Mandy Moore and Kumail Nanjiani to star in Insidious spin-off about ghosts and time travel

This will be the sixth entry in the Insidious series, following this summer's The Red Door

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Mandy Moore and Kumail Nanjiani to star in Insidious spin-off about ghosts and time travel
Mandy Moore ( Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images), Kumail Nanjiani (Kate Green/Getty Images for eOne) Photo: The A.V. Club

The Insidious series—which is not the one where Ethan Hawke sees the scary home movie or the one with Patrick Wilson… but it is the other one with Patrick Wilson—has been quietly hanging around for a decade. Not only is a new mainline entry coming out this summer (Insidious: The Red Door, directed by Wilson himself in his feature debut), but the series is now getting a new spin-off called Thread: An Insidious Tale with a good cast and a good premise.

Thread, first announced last year before it was officially brought under the Insidious umbrella, will star Mandy Moore and Kumail Nanjiani, and a Deadline story says it’s about a husband and wife who “enlist the help of a spell to travel back in time” so they can “prevent the death of their young daughter.” Previous movies have dealt with a mystical ghost world that demons and other spirits can access (along with supernaturally inclined people like Lin Shaye’s Elise Rainier) and they’ve taken place across two distinct timelines, so none of that seems especially unusual for an Insidious movie, but at the same time “two parents go back in time to save their child” is kind of a wild swing for what was—until now—essentially a series of haunted house/possession movies.

That kind of weird premise is also a good way for Insidious to keep setting itself apart from the other Patrick Wilson horror franchise and the other horror franchise with a title that could be a synonym for “insidious,” but at this point that’s got to be society’s problem and not Insidious’ problem. By the time Thread comes out, there will have been six of these. You either have to get on the Insidious train now or decide that you’re comfortable being left behind by culture.

6 Comments

  • chickenwingfan94-av says:

    Love Mandy Moore and Kumail Nanjiani…but this doesn’t sound too great. Maybe I’m just burnt out on time travel and multiverse crap in general.

  • teageegeepea-av says:

    You neglected to specify the director of this spinoff: Jeremy Slater. He created the recent Moon Knight TV series, and the TV adaptation of The Exorcist before that. He hasn’t directed any movies before, but his writing credits on films include the more poorly received Death Note and (Josh Trank’s) Fantastic Four.

  • stevennorwood-av says:

    That sounds like a big old cinematic yawn.

  • kinjacaffeinespider-av says:

    Ghosts and time travel: these are but two of my least favorite things!

  • refinedbean-av says:

    The only time-traveling ghost movie I want to watch is A Ghost Story, and oh wait I don’t need to watch that again ever. Okey doke, glad I got that out of my system.

    Also – I can’t shake the feeling that Kumail, now that he’s all swole, is most likely cheating on his wife and his marriage is doomed. There’s something about his look in recent photos. But hopefully they make it.

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