ComingSoon spoke to Final Destination Bloodlines directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky about the horror film, which successfully brought back the iconic series. The duo discussed two of the most brutal kills and how they balanced out the darker moments with plenty of heart. The film is out now on Digital and arrives on 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD on July 22.

“Plagued by a violent recurring nightmare, college student Stefani heads home to track down the one person who might be able to break the cycle – her grandmother, Iris – and save her family from the grisly demise that inevitably awaits them all,” says the synopsis.

Tyler Treese: Adam, my favorite kill in Final Destination Bloodlines was in the hospital with the strong magnet. I didn’t expect nipple and genital piercings to come into play, yet they did in the best way. What was the biggest difficulty in pulling off that scene? Because it’s such a spectacle, and the crowd was just going wild when I saw it.

Adam Stein: Wow. The MRI scene was such a fun scene to figure out. I think the biggest difficulty was to balance the tones and to make it unpredictable. Because, you know: Final Destination. People are gonna die.

But we always wanted to make it unpredictable so that you’re at the edge of your seat and in that scene you have this heart to heart between the brothers that we really wanted to be heartfelt, really wanted you to root for them and feel their connection while at the same time making things really unpredictable. Bobby’s next on the list, but Eric goes first, you know? This sort of twisting things back and forth was a really hard thing to do throughout the movie.

But it was really important for us to make the audience on the edge of their seat so they didn’t know what was gonna happen next.

Zach, my second favorite kill in Final Destination Bloodlines was the garbage trap scene because you really circumvent expectations. How was it doing that misdirect? Because like the series plays into its own tropes and it’s very knowing. So, how is it leaning into that, but not going too far to where you’re self-parody?

Zach Lipovsky: Yeah, I think we are really excited by the idea of telling the audience exactly what’s going to happen, and then walking past it and the audience not really knowing that they’ve been told exactly what’s gonna happen, and then it happens way in the background.

Because Final Destination’s never really done that before. Usually the set pieces are built amongst all these carefully done inserts that interconnect in a Rube Goldberg trap, but to do a Rube Goldberg trap in the background of a wide shot where the audience isn’t really necessarily looking, and then suddenly they realize it’s going down…

We were so happy that kind of execution ended up really, really working. ’cause it’s always tricky as a filmmaker, you build this little carefully constructed experience, especially when it’s a surprise. It’s difficult to know, will it surprise people?

Because you already know how it’s gonna go, so you don’t know if it’ll be surprising, but we’re delighted and it was so much fun to see audiences start to point at the corner of the screen knowing [something] is gonna go on in the background.

And when it comes to Julia’s death, we were very excited to have a shot where you kept expecting us to cut away, and it just keeps going and keeps crushing her and keeps, and then eventually her arm rips up. Just like every second you go, “they’ve gotta cut away now. No, they’re not. Oh, they’ve gotta cut away now. Oh, they’re not.” And just that was very perverse of us, but it was something we were really excited to kind of execute, to kind of show some people something that they can’t believe that they’re watching.

Adam, these movies are interesting because you make us care about these characters, but then we also celebrate when they die in a ridiculous way. How is it threading that needle? Because it’s a very particular place that these films hold.

Stein: Absolutely. Yeah. We, personally, as movie lovers, love all the feelings. We love the movie that gives you all the feelings. So we tried really hard to balance scares and suspense with also humor and with heart because this is the first Final Destination about a family. So it was really important to us that the family actually care about each other, actually have strong relationships, and that the deaths mean something.

And it was our thought from the very beginning that if you cared about the characters and they cared about each other, that the death scenes would be even more suspenseful and more horrific. So that was kind of what we were trying to do.

At the same time, we knew we couldn’t go full Hereditary and have this be a movie about family grief because Final Destination has an urgency and a fun to it. So that’s what made the balancing act of tone so tricky, but also so much fun to kind of figure out.

Thanks to Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky for taking the time to talk about Final Destination Bloodlines.