Final Destination and the importance of insight

There are only two scary movies. The simplest is called Bad Things Happen Off the Beaten Path. It goes like this:

• Act One: Sin - People choose to stray from the beaten path.
• Act Two: Penance - People are punished for straying from the beaten path.
• Act Three: Redemption - The survivors run back to the beaten path.

During the first act of a movie like this, you find yourself screaming at the screen quite a bit. "Don't create super-smart sharks, you fools!" Or, "Don't sneak into the woods to have sex, you morons!" Or, "Don't go searching for a local legend named Dr. Satan, you dumbasses! Because he's not a legend. He's real. And you'll find him. And things aren't likely to get any better from there."

This first type of movie is a lesson written in blood, encouraging teenagers to follow the established norms of polite society.

The second type of horror movie is trickier, and perhaps impossible, to pull off. It's called Sometimes Bad Things Just Happen.

• Act One: Fate Appears - A mysterious force comes to town.
• Act Two: Fate Decides - The force randomly chooses a victim.
• Act Three: The Fight Against Fate - The victim battles back.

This second type of movie is a way for humans to try to understand the cancers and the car accidents and the horrible accidents that destroy and take lives. It is an explanation of the awfulness of fate.

Over and over, horror movies have tried and failed to mythologize around the randomness of life. Michael Myers was visited upon Laurie Strode for no particular reason, until the makers of the sequel concocted a relationship. Jaws picked Amity randomly, but the town fathers sinned when they decided to keep the tourist beaches open. Sidney Prescott was forced to atone not for her sins, but her mother's. The victims in countless zombie movies will never learn that the zombies were inadvertently created by, say, our own government.

So close, yet still so far away.

In a life of watching scary movies, I have only seen one film that ever really challenged either of these two essential structures. Final Destination. In it, a premonition helps teens escape a fatal accident. Several of the survivors die mysteriously, and the rest realize that by evading death, they have interrupted its grand design. They search for a way to escape their fates as death circles back to complete its plan.

Final Destination squeezes the villain of the latter type of movie into the structure of the former. And in doing so, it captures the very essence of human existence. We come into this world randomly, unable to choose either our parents or our station. And we are faced with only one real possible outcome. Nevertheless, we give great weight to our own choices, imagining that perhaps we'll find some way to rewrite the script of human existence.

It is unlikely that Final Destination was supposed to be a message move. But it is. I've watched it and its sequels a dozen times, always admiring the perfection of their concept, if not their execution. They lack the energy of The Descent and often waver between Black Christmas 1974-style tension and Black Christmas 2006-style gore.

But they have something more important. Insight. And that's why I can't get them out of my head.

Dumb ways to kill good work

Some cliches earn their status. Others are memorable mostly for their inanity. And still others lie in between.

"If you cover up the logo, that ad could be for anybody."

A brilliant insight. Also a clueless, lazy assertion.

It's said a lot by clients. Luke Sullivan took them on in Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This.

Sometimes clients need to be reminded that their product isn't substantially different from the competition's. All that may distinguish the two is the advertising you propose... You need to get your client to see that execution can be content and personality can be proprietary. They're called "pre-emptive claims" - claims any competitor could've made had they moved fast enough.

All well and good. But what if the objection is raised not by the client, but by someone who should know better? An account executive. Worse, a creative director.

"If you cover up the logo, that ad could be for anybody."

Often the definition of "anybody" seems to float along with the motivations of the objector. For instance, Adidas ran a spot where an Olympic weightlifter snatched a heavy barbell, pumped his fist, and walked offscreen. The spot ended with the Adidas logo and the tagline "Forever Sport." Adidas has a rich athletic history and a product line that validates this claim. A smart planner would have supported it. But cover up the Adidas logo and you could easily believe you'd watching an ad for the USOC, Gatorade or even Nike. If the same planner woke up on the wrong side of the bed on that particular day, the campaign could have been consigned to the agency basement.

And even when a claim isn't unassailably authentic, a well-done ad can create ownable space all by itself. Saatchi/London's classic work for XXXX claimed, "Australians wouldn't give a XXXX for anything else." Except that Wikipedia reports that XXXX is one of a few beers popular in Queensland, and unpopular throughout much of the rest of Australia.

"If you cover up the logo, that ad could be for anybody."

Um yeah. And if we covered up the photo, that logo would be sitting next to some whitespace. It's all nonsense. We're not going to cover up the logo, we're going to end up making it 10% bigger. So please, unless the claim is random to the point of dishonesty, give it a rest.