There are a lot of forces working against Final Destination, including its largely bland cast and a scenario that makes a big damn point of not clarifying its own rules or explaining itself, but it's honestly as good as a teen-focused body count picture released in 2000 was ever possibly going to be. It's an open question in my mind which of these two approaches results in the better film, but the main point is that, rather unpredictably, Final Destination and at least its first sequel both end up being good enough that "better film" isn't a totally incongruous phrase to use. That, in fact, is the most signal achievement of Final Destination 2, from three years later: it fully embraces the sick humor that Final Destination merely hints at, in the process becoming a bit more enthusiastic in its cruelty and a bit less hard-hitting. Splitting the difference between the poles means that Final Destination ends up being more of a ghoulish black comedy than it gets credit for, if less than it could be. Final Destination has the setpieces, but not the isolation the whole film is build around rising momentum and dread that spans its entire running time, with every character's behavior hinging on their awareness of horrible it must be to die.
Any ol' slasher movie can present its character deaths with a certain flair that makes them more fun and cool than actually visceral this is usually done with a kind of showmanship that isolates the deaths as nothing but a self-contained setpiece. It takes quite a lot of pride in the viciousness of its preposterously elaborate death sequences, and it makes them land with a real punch. And here, too, Final Destination stakes its claim: while the blood is spilled with quite a bit of a sense of humor that functions to delegitimise its horror, there's no mistaking how nasty this film is. It punched, where the horror of the '90s tapped or tickled. It wasn't always scary and was frequently nothing but a gonzo show of elaborate, tacky gore, but this new mode of horror was at least unsafe.
The shift in American horror that culminated in 2004's Saw, meanwhile, was directly away from the sanded edges and glib friendliness of the reedy Scream followers, and back towards a measure of nastiness and violence-for-violence's-sake. I'm damned if I can remember now why anybody cared about Devon Sawa prior to 2000, but I vividly remember knowing that he existed when this film first came out, and thinking that it was pandering to try and force him into movie stardom, though pandering to whom, I am also at a loss to remember. Final Destination has both of those angles covered: the headliners include Dawson's Creek regular Kerr Smith and two-shot guest star Ali Larter (in fairness, Larter's fame - such as it was - largely started with Final Destination, and she could fairly be called an unknown), American Pie stand-out Seann William Scott, and in the lead role, Devon Sawa. Genre films in The Age of Scream, with almost no exceptions, largely functioned as the theatrical wing of The WB, both in the literal sense that the teen-focused network largely shared a pool of actors with the many films that tried to cut off a slice of that Scream pie for themselves, and in the more general sense that a lot of these films were basically teen soaps into which violent death wandered.
Rather, it's that Final Destination strikes me as a particularly clear-cut bridge between two eras of horror cinema. And no, this isn't some enormously pretentious "you see, decades begin in the year ending in -1 and end in the year ending in -0, so 'the '90s' were actually 1991-2000" type of deal, though I would absolutely not put it past myself to do that. I have named this penultimate leg of the final Summer of Blood "Horror in the Late 1990s", but the quick-witted will notice that Final Destination was released in 2000.