Author: Joe Boyd
This review starts on a cluttered bedroom floor in a small Derbyshire town, where two gangly teenage boys with too much hair are sat in front of an eviscerated VCR. It’s the mid-2000s, and me and my friend Mike are watching horror movies.
This always was a bit of a trip for me. Mike has a personality disorder, so spending time with him was never like hanging out with the average teenage boy. His moods are erratic, and his outlook on life switches from happy to nihilistic in an instant, flicking back just as quickly. He’s been diagnosed with ADHD before, and it’s easy to see why; his attention is constantly springing from one activity to the next. Watching horror movies is, therefore, an interesting experience.
Mike doesn’t have the patience for a whole movie, or even half of one. He watches them in bursts of energy, like a series of sprints, pausing to play a videogame or take something apart to see how it works, before catching up where he left off. When him and I get together, therefore, he skips most of the films. What I get is a kind of highlight reel of all the gory bits, as he switches out one tape for another in excited glee.
We watched vampires slash up a bar in From Dusk till Dawn, followed by Drew Barrymore’s fatal final phone call in Scream. We watched Final Destination – the perfect film for Mike’s attention span – in a chaotic, random order, skipping from death to death and laughing at the contextless slaughter.
In retrospect, that’s not actually much different from watching Final Destination normally.