We Asked the <em>Final Destination</em> Directors to Break Down Every Kill

Thinking up unique and gruesome ways for people to die may not sound like a fun time, but directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein secured the biggest gig in the horror film industry by doing just that. Their new entry into the Final Destination franchise, Final Destination: Bloodlines, is the first installment in 14 years. It’s a hefty burden to lead the new film in a beloved horror franchise, but Lipovsky and Stein were amped and prepped to take on the challenge.

"We're huge fans of the other movies," Stein tells us in a recent Zoom interview. "There was this immense pressure of how do we make something original?" The duo won the opportunity to helm the franchise, beating out hundreds of other directors, by submitting an audition where they faked their own deaths. It showed off the passion they had for the project and their creativity. "It was a many year process of planning out the [opening] sequence," Lipovsky says.

The intricate details that go into making the Rube Goldberg-like action sequences that lead to the deaths in these films are the most memorable parts of the franchise. Fans have their own favorites, and unlock new fears of everyday objects and experiences through the films. Lipovsky and Stein hope that with their new installment, which also features the last on screen role for horror legend Tony Todd, audiences will inherit new fears. The two sat down to show me death's grand design by diving deep into how they set up each kill in Final Destination: Bloodlines.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Final Destination: Bloodlines directors Zach Lipovsky (left) and Adam Stein nailed the latest entry in the horror franchise—the film grossed $102 million in its opening weekend.

Adam Stein: We always said our goal was to make a Final Destination movie where you were covering your eyes while you watched it, but you also have a big smile on your face at the same time. We were so excited to get the job, and then immediately felt the weight and pressure of trying to deliver the best installment of the franchise ever. We're huge fans of the other movies. But there's an inherent predictability in them as well. You know that characters are going to escape death, and then death is gonna come after them. There was this immense pressure of: How do we make something original?

Zach Lipovsky: We did a really detailed catalog of all the previous movies, and all the different types of death sequences that they have done. We thought about which ones worked, which ones didn't, and how many omens happened before each person died. We didn't want to repeat anything— so there's no dripping water on an electrical outlet, or a screw on a balance beam.

AS: There were Excel spreadsheets involved.

AS: My favorite death after an opening scene is the gymnastics scene from Final Destination 5 with the screw on the balance beam. It's incredible, masterful filmmaking and creation of suspense. You've got the screw on a balance beam that nobody is touching. Every time you see it, you're cringing and squirming in your seat. That was highly influential in the creation of the barbecue scene in Bloodlines with the shard of glass and the cup. We knew we wanted to have this cringey, visceral MacGuffin that we focus the audience's attention on, and then use it in a way they never expect.

ZL: One of the most influential scenes was what we called the spaghetti death from Final Destination 2, where one of the surviving characters is feeling good about cheating death. At the beginning of the scene, he throws old spaghetti out of the window, which makes you think he's a jerk, so you're ready to see him die. Then once he finally escapes all the insanity of his apartment burning up and getting stuck in the garbage disposal, he thinks he got away. But the thing that gets him in the end is the spaghetti that he threw out the window. Death was very clever in the way that it brought him to that point. Death had to start a fire, so he'd use the fire escape, so he'd go down and slip on the spaghetti that he threw out the window.

"There’s a really interesting tension of creating this beautiful sunset proposal that has a lot of suspense to it, because you know bad stuff is about to happen," says Adam Stein of the film’s opening scene.

ZL: The openings of all the films are so iconic and all of them prey on a very universal fear—fear of flying, roller coasters, driving. These are things that everybody does. When you do them, you have a bit of an icky feeling that you ignore. We all have this minor anxiety, but we do it anyway. What if by doing it anyway something horrible happened?

We really wanted to have something that had scale and fit within the 1960s. So we landed on a restaurant in the sky. Because in the '60s, that's when they started putting these restaurants up. We loved how universal the fear of heights is. We really wanted to take that feeling and also merge it with the relatability of a restaurant. We all go on romantic dates, go in elevators, and get excited for an important night. It was a many-year process of planning out that sequence to ruin restaurants and heights for people.

AS: I do have a fear of heights, and I've been up to those buildings. Every time I do it, I'm like, why am I doing this? But it was really fun to figure out how to create that visceral experience of giving people vertigo. But also make it feel romantic. There's a really interesting tension of creating this beautiful sunset proposal that has a lot of suspense to it, because you know bad stuff is about to happen.

ZL: It's one of the things that makes Final Destination unique: the idea that there are people in these movies [who you actually want to die]. We wanted to make sure that a lot of the people you meet at the beginning are mean to our main characters on purpose. So when the maître d gets it or the older woman gets lit on fire, you can enjoy the death of these people while also rooting for our main characters to survive. It's really important to set that tone for the movie and get the audience into the headspace that this is fun—and not really depressing. So when the boy is crushed by a piano, that's a key moment to set the tone of the movie. We did a lot of work on how his brains splatter across the pavement and come to a rolling stop.

AS: It was a Russian Roulette of who's going to die. It was a fun new experience for Final Destination because in the other movies, you basically know as soon as the movie cuts to an individual by themselves in a certain location—this person's gonna die now. We wanted to really give the audience an unpredictable experience and increase the suspense.

ZL: It was important to us that every single family member in that scene does one action that leads to Howard's death. One of them breaks the glass; one of them pulls the Jenga tower; one of them places the rake; one of them puts the beer bottle down. Every single person does something that leads to his death.

AS: They build the Rube Goldberg machine together. They each needed to be there to make the mousetrap happen to kill Howard. It goes to the theme of family and that they're all connected in this fated way.

"We always said our goal was to make a Final Destination movie where you were covering your eyes while you watched it, but you also have a big smile on your face at the same time," Stein says.

ZL: Unpredictability is a big piece of what we were going for. There's such a legacy of these films. Everyone knows how these movies work. This scene is to some degree, one of our most traditional in that it cuts to a person by themselves in a dangerous place. The audience who knows these movies will say, "Okay, this motherfucker's going to die soon."

Right away, there's a huge expectation that they're coming into that scene. It allows us to have a lot of fun with setting up this incredibly elaborate Rube Goldberg. It took many, many years to figure out all the details of how to hang someone by their nose on a chain. That scene begins in basically the most traditional way a Final Destination set piece can begin, but it ends with a surprise.

AS: It was really exciting for us to do a real Rube Goldberg thing that happens on the tattoo countertop. In the movies, the Rube Goldberg sequence is always done in edits, and obviously we do that also. But it took the team quite a long time to do the dominoes of the stuff that knocks the jar over, which breaks, and all the needles scatter on the desk. We also talked a lot about: Why does Death even do this to Eric in the tattoo parlor if he's not next on the list? It's like a sport for Death. It's equivalent to the metaphor of a fisherman hooking a fish, and then throwing it back in the ocean. It's fun for them. So hooking him by the nose and then tossing him back into the world was like Death doing the same thing.

There's a lot of fun Easter eggs in the tattoo parlor. There's a neon circle light that Eric approaches as he's about to tattoo himself, which evokes the MRI machine that he eventually dies in.

AS: We initially talked about it in terms of: What are the things we can ruin for people? Because Final Destination is famous for ruining things for people. We do hope that people still get necessary medical MRI imaging, but once you start researching MRI accidents, you really can't unsee it, because it's a real thing where the intense magnetization leads to horrible accidents. We also love planting something that you think is off the table that then becomes the final kill. Eric breaks the glass of the vending machine, and there's a coil that sticks out. You basically forget about it when they're in the MRI room.

ZL: There's a shot from inside the vending machine looking at exactly where he's hit the glass when he walks away. You see that the glass is broken exactly square with the door across from it. So that when that door opens later, it'll be exactly lined up with his head. One of my favorite Easter eggs that fans might really love is Eric's tattoo of a skull on his chest. As he's dying, that tattoo gets exposed, and then bits of metal come through his chest through the tattoo exactly in the form of the poster for Final Destination 5—which is a skull with a whole bunch of rebar coming through it.

AS: We always knew we needed to put logs in the movie, because as soon as we started working on Final Destination, everyone was like, "Logs!" It's the most famous image from Final Destination. But how do you kill the main characters in a way that's surprising but has people leaving the theater smiling? The idea of using a train for the ending came from the desire to have a bookend in the movie and end it where it began. We also liked the metaphor of the train being this path of fate that you can't get off of.

The trick is really helping the audience get to believing in the false happy ending. You know you're still watching a Final Destination movie—and it isn't over yet. We shot the opening shots on the same street as the ending sequence. We found this perfect neighborhood in Vancouver where there were train tracks right next to this 1960s-style neighborhood that had a hill next to it, where the penny from the beginning of the film could roll down the hill next to train track. Having the penny come back was exciting to us, because it showed the long game that death has been playing since the beginning. So all those things work together to create a Rube Goldberg death that maybe is worthy of the iconic logs in Final Destination.