The 'Happy Death Day 2U' director answers all the questions you have after watching the sequel

• Warning: There are major spoilers ahead for "Happy Death Day 2U."
• INSIDER caught up with director and writer Christopher B. Landon to break down some of the serious and sillier questions you'll have after seeing the movie.

The sequel to "Happy Death Day" is in theaters and the movie flips the script of the first film. Instead of a straight-up horror flick, director and writer Christopher B. Landon delivers a sci-fi movie inspired by "Back to the Future."

While you're watching the sequel, you may be left with a few unanswered questions. Why isn't this more of a horror film like the last? Did we almost see Tree in any other parallel dimensions? And can Tree die or does she have unlimited lives?

INSIDER caught up with Landon to find out the answers to some of the biggest questions you may have after the movie is over.

SEE ALSO: Our review of "Happy Death Day 2U"

DON'T MISS: The 'Happy Death Day' director says the idea for the creepy baby mask came from a fear of being a bad parent

Why isn't the sequel a horror/slasher movie like the first?

"My biggest goal going into this was I told myself I'm not making the same movie twice," said Landon. "I just don't think that there's any fun to be had in that. And that goes for even adjusting the tone and the genre of the movie." 

Landon definitely did not do that.

"There will be some people out there who might feel disappointed that I'm not delivering some big slasher film where every scene is her sort of running away from a killer," continued Landon. "But I made that movie, so why would I make it again? And it wouldn't be any more interesting if it was someone else constantly running away from a killer, you know? There's only so many ways that you can kill people and call it entertainment. So I really wanted to tackle it in a different way and part of that meant shifting even the tone and adding new elements to the movie like sci-fi."

Where did the idea for the sequel come from?

"Happy Death Day 2U" isn't a mere rehash of the first film. While the first movie was a rooted in the horror mystery of solving Tree's murderer, "2U" is grounded in sci-fi and trying to get Tree back home to her parallel dimension. 

"The idea for it came when I was editing the first movie and I was watching one of the scenes where Ryan, [Carter's] roommate, barges into the dorm room. I just started laughing and I said, 'What if he's the reason this all happened? What if he created something that caused it? It just immediately clicked," said Landon. 

Landon then imagined Ryan worked in the science department and the plot started to come together from there.

"Once I arrived at the device and figured out that I could also knock people into a different dimension that's when the whole thing really crystallized for me because it allowed me to get to the most important thing, which was that Tree would encounter her mother in an alternate dimension," he added. 

Why didn't we learn why Tree was reliving the same day over and over again in the first movie?

Landon told us in 2017, he planned to reveal that in the sequel. But he also wanted to avoid a movie cliché.

"With the first movie, I didn't want to try and answer it because I knew that it would mean it would be a character delivering some kind of a boring speech," said Landon of keeping the reveal to himself. "It would have been some kind of exposition that I don't think anybody wanted to hear."

"I think one of the cardinal sins in movie making is when there's a character that suddenly pops up and explains everything to you. And it felt like a cheat," he continued. "So I thought, if I'm going to answer the question then it better open up more doors and ask new questions. And that's what this did for me. It achieved both. It allowed me to advance the story by answering that question, but it also allowed me to ask new questions."