There are few people out there more interested in the ways the human body can be destroyed in terrible, Rube Goldberg-style accidents than personal injury lawyers. It’s not surprising, then, that a law office would have such a fascination with the horrible series of deadly accidents that fill the Final Destination movies that they’d take a break from running after ambulances to see which of the films’ typically mortal injuries are most likely to happen in real life.
Downtown LA Law, the firm in question, ran the numbers on the movies over on its website. Their methodology involved “[tracking] every type of death recorded in each of the five instalments of the Final Destination franchise” and measuring them up “against actual injury data from the last recorded year in the US.”
While slipping on spaghetti after fleeing an Incubus-soundtracked apartment fire isn’t, thank god, a typical problem, the same Final Destination 2 scene’s “ladder-related injury” is by far the most common accident that Americans are likely to experience. (Hopefully not with the same level of severity.)
Getting hurt by a fence, as in Final Destination 5, is the next most common injury, followed by weight-lifting, and being scalded by oil. From there, the number of recorded instances of each Final Destination-style injury drop off quite a bit, with only 14 people having been hurt on a roller coaster last year and one person getting burned in a tanning bed.
The same site tells us that stuff exploding may be the way most Final Destination characters are injured or die, but “falling” is actually “the most common cause of injury in the United States since 2019.” What goes unreported in all of this is how often seeing a kid ominously smashing toy trucks together in the next car over as you’re driving is likely to result in mass highway carnage.
For those interested in further details about the overlap between the sorrows of real life and the joys of schlock horror movies, check out more statistics on the Downtown LA Law website.
[via Bloody Disgusting]
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