ANAHEIM, Calif. — Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein sat in front of a blazing fireplace in Stein’s Los Angeles apartment several years ago, logged onto Zoom and launched into their pitch to direct “Final Destination Bloodlines,” the latest film in the popular horror franchise.

Producer Craig Perry, who has worked on all six "Final Destination" movies since the first in 2000, noticed the strangeness of a fireplace in Los Angeles in August immediately, Lipovsky says.

“We knew someone was going to ask,” he says of the plan he and his directing partner had plotted. “We just said, ‘Well, we’re just setting the mood,’ which was a setup, something the movie does very often as well. It sets something up really early to pay off later.”

Thirty minutes later, unbeknownst to Perry, producer Jon Watts and other studio officials on the video call, Lipovsky and Stein triggered the payoff, hitting a key that switched their live Zoom feed to a lookalike clip they’d prepared.

Flames started to crawl from the fireplace up to the mantelpiece, where various objects caught fire, Lipovsky said. The producers reacted exactly as he and Stein had hoped.

“We were all muted, so we’re pointing and like gesticulating,” Perry, who recalls watching the pair’s unusual pitch, says on a separate call. “The poor guys are trying to finish their pitch, and they’re looking at each other.

“Finally, they unmute us,” Perry says. “They’re like, ‘What? What?’ We’re like, ‘Fire! Fire!’”

Stein and Lipovsky ran frantically around the room. One grabbed a fire extinguisher, the other shouted he’d call 911. A giant ceiling fan whipped around, blowing the smoke out of the room.

“Everyone kind of realized it was a joke and started applauding, thinking it was over,” Lipovsky says. “We’re like, ‘Oh, thank you.’”

As anyone who’s ever seen a "Final Destination" film should know, the film has a deadly sense of dark fun even as it cleverly dispatches its unlucky cast members, so it was only a matter of time before the other shoe — or in this case, fan blade — dropped.

“Then I jumped out of the way as the ceiling fan came crashing down and chopped off Adam’s head, spraying blood everywhere,” he says of the final scene in their elaborate special-effects prank.

For most people, sneaking a fake fire or a bogus beheading into the company video call might get us a one-way ticket to the HR department. But the team entrusted with deciding whom to hand the keys of this valuable film franchise saw a touch of genius amid their madness.

“It was perfect,” Perry says. “They had so thoughtfully and carefully analyzed the franchise and put together a presentation that would have gotten them the job irrespective of whatever else happened.”

And the pitch plus the prank?

“They basically pitched “Final Destination” and also killed themselves doing it,” Perry says. “Which showed such massive confidence that not only did they understand how the franchise works, but here’s a demonstration of how we’d make it work,” Perry says.

“The only problem was that nobody recorded it, so we would have it for posterity,” he adds, laughing. “But it will live in infamy as one of the great director presentations and pitches of all time.”

Death is coming

“Final Destination Bloodlines” is the sixth in a franchise that debuted in 2000 with a new twist on horror. Instead of a slasher in a mask or with a hook for a hand, it’s literally Death who comes for you in “Final Destination,” and Death always gets what, and who, it wants.

Perry, who helped develop the original “Final Destination” and has been a part of all six so far, has surely heard more “Final Destination” pitches than anyone out there. That’s a whole lot of blood and guts, yet he’s remarkably cheery when he comes on the line to talk about this new one that opens in theaters on May 16.

“That’s how you have to be,” Perry says, laughing. “You have to be happy. We’re making movies. What a rare and wonderful gift, right?”

It was 1997, he says, when a three-page outline of a movie that originally was written as an episode of “The X-Files” landed on his desk.

“It was written by Jeffrey Reddick, who created this, and he and I came up with a treatment we then sold to New Line,” Perry says. “From sale to production was just under two years. It was really fast, and the reason being, I think, that the concept speaks for itself.

“It’s so unique, particularly in the late ’90s when we’re coming off “Scream,” “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” There’s lots of movies of people wearing a mask or having a fish hook or something.

“This was that same slasher principle, but it was a much more ethereal concept,” Perry says. “It was Death itself, a much larger conceit, and that, I think, is what has stood the test of time and given us the opportunity to revisit, and in the case of “Final Destination Bloodlines,” reinvent that concept.”

Without an onscreen villain, the scares and screams of the "Final Destination" films come from the filmmaking itself, he says.

“Without death being manifest flesh or corporeally formed, the filmmaker is Death,” Perry continues. “Zach and Adam are clearly consummate filmmakers because they were able to not only execute all those visual connective tissues in a way that the death sequences make sense, but they’re able to sort of correspond that with the challenge of having it be funny, having actual pathos, having it be cringy and scary, and also make sure it’s actually fun.

“That soupçon of elements is a degree of difficulty that I think a lot of people don’t really consider when they’re thinking about a 'Final Destination' movie,” he says. “But I think we pulled it off with this one.”

Surprising and fresh

When “Final Destination” debuted in 2000, Lipovsky and Stein were in their late teens and early 20s, a prime demographic for horror.

“That’s the perfect age to watch “Final Destination,” Lipovsky says. “Especially because I grew up in Vancouver, where most of these movies have been filmed.”

He stops, coughing until he can get a drink of water, and Stein takes over for him.

“Zach actually had a lot of friends who were killed in these movies, who worked on these movies,” Stein says. “He grew up 5 miles from Lions Gate Bridge, which is the bridge in ‘Final Destination 5.’”

Lipovsky comes back. “It was amazing, as the city itself is sort of set pieces of 'Final Destination' itself,” he says. “It’s our roller coaster in “Final Destination 3.” The whole city is alive in that franchise, and none of them had been directed by someone locally.

“So it was special to be in your hometown making a movie that your hometown is very proud of and the whole world celebrates,” Lipovsky says.

For Stein, the first film in the series left him fearful of flying for the next few years.

“Whenever I went on a plane, you feel every bump and go, ‘Should I have skipped this plane?’” he says. “That definitely stuck with me.

“But after that, I think I watched it more as a film fan,” Stein continues. “Like, how are they going to do these Rube Goldberg [complicated death sequences] in a new way that keeps it surprising and fresh? I just loved all the intricacies and details of those.”

In the new film, the cast is three generations of the same family, which offered more complex relationships and emotions to play with on screen, Stein says.

In it, college student Stefani Reyes (played by Kaitlyn Santa Juana), is haunted by nightmares of the deadly collapse of a Space Needle-like restaurant decades earlier. Her grandmother Iris was there that day, she learns, but had a premonition of disaster that provide time for all to flee before the tower fell.

But Death apparently keeps good records, and as Iris tells Stefani, has been tracking down all who survived and their many descendants — who would have never existed had Iris had minded her own beeswax — and offing them one by one.

Stefani tries to save her extended family by warning them … but you know how families and Final Destinations are, right?

Comedy and horror

In 1999, one year before Perry produced his first “Final Destination,” he also produced his first of many chapters in the “American Pie” comedy franchise.

Both pushed the boundaries of horror gore and comedy raunch to new places for mainstream Hollywood fare, so one wonders whether in some way they might have shared similarities.

“I think it’s less what they have in common on a superficial level,” Perry says. “But structurally, I feel that horror and comedy are very similar in how the scenes are constructed.

“It’s about when the audience or the characters learn information,” he says. “It’s about when they take action on that information. It’s how long can you hold the moment before you release the tension in a horror movie or you reveal the joke on the other side. The construction of the scenes is shockingly similar.

“So if you understand intellectually how to approach one, I feel that you would be able to approach the other with an equal degree of efficiency,” Perry says.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see that Stein and Lipovsky aced the structural elements of the prank that added a flourish to their bid to direct “Bloodlines.” Not that they were at all sure whether they should even attempt it, Stein adds.

“It was Zach’s idea to do this,” Stein says of his faked death on Zoom. “I was a little worried. I was like, ‘Our pitch is good! What if something goes wrong?’

“But he convinced me just by taking the fear out of it, and bringing it back to the childhood joy we had when we were first discussing the idea,” he continues. “Which was like let’s make a little 'Final Destination' set piece to show, not tell, what we would do with this movie. The innocent and fun of that totally won me over.”

Not, Lipovsky adds, that they still almost bailed out on the prank at the last minute.

“We were about to execute this incredibly elaborate thing, which once we turned both submarine nuclear keys, there was no going back,” he says. “Jon Watts started picking up on something we had just pitched, which is everything you want in a pitch, them pitching ideas back to you.

“So that was happening, and Adam’s looking at me like, ‘Abort! Abort! Abort!’” Lipovsky says.

They did not call it off, of course. Watts finished what he was saying. The two directors looked at each other one last time.

And then, Stein says, pressed play.

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