Turns out you can teach Death new tricks!

In September of 2022, Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky were selected out of more than 200 hopefuls to direct a sixth installment in New Line’s Final Destination franchise. It had been over a decade since the previous entry — 2011’s Final Destination 5 — which served as a stealth prequel to the original film and seemed to be wrap up the macabre mythology with a neat, blood-soaked bow.

Where could Death’s grand design possibly go from here?

Like the characters of the iconic film series, Stein and Lipovsky defied the odds and breathed new life into the nearly 30-year-old IP with Final Destination: Bloodlines (now playing in theaters everywhere; click here for tickets) in the same way they subverted the superhero genre with their 2018 breakout feature, Freaks.

Boasting a creative arsenal of gnarly kills and a cheeky, self-aware attitude, Bloodlines knows exactly the kind of movie it wants to be. The screenplay written by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor is chock full of clever setups, payoffs, hints, and misdirects that not only play with the established canon of previous Final Destination titles, but also build upon them in brilliant fashion. There’s nary a false note across the sequel’s 110-minute runtime. Audiences seem to agree, with Bloodlines setting new milestones — both critically (a near-perfect score of 93% on Rotten Tomatoes) and financially (a massive $100 million global weekend debut) — for the gleefully morbid saga.

“Something that was interesting, was the unexpected bloodlust of our audiences,” Bloodlines editor Sabrina Ptire admits over Zoom. “There were some shots where we were debating, ‘Is this too far? Is this too much?’ [when]

based on some of the previous Final Destination movies. Maybe it’s because we’ve been desensitized over the years as more boundaries are pushed, but I think the older films did sort of keep some things in check. But when we were testing the movie, we specifically asked, ‘Would you like more gore or would you like less?’ And everybody across the board was like, ‘More! Give us more blood!’ That was really refreshing to hear because then we knew we could be unrestricted with some of this stuff and just dig in."

To pull off the slaughter-filled success, Stein and Lipovsky needed to assemble a creative that could be fully trusted to realize their vision. To that end, they called on previous collaborators like Pitre and composer Tim Wynn, both of whom had worked with the directorial duo on Mech-X4, Freaks, and the live-action Kim Possible.

“They really fought to have me on board," emphasizes the former. “I’m a Canadian editor and so, I think it took a little bit of a convincing to bring me down to LA and work on this project. But I’m so grateful that they were [successful]

.”

Wynn, on the other hand, lobbied for the composer job, writing a theme for Death itself before a script was even in place. “I had a feeling that this movie was going to have some of the same story beats [of previous Final Destination movies] ," he recalls over a separate video call. “It was just my interpretation of what Death sounded like and how it was going to stalk the characters. It fell into exactly what Zach and Adam were looking for. They were looking for a menacing theme that just felt like you could never really get away from it — and I believe that’s what my theme does.”

At the same time, he wanted to marry the more traditional sound of the late Shirley Walker, composer of the first three Final Destination films, with the contemporary inspiration of Brian Tyler, who took up music duties on The Final Destination and Final Destination 5. “I wanted it to have modern sound to it, but still evoke the first two Final Destination movies, because we were very aware of the fans,” Wynn shares. “We wanted them to feel like we were starting the franchise new, but the music still feels like it’s part of the whole Final Destination franchise — rather than going completely off-script and doing something that isn’t characteristically musical in the franchise.”

Like its fatal forebears, Bloodlines kicks off with an ominous premonition of mass mortality, albeit one with a slight twist. This opening turns the clock back to 1968, when a young woman named Iris (Brec Bassinger) singlehandedly prevents a disaster from taking place at a Space Needle-like restaurant called the Skyview.

The source of all the trouble? A brittle glass dance floor and a very unlucky penny.

By this point in the Final Destination lifecycle, however, audiences have long been trained to expect a cascading series of catastrophic failures in some manmade structure that will result in a gruesome parade of burns, evisceration, decapitation, dismemberment, and a whole other manner of sphincter-tightening butchery.

“You’re always looking for ways to stack stuff on top of the other. You can’t start off giving it away too early. You just want to sneak in and keep on building the moment,” says Wynn. “You constantly rise the tension to where it literally explodes on the screen.

For Pitre, the fun of cutting the retro curtain-raiser together was playing with viewer expectations: “People who know the franchise already understand that every little thing that’s off is something to pay attention to. Like the kid getting warned not to steal pennies from the fountain, the weird clanging of a flag on the flagpole, or music that comes on the radio that foreshadows doom. But we also wanted to be careful with people who aren’t familiar with the franchise to understand what’s going on and why we’re being so tense about these things. That was an interesting needle to thread.

She continues: "The guys always had this intention of things getting tighter and tighter, faster and faster, as the build-up to the climax comes. We did do that, but what I started to play with, were cuts that were sort of off the beat and cause a bit of anxiety in a way … I knew that when when I was watching that sequence, I wasn’t happy until my own heart rate increased while watching it.”

The production also played around with aspect ratio, using it as a way to signal Death’s arrival and exit. It’s very subtle and I don’t know if audiences will tune into it," Pitre says. “But what we do, is we open the aspect as Death is arriving, and then we close it when death has left. We thought that just added another layer of really subtle tension that brought people further into the movie and [made it] really immersive.”

Once Iris has her vision and prevents the Skyview massacre from taking place, we jump into the future and learn that the opening was actually a portent within a portent. Iris’s granddaughter, Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), has been dreaming about that fateful evening in 1968 for weeks, unaware of its ominous significance. Long story short: Iris unintentionally created a multitude of family trees that never should have existed and for the last 50+ years, Death has been working overtime to prune them all via a series of freak accidents, including all the ones we saw in the previous five movies.

And since Iris was one of the last people to die in her vision, she, her children, and her grandchildren are next on the Grim Reaper’s to-do list. “A big thing was bringing the family component into it and really building on that in a way where audiences could learn to love these characters,” Pitre notes. “Obviously, you want them to love the characters because you want them to be upset when they die. I think Final Destination fans are looking for the kills, but if we can make it hurt just a little bit more by taking away a character they love, then all the better.”

Indeed, that’s what ends up happening as Stefani’s relatives are picked, off one-by-one, in ever more appalling “accidents" involving a lawnmower, a garbage truck, and, most notable and brutal among them, an MRI machine. The latter proved to be the most challenging to edit because of how it had to balance two kills in quick succession. “The death of a beloved character, Erik [Richard Harmon], happens. We want to be able to mourn that and be upset about it, but we’ve still got the tension of Bobby [Owen Joyner] and what’s happening with him and his anaphylaxis,” Pitre explains. “It was a fine line between what we could do to build and release and then continue another build of tension in that scene. I found it very difficult to walk that line.”

The real key to Bloodlines’ success, though, is the fact that each kill is offset with a healthy dose of pitch-dark comedy that makes it acceptable for the audience to laugh as well as cringe. “With a film like this, where you’re building so much tension all the time, these little releases of comedy are are gold, essentially,” Pitre continues. “They help give the audience a little bit of a break before we build them back up again to some terrible disaster … When you’re given those little nuggets, it’s an editor’s toolbox dream. You have so much to play with."

“I went to school at USC and two of my instructors were the great Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein," Wynn adds. "I mentored with both of them and they really stressed, ‘Don’t have the music be funny. You be the straight man and let the actors and the script carry the weight and be funny. You just be the supporting cast.’ I just tried to propel the action along and and and get out of the way of the comedy.”

On a sadder note, Final Destination: Bloodlines marks the final appearance of horror icon Tony Todd (Candyman) as William Bloodworth, the ghoulish medical examiner/funeral home director/hospital morgue worker who basically became Death’s human proxy, delivering exposition to doomed characters across the franchise since its inception. This entry reveals that Bloodworth’s mysterious knowledge of cheating one’s own mortality can be traced back to his childhood, when Iris saved him from a terrible fate at the Skyview. If you listen closely, you’ll hear Walker’s original Final Destination theme play throughout the scene, which was filmed as Todd was battling the stomach cancer that would ultimately claim his life (the movie is dedicated to his memory).

“We were very excited about the cue, but seeing Tony’s face being projected on the screen and hearing Shirley’s theme interwoven with my theme was just a magic moment,” Wynn remembers. “We all just looked at each other — myself, the directors, and producers — and shed a tear in reverence Tony Todd. We were looking to give him a proper send off, and we felt like we achieved it.”

“I think everybody knew that Tony was sick and when the dailies came in, it was really difficult to see him that way,” Pitre concludes. “But the sparkle was still there. You could still see Tony and we wanted to treat the whole thing very delicately and give him the send-off he deserved. He's such an iconic character and an amazing performer. We were lucky. He brought it on the day and we were able to put together something that I think was a really nice send-off for him. It still gives me chills when I watch the scene back, even now.”

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