Final Destination Bloodlines: Why Erik is Special

Let’s be honest, every horror movie needs their laidback, cool alternative character that sticks out no matter how little screen time they get. Sadly, this genre of character tends to die early in the story, usually in a brutal way. And though Erik Campbell gets his unhappy ending, we can appreciate Final Destination Bloodlines for keeping him around long enough.

Jennifer’s Body‘s Colin Gray awakened a lot of fans’ attraction towards alternative characters, mainly those existing in horror settings. Though, they usually don’t serve much of a purpose other than being mysterious with morbid one-liners. An example is Kim Diamond from Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 who is shown at the beginning of the film smoking a cigarette in a graveyard.

Final Destination 3 was the first movie of the franchise that introduced their first ‘goth’ characters Ian and Erin. This trope was popularized in the early 2000s and Final Destination Bloodlines brought it back with our beloved Erik Campbell. But Erik isn’t just there for comic relief, he is a testament to how Death loves to toy with his victims in the franchise. He is also the only character in Final Destination that was supposed to live.

Erik Campbell: The black sheep

With his dark hair and sarcastic humor, Erik Campbell bears a resemblance to Ian Mckinley from Final Destination 3. Initially, Ian expresses skepticism about the protagonist’s ‘psychic’ ability to predict death. But after witnessing his girlfriend’s death, his disbelief turned him cynical.

Similarly, in Final Destination Bloodlines, Erik is skeptical of his cousin Stefani’s premonitions. Instead, he takes Stefani’s warnings as insensitive, especially after his father’s death. Here, he takes on the protective elder sibling role: standing his ground for the family. It’s clear that despite his deadpan nature, Erik cares deeply for his family. He is very much the ‘black sheep’ and yet the film strays away from boxing him into a stereotypical category, giving him a fleshed out arc instead.

“When people see the way I look as Erik, and see the tattoos and piercings that they put on me, they make an assumption about every other alt-looking emo, punk-rock character that we’ve seen played in the genre since the ’80s, you know?” actor Richard Harmon tells Indiewire about his character Erik. “I knew then that he cared about his family more than anything. That’s actually Erik’s driving force, which I don’t know if it originally was supposed to be.”

Death has a sense of humor

Erik is grieving the death of his father after his shift at the tattoo parlor when a chain of little accidents lead to his near death experience. We soon learn why Erik was spared by death when Mrs. Campbell reveals he has a different father than his siblings. This means he won’t be affected by the Campbell family’s doomed bloodline. So then why would Death waste its time targeting Erik? Was it just to toy with him? Give him a warning?

Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein have admitted that Death is a sentient character throughout the franchise. “Death has a sense of playfulness,” Stein says about the tattoo parlor scene.“Just like a fisherman might catch a fish without intending to kill it, and they’ll hook the fish and then throw ’em back, that’s exactly what Death is doing with Eric in that tattoo parlor scene…”

This analogy is also shown when Erik mocks death in the next scene. As he steps onto the street, he gets narrowly missed by a truck, a reference to a similar scene in the first Final Destination. It’s almost like a stern warning from Death. But due to Erik’s determination in trying to save his brother Bobby, Erik ends up paying the consequences. “Tony says it: when you fuck with death, things get messy.” What makes Erik such a special character is that he is the only character in the franchise that is not supposed to die. Still, he is an example of why you shouldn’t mess with death.

That MRI death scene…

The filmmakers were definitely creative with their kills on this one. If you’ve seen any Final Destination movie, you’d know that there are exceptions to cheating death, though risky. Erik tries this trick with Bobby in the hospital when visiting William Bludworth, a recurring character of the series. Taking advantage to Bobby’s nut allergy, Erik plans to momentarily kill his brother and then resuscitate him so that Death will skip him.

Unfortunately, this backfires and Erik gets the most brutal death of the movie. It’s important to note that unlike the other Campbells, Erik was the only one not targeted in the face area. For example, his father, Mr. Campbell took a lawn mower to the face; then, his sister Julia’s head got crushed inside a garbage truck; Bobby’s head got impaled by a vending machine spring; Darlene got hit in the head by a pole; and finally the Reyes siblings got impaled in the head by two logs at the end of the film. These similar deaths are a reference to how Iris died in the premonition and in front of Stefani.

The Campbell’s deaths are all connected, except for Erik’s because he isn’t a Campbell. This makes his death scene the most memorable and, of course, separates his character from everybody else. Even the large skull tattoo on his torso was intentional, referencing the skull imagery on the prior Final Destination movies. As Erik is sandwiched into the machine, the metal tubes of a wheelchair impale the skull on his torso, referencing the Final Destination 5 poster.

On that note, Erik’s death might just be the most gruesome death in the franchise so far. His piercings being ripped off by the magnetic pull of the MRI before being crushed– it’s like the log scene all over again. But one particular part of that scene was Harmon’s idea, the one that made us all wince. “Looking at this character and the way that he’s tattooed and the way that he’s pierced, I said ‘there’s another piercing, you know,’ and they’re like, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I think you know exactly what I mean,'” Harmon said about the MRI scene.