Evil Thread (2026) tries to do a great deal during its ninety-minute runtime, so we begin a little bit meta – with a couple, Alice and Archie, both appearing in a horror film and watching a horror film, in an opening scene replete with silliness, like Archie cowering from the screen behind a blanket; this does, however, set the tone, even if these two people are about to disappear from the narrative. The film-watching is disturbed by a knock at the door: there’s an anonymously-delivered and unwrapped sweater on the front step, which Alice duly brings inside. Talk immediately turns to whether a sweater can be possessed or haunted, given that any kind of object can, apparently, be haunted. That’s our preparation for the jumper to kill someone, just before the opening title appears on-screen.
Ten years later: prospective fashion student Mindy Lou Kazoo (wacky enough name for you?) receives the very same sweater as a gift from her boyfriend. An origins story interrupts us just briefly here to establish, if needs be, that the sweater has a demon attached to it. Anyway, boyfriend Fred asks Mindy to wear the sweater to dinner with his parents. At the table, a weird dream ensues, and then over the coming days, Mindy accidentally discovers that the sweater has a long history of involvement in various murders. Meanwhile, it’s popping up to kill a few people, but it seems it would really like to kill Mindy, for reasons of hellish prophecy, the need for a sacrifice and so on.
Okay. Whilst it pains me to hammer an independent film – any independent film – indie cinema, whatever its budget, still needs to tell a good story, or an interesting story, or just do something worthy of examination, or at least make us laugh. Indie films manage this hundreds of times a year, every year: Evil Thread is not, sadly, in that camp. Here’s why I think so, though I am conscious of the fact that I am just one reviewer, and that hopefully, in a festival setting, the film will be buoyed up by that very particular kind of audience which will happily rally around a low-budget film like this.
There are no additional layers to this story – something which the script comes close to acknowledging, and which the director and team no doubt know, what with that short and sweet origins segment and the occasional reference to horror tropes and so on. But some depth could certainly have been added; this isn’t that much of a ridiculous premise, even; a couple of recent-ish films have also used jinxed garments as the source of their horror, such as Slaxx and In Fabric – two drastically different films, sure, but each centring an interesting set of ideas around their own haunted, or otherwise noteworthy piece of clothing. Here, however, there’s no such broader point and no overarching style. Evil Thread both tries too hard and not hard enough, filling its runtime with deliberately zany performances; you know the self-conscious style of humour I mean, and you’ll probably either love it or hate it. The actors here gurn, overact, laugh raucously and find ample time to natter, at length, sometimes about a list of contentious issues: nationality, gender, race and so on, which even if it’s often being put into the mouths of characters we’re not intended to like, still feels like lowest common denominator stuff. Almost certainly, the script read-through felt much funnier.
So Evil Thread is busy, but busy with notional things. The film also veers into (more than one) voiceover at certain points, with the demonic garment given its own voice (and credit) – of course it sounds like every demon ever sounds, with that sort of distorted, gruff thing going on, though either of the voiceovers are only used at certain points and so get a little lost in the melange of everything else. All of the characters are too old for the roles they’re playing – again, if part of a gag, it’s a weak gag – and to top it off, the dialogue often gets drowned out by the overbearing soundtrack or mic issues, which mean that the speech sometimes becomes muffled. To put it briefly, it feels very much that the team making this film has done so to have a good time amongst themselves and for themselves, which is fine – to a point, but put it in front of an audience, and that all changes. Getting any feature film completed in this day and age – sure, it’s tough. But this would have been a hell of a lot better as a fake trailer, or a short film at most. Indie or otherwise, this is jarringly amateurish stuff, and trying to make that amateurishness part of the appeal seems very risky.
But let’s look at some of the positives! It is nice to see Newcastle on screen, as it’s a great city, even if only a few of the actors or the fairly numerous extras sound local. It also seems highly likely that the director and his team decided very early to prioritise practical SFX, which yield several crowd-pleasing moments, and get fairly grisly in places – that is a plus, for sure, and lots of viewers will forgive a great deal to enjoy the splatter. I hope Evil Thread finds its tribe, I really do, and if it’s to do that anywhere, then it’ll be at a horror film festival, but unfortunately, this did nothing for me.
Evil Thread (2026) received its world premiere at the Dead Northern Film Festival.