Nearly 15 years after the previous movie in the Final Destination horror franchise, Freaks writer-directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein revived the series with Final Destination: Bloodlines, a modern update that instantly became the series’ number-one all-time box-office earner.
The new movie — once again, about death as a vindictive force actively stalking people who survived a fated calamity — echoes the filmmaking of the older installments, while adding a new twist. This time around, one of the survivors of the original accident lived long enough to have kids and grandkids she couldn’t have had if she’d died young, so death comes after them as well.
Lipovsky and Stein told Polygon in a recent conversation that part of the Bloodlines dynamic is a stronger emotional connection between the audience and the cast. Stein says watching a family collaborating to fight off death, rather than the franchise’s usual friend group or collection of strangers, “makes the movie a lot more complex and interesting, because you really end up caring a lot.” He says the way the central family grieves as they’re picked off one by one gives them “extra depth and emotional relatability,” and a heightened sense of urgency as they try to protect each other.
That said, he and Lipovsky acknowledge that the familial plot twists, in terms of who is and isn’t on the chopping block (or the crushing block, or the “elaborate Rube Goldberg deathtrap” block), have left fans of the series with two big questions. And they want fans to understand the movie’s logic in terms of who lives and who dies.
[Ed. note: Major spoilers ahead for Final Destination: Bloodlines.]
In the movie’s version of 1968, a young woman named Iris (Brec Bassinger) has a premonition about a new skyscraper restaurant collapsing due to shoddy workmanship. In the process, it kills everyone who’s present for its gala opening-night event, including her, her fiancé Paul, and their unborn child. Iris alerts everyone to the danger, and gets them out of the restaurant tower before it collapses. She goes on to live a long life, having two children, Howard and Darlene, who eventually have their own kids: Howard’s are Erik, Julia, and Bobby, and Darlene’s are Charlie and Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Bloodlines’ primary protagonist). But Iris alienates her entire family with her unhinged predictions of doom stalking the family, and winds up estranged from her descendants.
When Stefani, a present-day college student, starts having horrific visions mirroring Iris’ 1968 premonition, she investigates her own bloodline, ultimately reconnecting with her grandmother Iris (now played by Gabrielle Rose), who has spent her life learning how to evade the kinds of bizarre, unlikely coincidences death uses to claim victims in the Final Destination movies.
Since death only goes after its fated prey in the order they were supposed to die, Iris managing to stay alive via isolation and paranoia has kept Stefani and her family safe. But when Iris surrenders to her fate, death comes after her family one by one. Howard is first up, since he’s the oldest. Then death comes for all his children, in order from oldest to youngest, with Darlene and her kids next in line.
Except… while Howard’s oldest son Erik (Richard Harmon) faces a bizarre, unlikely chain of events (pun intended) in the tattoo shop where he works, it’s followed by an even more unlikely reveal. Warner Bros. released his brush with death as a teaser trailer:
And yet (again, spoilers ahead), as revealed later in the film, Erik survived that accident almost completely unhurt, protected from the fire and glass by his leather jacket. His escape from death causes Stefani to question whether everything she learned from Iris was just a paranoid delusion. But Howard’s wife Brenda (April Amber Telek) tearfully admits that Erik isn’t actually Howard’s child, and was the result of an affair.
That seems to put Erik outside of Iris’ doomed bloodline. But he later dies anyway, in a different complicated, ridiculous, horrendously gory accident. So fans have wondered: Why did death go after him? Stein says the answer comes from longstanding Final Destination franchise stalwart William Bludworth, the mortician played by Candyman star Tony Todd.
“Tony says it: when you fuck with death, things get messy,” Stein told Polygon.
“That’s right,” Lipovsky says. “That was our answer to that question. Right after he dies, that’s the first line — ‘Why did he die?’ And Kaitlyn’s character [echoes Bludworth]: ‘When you fuck with death, things get messy.’ I think that’s a very good lesson for everyone to remember.”
In this case, “fucking with death” means the way Erik tries to interfere on behalf of his brother Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner), trying to “trick” death and avert Bobby’s fate by momentarily stopping his heart in a hospital, where he can be immediately resurrected. As Stein and Lipovsky note, death is an active, seemingly intelligent force in the Final Destination series, and it’s well aware when someone’s trying to escape or thwart it.
But Stein also thinks death has a dark sense of humor. “The other big question is, why does death hook Erik in the tattoo parlor, when he’s not next?” he says. “We always liked the idea that death has a sense of playfulness. Just like a fisherman might catch a fish without intending to kill it, and they’ll hook the fish and then throw ’em back, that’s exactly what death is doing with Eric in that tattoo parlor scene.”
That bleak horror-comedy element, Stein says, is what makes the Final Destination movies distinctive. “The thing that makes [Bloodlines] richer as a viewing experience is that in the previous movies, you end up rooting for death more than you end up rooting for the characters, because death is so clever, the way he works. His Rube Goldberg magic is so much fun to watch. It’s full of irony and surprises. We wanted to retain that, and really milk all these deaths for all the fun dark comedy.
“But you’re also rooting for the characters, and not wanting them to die. So it gives you both levels of experience at the same time. That really makes it a more complete, more interesting, fun viewing experience for the audience.”
