Death is back, and it has two new visionaries at the helm.

Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein directed “Final Destination Bloodlines,” now in theaters via Warner Bros. Pictures. The script, which was based on an story from Jon Watts, Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor and written by Busick and Taylor, focuses not on a group of strangers brought together by dodging Death, but rather the family of a woman who escaped Death for decades, making their very lives at odds with Death’s plan.

Lipovsky and Stein spoke with Variety about the joys and challenges of reviving a beloved franchise after 14 years, going wild with the gore and filming a special scene with “Final Destination” mainstay and genre legend Tony Todd, who died in November.

Why were you interested in directing this return to the “Final Destination” franchise?

We’ve always been huge fans of “Final Destination,” but one of the things we love about it as filmmakers is that it’s a unique horror franchise and there’s no personified antagonist. There’s no guy in a mask with a knife, there’s no monster in the woods. What the villain is in these movies is the filmmaking: All these insert, close-up shots of different objects connected to others, cut in the perfect suspenseful sequence to create the sense of a presence that comes from the characters. That’s all built through the directorial shot design. So that’s been something that has always excited us about the franchise — how the suspense is built in that unique way — and it’s one of the delights we had as directors getting to do that.

It’s said you were able to secure the job by talking to the film execs via a Zoom call in which one of you ended up “dead” due to some creative filmmaking. Can you reveal how you pulled that off?

One of the tricky things when you’re pitching to get these bigger jobs is to communicate tone, and “Final Destination” has a really unique tone. Initially, I had the idea of killing one of us on camera live on Zoom. Adam was pretty skeptical at first that it could be pulled off in a way that wouldn’t be cheesy or wouldn’t go wrong. If at any point the wheels fell off and it didn’t work, that would be the end of our chances on this movie. So it was a risky thing to try, but we just decided to at least do all the steps of seeing how that might be possible and enjoy that, and make it its own little short film project. As we got kind of into all the nitty-gritty of how to pull that off, it became so much fun that we had to try it. It was incredibly complex to do: We wanted a completely seamless live experience to have one of the directors get their head chopped off by a ceiling fan in the middle of pitching the movie over Zoom. It was a crazy sequence of technological things that we had to do, but it ended up working well.

Did you end up taping it? Might we see it as a “Bloodlines” special feature someday?

What was crazy is that it was live on Zoom. It was a one-time-only experience. If they had recorded the Zoom, it would have been preserved, but they didn’t record the Zoom and and it wasn’t something where we could say, “Excuse me…” It was their meeting. It’s just for the 15 executives and producers who were on that call to see it. But I think that’s what made it even more magical, because they just felt like it was live, so there was a realism to it that was surprising.

What goals did you have for revitalizing the series and pushing it forward?

There were several things on our minds. The first was that we wanted to build on Jon Watts’ brilliant idea, which was to set the movie around a family tree. That’s what Jon brought to this, the whole reason for the new chapter, and use that to create characters that had a bit more depth and emotional relationships with each other to increase the stakes. In the past episodes of the franchise, they were all teenage friends, or sometimes strangers, that were thrust into the situation, and we just saw what a juicy, emotional canvas it would be to build this around a family.

The other thing that was concerning to us was that the movie needed to be unpredictable to keep the audience on the edge of their seats. The movies had developed a bit of a formulaic structure where there was a premonition, the premonition was avoided, and then death came after the characters one by one. So there were a few things we had in mind to switch up the structure a little bit, to keep it faithful to the canon but to change the order of things, to start in the past and flash to the future and not reveal who the premonition character was right away —  all in service of making the audience lean forward and not know what’s going to happen next. That way, the superfans were just as much in suspense as the people for whom this was their first “Final Destination” experience.

Did you have an approach to shooting the family scenes to make them feel as dynamic as the death scenes?

That was one of our other main priorities: To avoid the idea that you would see a death setpiece and then just fast forward until the next death setpiece. We wanted everything in between those setpieces to be as engaging. A big way of how we brought that to life was to create an environment on set where we made all the characters as rich as possible. But also, the way that we filmed it, we gave the cast a lot of freedom to be able to overlap with each other, to add their lines and try new ideas to create that Amblin-esque chaos that a family can have to bring authenticity to it.

Also, we wanted to make sure that all these characters evolved throughout the film, which is something that you’re not necessarily used to having so deeply in “Final Destination.” We introduced some of them as genre stereotypes, but then really wanted them to evolve, to realize, “Oh, the tattooed asshole is actually really caring and loving of his family and will do anything for his brother” and “The jock-type strong guy actually is sensitive and scared and loves turtles” and just trying to do everything we could to kind of make all of these characters full people, rather than just the next person to die.

Were there any gory moments you had to trim down to keep the MPAA happy for an R rating?

Surprisingly not. Adam and I were extremely excited to make a “Final Destination” movie because there’s a certain expectation of the level of gore you’re going to see. It has to be beyond what you would see in other movies or television. And so we went as far as we could when we were filming the movie. Even then, when we showed the film to audiences, they wanted even more. So we went back and added some sweeteners here and there to push things to the max, because I think that’s one of the things that makes “Final Destination” so unique. It’s kind of interesting because horror has evolved a lot since the last “Final Destination” movie, and previous “Final Destination” movies did have to censor themselves … not for the MPAA, but for audiences. People would start to kind of turn off when it got too gory. In this installment, as soon as we started testing it, it was the exact opposite. Whatever’s happened in the last 14 years, people have become incredibly bloodthirsty and just wanted way, way, way, way more gore than they did before.

The New Line execs remarked on how much the audience has changed since they made the last one and how people are out for blood now for some reason. But also, I think everyone would agree that this is also the funniest “Final Destination” when you watch it with an audience. It’s an extremely vocal audience experience. Everyone is screaming and shouting together at the deaths. They’re also uproariously laughing during certain parts of the movie, sometimes at the same time. It’s some of the glorious deaths that make people squeal in horror and laughter. We had the first test screening we did, and there’s a certain death that happens in the opening where a little boy gets killed, and we had people jump up out of their seats and fist-pump the air. There’s some kind of joyful catharsis when that kid dies, and when that happened, we realized, “OK, the audience is enjoying this.” It’s shocking how much vocal response there is, but you can also hear even small things, like rumbles in the audience when they realize how death is coming for someone or when Aunt Brenda reveals she has a secret that she hasn’t told them. Little things seem to get people in this movie.

What was it like working with Tony Todd? It seemed like he was saying goodbye to his larger fanbase in this movie.

Throughout prepping the movie, we knew Tony was sick, and there were times when we weren’t sure if he would be interested in even doing the movie. But he kept reaching out to tell us, “I’ve got to be in this movie. Don’t write me out of it.” He was very excited to broaden the understanding of his character, Bludworth. In the previous episodes of the franchise, he has been a bit of a mysterious mentor figure, without much character on a human level. So he was very excited about the idea of giving his character a human backstory, where you now understand why Bludworth knew so much about death and was so concerned about premonitions and that sort of thing. But then to also give the character not just a beginning, but also an ending, because we were pretty sure this would be his last “Final Destination” movie, because they take years to make, even though we didn’t know it would be his last movie overall.

As the character is saying goodbye to the other characters in the movie, we also knew it was a meta message of Tony saying goodbye to the franchise. We asked him if he would be willing, in that final moment, to put the script aside and just speak from the heart about what he wanted to leave the audience with. “What do you want your fans to know about life, Tony? Tell them in whatever words you want to say.” The take that’s in the movie is him just speaking from the heart about life, and I think that’s why it’s so emotionally powerful. There was an awestruck hush over the entire cast when we filmed.

I remember vividly after we did that take. The sound engineer came over and looked at me with this shocked expression and said, “Did we just witness that?” It was pretty incredible.

Have you already started thinking about what another installment might look like?

Because we spent the last three years putting every dark, anxious thought in our minds into this movie, it’s hard to think about what else we could tap into for the next one. But Death’s work is never done, so I’m sure there’s more to explore.