Mandy Moore And Kumail Nanjiani Are Spinning Off The Best Horror Franchise
Mandy Moore and Kumail Nanjiani have been cast in the Insidious spinoff Thread: An Insidious Tale.
It’s an open secret that horror movies have been having something of a renaissance lately. Films like Scream 6 and Evil Dead: Rise have been reminding audiences what a bloody good time they can have at the theater, and horror fans are about to get treated to an ambitious new film in the very successful Insidious franchise. Deadline reports that Mandy Moore and Kumail Nanjiani “have closed deals to star in Thread: An Insidious Tale,” a spinoff of the main Insidious film series.
Neither Mandy Moore nor Kumail Nanjiani is the first actor most people think of when it comes to horror films, but Moore was recently cast in the second season of Dr. Death, a series that is certainly horror-adjacent. As for Nanjiani, he is perhaps best known now for getting buff and starring in Marvel’s plodding Eternals. While that certainly wasn’t a horror movie, it kept us on the edge of our seats for fear of one thing: that we wouldn’t see the credits roll for a very long time.
In other words, his past Marvel experience may not inspire much confidence in this film, but we were pretty excited to learn about the director. In addition to casting big names like Mandy Moore and Kumail Nanjiani, Thread: An Insidious Tale is going to be written and directed by Jeremy Slater, best known for creating and writing Moon Knight on Disney+. That show was much more confident and mature than many modern Marvel projects (that’s right, we’re still salty about Quantumania), and it had enough horror elements that we think Slater (who notably also created the Fox horror series The Exorcist and co-created Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy) will be right at home helming a horror film.
Aside from knowing that Jeremy Slater is directing and that Mandy Moore and Kumail Nanjiani are starring, what else do we know about Thread: An Insidious Tale? For one thing, this movie is a spinoff of the main franchise rather than a proper continuation of the four films that came before. And for another thing, the plotline sounds like the lovechild of a horror film and an old episode of Star Trek.
In the movie, Mandy Moore and Kumail Nanjiani play a wife and husband who are grieving after the death of their young daughter. Their grief is so keen that they find and use a magical spell in order to travel backward in time and save their daughter from her fate. But, as with most sci-fi stories focused on time travel, things don’t go as planned, leaving this husband and wife to deal with the nightmare they helped unleash.
If you’re not already a fan of Mandy Moore, Kumail Nanjiani, or Jeremy Slater, you might be interested to know that this is a movie being made by Blumhouse as well as James Wan’s Atomic Horror. They’ve brought us bonkers horror hits that range from Get Out all the way to Malignant. And if nothing else, we’re looking forward to another round of online discourse arguing the meaning of “elevated horror” once this new Insidious film premieres.
