Director Darren Lynn Bousman has told NME what to expect when Spiral, the ninth instalment in the Saw series, hits cinemas next year.

The film, pushed back from its Halloween release date to May 2021 due to coronavirus, is the first “reboot” for the franchise in which Chris Rock (who also executive produced the movie), Samuel L. Jackson and Max Minghella (The Handmaid’s Tale) are set to star. They play three cops called in to investigate a spate of grisly New York murders that are “eerily reminiscent of the city’s gruesome past.”

16 years since James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s original wowed audiences and laid the foundations for a hugely successful horror franchise, Spiral is set to take things in a whole new direction, says Bousman, who has helmed three Saw films already.

“The Saw franchise is such a well-oiled machine. I can’t even explain the nostalgia of being able to do another one now,” he added. “But this movie is so unique and so different than what I think people expect and are ready for. That’s what made it so exciting to get back to the franchise. I read the script and I thought, ‘Holy shit! This is actually really good.’ It didn’t feel like a sequel at all. It feels like a Saw movie and it has some very Saw elements in it but it’s definitely its own unique thing.”

At first, Bousman said he didn’t want to make another Saw film, but Rock’s involvement changed his mind. “I never had any intention of returning to the franchise,” he said. “But the producers sent me the script anyway and told me that Chris Rock was attached to it. Hearing that’s enough to change anybody’s mind.

“You always hear a lot about how some people get producer credits even though they don’t really put in the work that that entails. Chris was not that at all. He was very involved from the original conception of the script, the rewrite, the casting, right up to being at all the locations that we were filming at.”

He added: “It was an important movie for him and you could tell that and I hope that this is the first of many projects I get to work on with the guy.”

‘Spiral: From the Book of Saw’ is currently slated to release on May 21, 2021