Horror, at least since the 1970's, occupies a special place in the youth culture, aiming squarely at young audiences with scores of flicks about teenagers and college students, most notably all the celebrations of "Halloween," the months of "Friday the 13ths," the daily "Nightmares on Elm Street." Those pictures and their innumerable imitators usually provide a sort of logic for their depictions of serial slashers, stabbers, and chainsaw operators working their way through a batch of babysitters, camp counselors, cheerleaders, sorority sisters, or dancers at the senior prom. In many of them some scorned, rejected, even murdered figure from the past returns to wreak revenge on his tormentors, meting out just punishment for bad deeds, often striking when his victims are engaged in sex, the real reason behind the serial killing and horror in general.

Although young people occupy its foreground, "The Final Destination" consciously avoids any logical reason or any hint of retribution in all its deaths - they simply occur, foreseen in the premonitions of its protagonist, the result of some unknowable and implacable fate. The picture depends upon the same gimmick that propelled its three predecessors, the notion that survivors of a catastrophe envisioned by the protagonist, Nick O'Bannon (Bobby Campo), owe a death and must therefore pay up. While Nick struggles to understand his visions, his fellow spectators at a stock car race who escaped a fiery fatal crash because of his warning, begin to die, one by one, in shocking and horrible ways.

In dreams and trances Nick continues to foretell the deaths of the survivors, for whom he feels responsible, but he cannot make sense of the cryptic clues he sees. His friends naturally disbelieve his warnings until several people he initially saved meet their ends in some weird, complicated accidents - impaled, decapitated, dragged to death, strained through a chain-link fence by a crushing automobile engine block, fatally struck by a stone propelled by a lawnmower blade.

At times Nick's visions of a particular disaster involving a recognizable person among the survivors deceive him and us, confusing dream with reality, and in the great manner of contemporary horror, show a false alarm followed soon after by the real thing. Sometimes Nick "sees" and prevents a particular death, only to face the horror of the person he initially saved in effect dying all over again in a strangely parallel manner.

All the deaths throughout the movie reflect the recalcitrance of the inanimate, the malevolence of mechanisms. Concatenations of small, bizarre misfortunes create disasters, as one minuscule malfunction leads to another, suggesting the chanciness of life and the danger lurking in every mechanical device - frayed wires, a shaky ceiling fan, a forgotten tool, a corroded pipe, a dropped nail gun, a stalled conveyor belt in an automatic car wash form deadly combinations.

The deaths caused by the various mechanisms sometimes fuse the comical with the horrible, a familiar notion to fans of the form. While retaining the signature shot of the series, the writer and director devise some remarkable methods of annihilation, including a broken escalator that chews up a victim and spits her out in pieces, and (my favorite) a pool drain that traps the most obnoxious character in the film and vacuums his entrails and organs out of his anus.

"The Final Destination" shows that 3-D has come a long way since "Bwana Devil" and "House of Wax." The picture brilliantly exploits its subject and method, throwing such lethal objects as speeding vehicles, flying tires, rocks, and sharp stakes at the audience. To provide the full thrill of horror, it also shoots flames, sprays blood and, really piling it on, even tosses a severed head from the screen: what's not to like?

Finally, the movie violates the traditions of its genre not only in refusing any logical explanation for the suffering it shows, but also in suggesting the randomness of a universe without meaning, where some inexplicable and unavoidable fate governs all human life. Young or old, male or female, innocent or guilty, none of the characters escapes a punishment they neither sought nor deserved. The picture's bleak themes suggest an unusual hopelessness in horror, an odd conclusion for a form so dominated by youth.