the class where all the kids, but one, went missing. We see our first dream here, where she walks around the school at night, but enters her classroom like it was another normal day. Justine is the immediate scapegoat of the parents, it is clear anyone would long for the normalcy of your humdrum day at school. When she enters the classroom, every kid has their head on the desk, covered by shadows and only slightly illuminated by the moon. Alex, the one kid who isn't missing, looks up with a menacing smile, covered in makeup. This is played like your typical jumpscare out of a dream, but along with Archer’s dream that soon follows, I argue they are more premonitions of what's to come.
Archer is the father of one of the missing children, and the second character they examine in the movie. The movie dances with time and the events that follow a month after the kids are missing, and we see that Archer is the concerned parent yelling at Justine during the meeting the night before class was set to resume at Maybrook Elementary. His dream happens a bit further along than Justine's, after he's spent time trying to investigate where the kids were going. His dream is one of my favorite parts of the film, it felt natural for most of it. Most dreams in movies are visually presented to know they're a dream, but it often doesn't feel like a dream. This one did to me, as Archer wakes up and is always a step behind his son on the fateful night he left his house running at 2:17am.
Last night at 2:17A.M., every child from Mrs. Grandy’s class woke up, got out of bed, went downstairs, opened the front door, walked into the dark… and they never came back.
The dream toys with your tension while viewing as well, because I was desperate to know where the kids were off to, and desperate for someone to try and solve it. Archer’s son, Matthew, runs straight out of the house, across the street and into the woods beyond the houses across from them. Archer doesn't see him in the dream, but knows he ran that way, and sets off in that path. After some time, only moving forward and away from their home, he arrives back at it. Now, drenched in the white light of the moon, a giant assault rifle is looming over their house. It feels almost Lynchian, or surrealist in ways only movies can deliver. The assault rifle has 2:17am in red across the gun like an alarm clock’s display, its imagery direct and foreboding. Some people by this point in the movie picked up on the “the kids are the weapons” theme of Weapons, because it is meant to be obvious. They're not hiding the message in any way, which I love. Archer then goes back into the house, looking for his son in his room. After some emotional words are shared by Archer, he pulls over the covers and finds Aunt Gladys, in all her glory and makeup, in his bed. Archer's “what the fuck” moment upon waking was also the funniest part of the film to me, and a great way to ease the tension of his dream for the audience.
You aren't introduced to who Aunt Gladys is until after this moment, but looking back on both dreams, it's hard to only call them dreams. In the same way the Final Destination movies use particular elements to discern what tragic event might come next, these dreams point directly to Alex and whoever that creepy woman was, since Justine and Archer won't find out who she is until the end of the film. While the characters don't see them as premonitions in that sense, the audience does, especially once more of the plot is revealed and you can tell that Aunt Gladys has been in control of everything, and everyone. This movie treats the audience as intelligent and attentive to each crumb of information dropped throughout, and I love the culmination of how Justine and Archer eventually work together to unravel the mystery. They never mention their dreams, but you know that in some way, it pointed them to what they needed to know.
Iris/Stefani
Final Destination: Bloodlines, however, treats you like a big dumb baby who's never seen a Final Destination movie before. I think that's fair since it was aiming to draw in new viewers, but also a disservice to a life-long fan of the franchise like me. Listen, I know they're nothing special, but I have loved the first trilogy since I was a kid, and will go to bat for Final Destination 3 being a solidly made horror movie. It's well shot, it doesn't shy away from the grief of the mass casualty event in its first act, and revealing the ways the group die by the photos taken of everyone before their brush with death is captivating. Bloodlines does present a clever spin on the series overall though, with the first premonition manifesting into a dream that Iris’ granddaughter has.
The beginning of the movie, like all FDs, showcases a horrific event and details the way the protagonist saves a group of people before experiencing what she saw. This time it follows Iris, a woman soon to be married (who is also pregnant) atop a new structure built called the Sky View. I hated this particular set piece, it doesn't cover a real-life scenario that audiences can connect to like a plane crash or roller coaster malfunction. These things we might all have an underlying fear of. Instead of recapping the total nightmare scenario that plays out in Iris’ premonition and puts you before it ever occurs, the end of the premonition is revealed to be a recurring dream that college student Stefani has. I liked this spin on things for the franchise, and the overall familial plotlines it follows. Iris has been hiding away, fending off death for years, and has traumatized her children because of it.
“I saved a lot of lives that night. Lives that were never meant to be saved. They closed the restaurant after that. Said it needed additional renovations but it never reopened. Eventually, they tore it down. (...) But Death doesn't like it when you fuck with his plans” - Iris Campbell, Sky View survivor
Turns out this nutcase hiding in a “fortified” cabin was right all along, and death was knocking at her door for decades after she saved almost everyone at the Sky View and stopped its collapse. As silly as these movies tend to be, I enjoyed that she saved everyone, and it's taken years for death to catch up and even the score. This movie loses me in the same way FD2 does though, with too much backstory and lore about death that sucks the fun out of it for me. My favorite part of any of these movies is the subtlety of the water following the tiles to kill its first survivor in the first Final Destination film. You can tell “death is coming” and that the universe is in tandem with this notion, but it's not shoved in your face and needlessly explained in the way this movie is. The water snakes along the tiles of the bathroom and ends up going where it needs to for the next section or the Rube Goldberg killing machine to continue. It's silent and moves along like a predator, staking out its next prey with intent and with ease.
In Bloodlines, Iris and Stefani see death everywhere, with this damn journal of all the ways death can get them. I like the fear of that and the isolation it's stricken the family with, but the movie unnecessarily details all of this when the audience is highly aware of death hunting people down. We're here for fun deaths and a wild time, the plot and dialogue around it all grew tiresome. The premonitions were also insanely stacked in this movie, usually a song or small detail lets the protagonist know something bad is coming. In Iris' premonition, there are three different songs foreshadowing the Sky View collapse. Why? What happened to subtlety in the premonitions? I love that the movies can be exaggerated and campy, but the premonitions always felt sincere and struck the character at the right moments to know what was coming. It lets you connect with the character more and you feel the human side of anyone imagining the worst case scenario and seeing it come to life step by step. The premonitions are a gateway to that emotional tie, and even though the fake-out with it becoming a dream worked for me, the heightened sense of the character’s feelings of death in every scenario did not.
Who's In Control?
I wanted to talk about these movies because they both were commercial successes, and most audiences enjoyed both from what I can tell. I'm in that boat as well, though I give a clear nod to Weapons being a much more well-crafted horror experience that has a stronger staying power in my brain since watching. In Weapons, the dying witch clearly has control. It wasn't until Alex set the classroom of kids to kill her in the very end that the power dynamic shifts, and the payoff was hilarious, but also satisfying for the viewer. There is a broader theme to Weapons though, and it speaks on how people talk about children and use them to fit whatever narrative they are trying to push. “But think of the children!” people say, as they spread their own views, often negative and antithetical to progress. The kids aren't being thought about at all, they're used as tools, as weapons against other humans, to persuade or deceive. In this sense, the narrative is in control, as people can often buy into the pleas of anyone who seems to think of our children, our future. I think this movie is saying a lot of things, and also leaving it up to the viewer to interpret from their own experience as well. I have friends who are teachers, and I'd love to know how they felt watching and relating to Justine.
In Final Destination: Bloodlines, death is in control. It is always in control. I think after the whole family is wiped out by the end of the film, it is clear death is the winner. However, Iris was in control for decades, some 30-40 years keeping herself safe before she decided to show Stefani how death works by taking a pole through the mouth. How many fucking times does this need to be done in these movies? The total CGI gorefest really knocks the fun out of the more recent movies to me, it's not as unique or engaging as the other sequences can be. But all this time learning, sensing death in the world, and how it can be avoided in the movie is lost on everyone dying by the end. I hate that horror movie trope in general, but it can be done well, like in the third movie when the three survivors realize they're all on the same train that will inevitably derail. The main character’s premonition comes too late as the train has already left the station, and the worst is about to come. Death smiles.
I have always connected the threads between art when and where I can. When you experience anything back to back, I think it's fun to analyze and explore the things that are similar, even if it is vague or a stretch of the imagination. Weapons and Bloodlines are on completely different spectrums of the horror movie experience, yet both have a tinge of comedy that underlies them both. Bloodlines should be funny, and Erik’s character toying with death and being ridiculously over-the-top was a breath of fresh air for the series. Zach Cregger was known for sketch comedy before making horror films, and I found Barbarian and Weapons both to be hilarious at times. I love that contrast, and I love both of those films. No wonder the man screaming “Now you fucked up, now you fucked up” as Abraham Lincoln in Whitest Kids U’Know could add a tinge of comedic relief to his films. There is also a nod to the late Trevor Moore in Weapons, which I think is an underlying theme to the movie as well. We lose people, sometimes inexplicably, and the loss and pain that follows is unique to everyone. It is shared by everyone who's lived long enough to feel that burden, but the way we interact with it can lead down many different paths, just like the characters in the film. We all work hard to keep them alive in our minds and hearts, and in this instance, subtly in the reels of a film. Death does not always win.
Thank you for reading if you've made it this far, and I encourage you all to “connect the threads” of any art you experience. I loved writing and exploring this, I hope you did too.
Written by Evan Lurie
