Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of Final Destination Bloodlines.

Final Destination may be the hardest horror franchise to spoil. By virtue of its basic conceit — after narrowly escaping a disaster with the help of a premonition, a group of people are stalked and killed by Death itself — almost all of these movies end with a high body count and no one making it out alive. The thrill is less about who will survive, and more about how they’ll bite it. Death, as it turns out, has a nasty sense of humor and a whimsical appreciation for Rube Goldberg chain reactions, making each subsequent entry in the series an act of one-upmanship for elaborate kills. To its credit, Final Destination Bloodlines, the first new installment since 2011’s Final Destination 5, does something a little different — even if it still ends exactly where you’d expect.

Bloodlines announces its twist on the Final Destination format from the jump. The opening takes us back to 1968, where a young Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger) has a sudden vision in which the Skyview, a high-rise tower with a ritzy restaurant at the top, collapses. The disaster is meant to claim the lives of Iris, her fiancé Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones), and everyone else inside. But instead of continuing the story at the moment Iris comes to after her vision, the film jumps forward to the present day, where Iris’ premonition has become her granddaughter Stefanie’s (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) recurring nightmare. Instead of targeting the Skyview survivors, Death is focused on taking down their descendants.

Here’s the basic idea: Back in 1968, Iris was able to save every single person who would have perished in the tower collapse, which left Death with an overwhelming number of people to pick off in the order they were supposed to have died. Because of how long it took Death to get to everyone, those survivors ended up having children of their own, who were never supposed to be born. Those family lines continued, and now Death has a lot of clean-up to do. (This is why you delegate!) Once Death finally claims an older Iris (Gabrielle Rose), it sets about killing her progeny in birth order.

By the end of Bloodlines, Death has done an appropriately thorough job. First, he takes care of Iris’ first-born child, Howard (Alex Zahara), who gets a lawnmower to the face. Then, there’s Howard’s daughter, Julia (Anna Lore), whose head is crushed by a trash compactor; and his son, Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner), who ends up with a wire coil through the brain thanks to an overly magnetized MRI machine. (Julia and Bobby’s brother, Erik, played by Richard Harmon, turns out to not be Howard’s biological son, but he gets brutally killed by the same MRI because Death is a messy bitch who lives for drama.) Iris’ daughter, Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), is up next, along with the two kids she’s been estranged from — Stefanie and her little brother, Charlie (Teo Briones).

Before her long-delayed demise, Iris was living in a safe house designed to protect her from any of Death’s traps. While admittedly not the chillest place to hang out, it’s perhaps the only refuge that will keep Stefanie and her family alive. Darlene is next on Death’s list, so if they can protect her, Stefanie and Charlie will be safe, too. The three head to Iris’ cabin in Darlene’s RV, but they crash just outside the door, and Stefanie’s seat belt jams. She tells Charlie to get Darlene inside while she tries to get out of the car. Obviously Death is not going to stand for any of this, and it orchestrates a chain reaction that explodes the cabin, trapping Charlie under debris and sending the RV into water with Stefanie still stuck inside.

Darlene is able to lift a hefty piece of cabin off Charlie — only to immediately get smushed by a falling lamppost. That means it’s Stefanie’s time to go, and she’s conveniently already drowning in the RV. Charlie rushes to save her and manages to get her seat belt off, but she’s lost consciousness. Stefanie looks like a goner, until Charlie is able to resuscitate her with CPR, and she awakens, gasping for air. As traumatic as this experience is, it may be what saves her: Earlier in the film, Death expert William Bludworth (Tony Todd) explains that the only way to get yourself off of Death’s list is by killing someone else and taking their remaining years (as seen in Final Destination 5), or by dying and being brought back to life (as seen in Final Destination 2). The latter option is clearly the kinder one, and it seems to be the most effective, in that it makes Death abandon the list entirely and skip any remaining victims.

By drowning and being brought back to life, Stefanie has saved herself and her brother. Or so she thinks. In the final scene of Bloodlines, the doctor father of Charlie’s prom date helpfully explains that Stefanie’s heart never stopped, which means she didn’t actually die. That suggests Stefanie and Charlie are still very much on Death’s list. Just as they realize they’re screwed, a penny rolls onto the train tracks nearby — the same penny that led to the tower collapse in Iris’ 1968 vision! — and causes a derailment that sends the entire train rolling through the neighborhood. While the siblings are able to outrun it before it skids to a stop, multiple logs fly out (another Final Destination 2 callback), killing Stefanie and then Charlie.

Death’s work is done, but thanks to Bloodlines’ exceptional box-office performance, a sequel appears inevitable. While movies in this series are historically only loosely connected, the sixth film’s lore-heavy storytelling feels like Final Destination’s attempt at creating a more cohesive universe. We can only speculate about what a seventh franchise film would look like, but these are our best guesses based on the series’ established rules and lingering loose ends.

Final Destination has not yet been able to pull off a legacy sequel in the style of 2022’s Scream or the upcoming I Know What You Did Last Summer, mostly because there are so few surviving characters to bring back outside of Tony Todd’s Bludworth. (Todd has sadly passed, making this film his swan song.) Bloodlines comes closest, however, with an explicit mention of Kimberly Corman, the heroine of Final Destination 2 (played by A.J. Cook) who defied Death 22 years ago by driving a van into a lake, drowning, and being brought back to life. Is it possible that she’d return? Curiously, Bludworth doesn’t mention Kimberly’s pseudo-love interest Thomas Burke (Michael Landes), who was also saved by her temporary sacrifice, since he would have been the next person to die.

Bludworth’s reference to Kimberly as a sole survivor confirms that an alternate scene from the Final Destination 3 “Choose Your Fate” DVD — yes, this is a real thing — isn’t canon. In one of the forking paths viewers could choose, a newspaper article reveals that Kimberly and Burke were pulled into a woodchipper at a hardware store. (There is a woodchipper sketched in Iris’ notebook of past Death traps in Bloodlines, but you have to believe Death has gone the Fargo route multiple times over the last several decades.)

There’s another Final Destination 3 survivor who could return in the next sequel, too: Wendy Christensen, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead. That film’s conclusion is a little ambiguous; Wendy has a premonition of a subway crash that will also kill her sister Julie (Amanda Crew) and her love interest Kevin (Ryan Merriman), but we cut to black before we see what happens. For what it’s worth, producer Craig Perry has said that Wendy, Julie, and Kevin are definitely dead, while Winstead herself maintains that her fate is up for debate.

Of course, Final Destination 7 could also bring back Bloodlines’ Stefanie and Charlie by lightly retconning their deaths by logs as another premonition, but that feels like a cheat that’s not in the spirit of the franchise.

Bloodlines introduces the idea that any offspring you have after cheating Death will also be targeted, which opens up a massive can of worms. We only meet Iris’ family line in the film, but surely many of the survivors of the Skyview incident at the start of the movie went on to have kids, who then had kids themselves. And who knows, maybe Darlene has secret other children of her own. We don’t know what she was up to in all those years of estrangement.

Before Bloodlines’ release, Final Destination fans also speculated that the love child of the original movie’s Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) and Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) could appear.

One of that film’s scrapped endings showed us Alex dying and Clear giving birth to their son. This would have saved her from Death because the creation of new life is another loophole — curiously, Bludworth does not mention this in Bloodlines, perhaps because telling Stefanie to get herself knocked up would be a little rude. Obviously, Final Destination avoided that very silly ending, and Clear doesn’t mention a child in Final Destination 2. (She also explodes, indicating that she never made it off Death’s list.) But hey, if the next movie wants to keep the family theme going, Alex Browning II is a distant possibility.

If unearthing more secret family members is too soap opera for the franchise, Final Destination 7 might want to explore the butterfly effect — not the Ashton Kutcher film, but the concept introduced in Final Destination 2 that anyone saved by a person who should have died is also on Death’s list. It’s not as complicated as it sounds: The Route 23 pileup survivors being picked off in Final Destination 2 were all inadvertently saved by the survivors of Flight 180 from Final Destination. For example, Kat Jennings (Keegan Connor Tracy) reveals that she was on her way to a bed and breakfast when her bus hit someone. That turns out to have been Terry Chaney (Amanda Detmer), whom we saw splattered in the first Final Destination. Kat never made it to the lodge, where she would have died from a gas leak that killed the guests. Okay, so maybe it is a little convoluted.

Basically, Death is a massive control freak, and it considers any lives saved by people who cheat it to be loose ends. The seventh film could focus on people granted extra time by characters from any prior movie in the series. It would be a fun way to reference some of the franchise’s more iconic deaths, and a reinforcement of the films’ shared continuity. On the other hand, it hurts my head to think about. Just trying to explain all of this required more brain power than any Final Destination film should, so maybe this isn’t the best sequel idea to pursue.

How about something completely different? Back in 2013, producer Craig Perry had a bold idea for a sequel to Final Destination 5: a trip back to the 12th century. Whether this would have been a sort of origin story for the series’ premonitions or simply a gory period piece is unclear. Perry was so confident in his take, however, that he hired editor Alexander McNeill to put together a concept trailer for Final Destination 6: The Dark Age. It’s a pretty intriguing preview of what that abandoned idea could have looked like, even if it is just clips from existing movies and shows cut together. The fact that Bloodlines begins in the ’60s suggests the franchise could take a page from the Predator series, which has discovered that its basic premise works well enough in any period of history.

And yes, technically Final Destination 5 went back in time, because it takes place right before the first Final Destination, but a flip phone does not a period piece make.

Ultimately, if the next Final Destination movie wants to stay true to the franchise, it should start from (relative) scratch. Just give us a new lead, a new premonition, and a new set of characters whose escape from the inciting disaster dooms them to even more horrifying ends. These films work best when they’re not weighed down by lore. We’re not watching for the shocking return of Alex and Clear’s son — we’re watching to see what sadistic tricks Death has up its sleeve.

In an era of horror mired in pathos and trauma metaphors, there’s a refreshing simplicity to movies that are just about finding new ways to turn people into goop. (And with practical effects, please.) As tempting as it might be for producers to lean into our Marvel-induced obsession with shared cinematic universes, the best version of Final Destination 7 might be the one that goes back to brutal basics.