There’s a special, sparsely populated subgenre of films that have had a unique effect on my behaviour. They’ve lingered long after the end credits not based on quality but on how they’ve then proceeded to invade my day-to-day decision-making. The most topical example of which, Steven Soderbergh’s cautionary thriller Contagion, has dominated the thoughts of many lately, a chilling warning to watch what we touch and who we interact with. After I saw it back in 2011, I stepped on to the subway suddenly acutely aware of the potential danger of a surface and ever since, when I absent-mindedly touch my face during the day, Kate Winslet’s horrifying reminder of why we shouldn’t be doing this replays in my head.

But there’s another that’s been part of my life for even longer and despite its comparative silliness, it’s arguably had a more profound grip, spookily re-entering my mind at strange times such as these. This week marks the 20th anniversary and my (probable) 20th rewatch of Final Destination, a compellingly nasty yet darkly humorous film about the crushing inescapability of death. The set-up remains an underappreciated stroke of genius. A teen has a premonition that his flight to Paris will explode mid-air but finds out that by abandoning the plane with a random assortment of peers, a plan has been interrupted and the Grim Reaper must find gruesome ways to redress the imbalance.

And so began a formula that was regurgitated over the span of another four sequels as unintended survivors of a tragedy were picked off one-by-one in a series of freak “accidents”, each one nastier than the last. Dismissed by some at the time as a “dramatically flat” scrap of nonsense made by “contemptuous” film-makers, it was Roger Ebert who provided one of the few voices of dissent, recognising the appeal of the film’s “biblical” dilemma and its “unusual substance”. As a 15 year old at the time, I was enthralled as I watched and then faintly terrified in the months after.

While the film made waves for its deviously well-modulated shocks (one of which was so effective that the makers had to insert an extended introduction to the next scene as test audiences needed time to calm down), what struck me at the time, and more so with every next rewatch, was the sheer hopelessness of it all, the brutal unambiguousness of its conceit: death is coming for us and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. This wasn’t a villain who could be brought down in a blaze of bullets. There was no cathartic finale to leave us feeling safe and satisfied. Death would remain at large for the rest of time and while we might be able to cheat it once, maybe even twice, it will keep coming and coming and coming until it bumps us off.

It would be one thing if death was content to just go about its business with a sense of cold and clinical professionalism but the Final Destination movies suggest that instead, it takes a great level of glee in constructing a series of elaborate and macabre traps. While the opening scene remains the most frightening plane crash ever put to screen, it’s the gory, startling death sequences on the ground that stayed with me, longer than I anticipated. Rather than needing to avoid a masked madman (in the first iteration of the script, intended to be an episode of The X Files, death was personified), in Final Destination, characters would need to avoid everything in order not even to survive but to live a little bit longer (in the sequel, the only survivor from the first film locks herself in a padded cell for protection). Seemingly innocuous elements of everyday life suddenly became instruments of torture. It brought an unsettling fragility to the world of the film and in turn, my teenage real-world view of it.

Walking past a construction site would bring visions of a falling brick smashing me in the face. A bathroom would inevitably lead to a fatal slip. The dentist’s chair a myriad of ghoulish possibilities. It’s not quite the crippling fear that it might sound like but more of a “Huh, what if?” thought that would flash into my mind with the same speed with which it would then disappear, long enough for me to second-guess a potentially risky everyday decision. For early millennials that came of age with the franchise, it became a go-to punchline for when one would narrowly cheat death, however low the stakes might seem.

It’s a flawed film for sure – its stabs at broad comedy, courtesy of a post-American Pie Seann William Scott, are as tiresome as the nonsensical law enforcement characters – but it’s a rare horror film that allows for brief existential grapples from teens who had previously thought of life as unending and death as out of reach. It’s not an openly religious film but I imagine for some who do subscribe to certain belief systems, there’s a strangely reassuring throughline here, that everything happens for a reason, that we’re all part of a grand design. In the film this might be a particularly sadistic one but only when we step out of the lives that are pre-written for us to fulfill.

With each film, things got sillier (although the fifth installment did end with a killer twist), but the core messaging remained the same: death is inescapable. In recent years, attempts to replicate the formula have been equally hard to avoid with low-rent copycats like Wish Upon and Truth or Dare forcing their teen casts into similarly structured yet markedly less effective death sequences and recently it was announced that the franchise that started it all would finally be getting an inevitable reboot. Details are scarce and so far early word suggests it will take place in the world of first responders. It’s an intriguing proposition and at a time when hit-making horror house Blumhouse has ensured that its films turn a tidy profit by keeping costs under $10m, usually as little as $5m, the relatively extravagant budgets required by the Final Destinations (between $25m-$40m) means they can’t afford the risk of audience lack of interest.

But how will a new generation of teens, haunted by evil dolls, evil clowns and evil aliens react to a film about … evil accidents? What’s notable about many of the horror films that have been big hits of late – the Its, the Annabelles, the Conjurings – is the remarkably low body count which in some cases is entirely non-existent. The threat of death gently lingers in these films but in the mean-spirited, give-no-fucks world of Final Destination, it’s waiting on a plane, in the kitchen, on the street, plan already in motion. In this particular franchise, death isn’t coming, it’s already here.