Sewing Machine
2026 · 6m · US
Directed by Tyler Hagen
Genres: dark comedy, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tense
A young fashion designer receives a mysterious sewing machine on her doorstep — a gift harboring a demonic entity hellbent on her destruction.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Demonic sewing machine is exactly the kind of high-concept absurdist setup that should be unbearable, but Hagen's refusal to play it straight—threading horror and comedy into the same needle—makes it the rare premise that actually *earns* its own ridiculousness.
A competent genre exercise that sits comfortably in the body-horror-meets-dark-comedy lineage, though it doesn't quite achieve the formal innovation or thematic depth that would distinguish it from its peers in the festival circuit.
The singular choice here is the decision to make the sewing machine itself the antagonist rather than a MacGuffin—treating it as a character with its own malicious rhythm transforms what could've been stock horror into something tactile and genuinely unsettling on a micro-budget.