Erik Campbell (Final Destination)

Erik Campbell is a character from Final Destination Bloodlines (2025), the sixth installment in the supernatural horror film franchise Final Destination, directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein. He was created by Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor, and Jon Watts, and portrayed by Richard Harmon. Erik is introduced as the son of Howard and Brenda Campbell, being the oldest of their three children. In the 1960s, his paternal grandmother Iris had a vision of a restaurant tower collapsing and prevented the disaster, saving herself and hundreds of others. As Erik and his family were not supposed to exist, Death itself targets Iris' bloodlines, killing them in order of lineage. When his younger sister is killed, seemingly out of order, Erik learns he is not a biological descendant of Iris, being the result of his mother's affair with another man. While attempting to help his brother Bobby nullify Death's list, Erik dies when he gets sucked into a malfunctioning magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine by a wheelchair that crushes and impales him.

In developing the cast of Bloodlines, Lipovsky stated that he and Stein wished to avoid creating one-dimensional characters, instead wanting to feature ones with layers to them. The reveal about Erik's parentage came from the crew wanting to subvert audience expectations regarding the order of the characters' deaths; one discarded concept involved twins whose birth order was uncertain. Initially, Erik was envisioned as an online streamer who died while livestreaming a virtual reality game. A longtime fan of the franchise, Harmon was cast as Erik eight months after his first audition, with a delay due to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Harmon helped influence many of his character's scenes and dialogue by either improvising his lines and actions or making suggestions to the production crew. From the beginning, Lipovsky and Stein hoped to feature a death scene involving an MRI machine, but were unsure where to place such a sequence in the film; they also questioned its ethical implications. In the end, they included the concept as it received a positive response from the production team.

Following the release of Bloodlines, Erik became a fan favorite. Critics often singled out Harmon's performance as among the best in the film, recognizing him as a "scene stealer" and praising him for adding comic relief. Erik's fake-out death scene at his tattoo parlor and his actual death involving an MRI machine were also commended by critics, with the latter deemed the best death scene in Bloodlines. Erik's death was further analyzed for its accuracy by scientific experts.