The Third Parent: Crispin Glover in the Tommy Taffy Film

The Third Parent is the film based on the Tommy Taffy creepypasta, with Crispin Glover as a disturbing domestic tyrant.

Fireworks, flags, families gathered together. Then someone knocks at the door. The first teaser for The Third Parent, released by Bleecker Street, lets Tommy Taffy enter the frame looking almost ordinary, reassuring enough to make what he represents even more disturbing: a usurping domestic authority.

Written and directed by David Michaels, the film adapts Elias Witherow’s creepypasta, originally published in 2016 on r/nosleep. The cast includes Rob Lowe, Roselyn Sánchez and, above all, Crispin Glover as Tommy.

The Third Parent: it is July 4, but independence is left out of the film

As the neighborhood celebrates American independence, Tommy enters the Hollow family’s life to do the opposite: he sets rules, occupies the role of parent and turns the family into territory subject to his authority. He does not want to destroy the house, but to govern it.

Old-looking photographs, children’s drawings and images of different families suggest that Tommy has moved like a shadow through eras and households before the Hollows.

Elias Witherow’s stories have also gradually expanded his presence, from The Third Parent to His Name Was Tommy Taffy, Tommy Taffy’s Twins and The Night I Met Tommy Taffy.

Crispin Glover avoided Reddit’s Tommy Taffy

Crispin Glover said he did not read the original creepypastas before filming, preferring to build the character solely from Michaels’ screenplay. A prosthetic had also been prepared for Tommy, but it was abandoned because it could not be fitted properly to the actor within the production schedule.

The music, meanwhile, is by Andy Jenks and Butch Vig, producer of Nirvana’s Nevermind and a member of Garbage.

Ten years after appearing on Reddit, Tommy Taffy arrives in cinemas with Crispin Glover, Rob Lowe and a production now far removed from the anonymity of NoSleep. It is the almost paradoxical fate of a creature born without a face, a studio or a promotional campaign: to become a film precisely when it must preserve what made it disturbing, the feeling that Tommy could appear anywhere, enter any home and behave as though he had always been there.

The US release is set for January 22, 2027, after moving from the previous date of August 7, 2026.