Stephen King’s favourite horror franchise of all time: “I love all these movies”
An icon of the horror genre, Stephen King has long had a monopoly on all things spine-tingling and fear-inducing. Publishing his first novel in 1974, in just a year’s time, his work had made it to the big screen, with Carrie earning acclaim as a landmark in the scary movie canon.
From there, King seemed unstoppable, penning the likes of The Shining, IT, Cujo, and Misery, all of which got the Hollywood treatment, tapping into the kind of fears that make even the most cold-hearted of people flinch, taking something ordinary and turning it into a place of fear, and suddenly, a beloved pet dog could become rabid, or a clown could snatch you into a drain, nothing and nowhere was safe.
Inspired by the likes of The Twilight Zone and HP Lovecraft, King has churned out novels, and while some are coke-fuelled epics and others are much more considered novellas, all of his writing is unmistakably the work of a prolific and dedicated author – one who never seems to be without a new idea whizzing around the back of his brain.
When he’s not writing, King is probably consuming movies, himself an avid cinephile, and he has no qualms about sharing his thoughts on the films he watches. While some of his reviews have been pretty brutal, hating everything from The Shining – finding it nothing like his own novel – to Kill Bill, he has been complimentary about his fair share of movies, too.
In particular, King once expressed his love for a certain horror franchise that has spawned countless movies over the years, each getting more ridiculous than the next, with the author admitting his love for the Final Destination series, which began with James Wong’s first instalment in 2000, based on an idea penned by Jeffrey Reddick.
What began as an idea for an episode of The X-Files transformed into the hugely popular series, where Death is always lurking around the corner, inescapable and haunting. When a group of teenagers survive a plane explosion that was meant to kill them, they get taken down one by one, their fates clearly sealed from the beginning.
You can’t cheat fate is the message of the franchise, even if you try your best to avoid what is meant for you. King loves the idea that forms the basis of Final Destination, with its gruesome kills turning it into a pretty grisly modern horror classic. It might not have been as good as a horror movie like The Exorcist or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but it reeled in large crowds, grossing $112.9million against a budget of $23m.
Of course, when a movie does that well, it’s only a matter of time before a sequel emerges, with Final Destination 2 coming three years later. Four more sequels have been released since then, with the most recent being 2025’s Final Destination Bloodlines.
Discussing his love for the franchise, King wrote, “I love all these movies, with their elaborate Rube Goldberg setups – it’s like watching R-rated splatter versions of those old Road Runner cartoons – but only the first is genuinely scary, with its grim insistence that you can’t beat the Reaper: when your time is up, it’s up.”
