The first thing the new “Slayground” trailer shows is almost nothing at all, a black frame, then the A24 logo flickering behind what looks like a curtain, and an unseen voice that says one name and stops. A24 posted the full trailer on Tuesday, October 20th, and over the next minute and a half it sketches a Halloween story about a haunted attraction, a mass killing and a man named Michael (Cory Michael Smith) who appears to be at the center of both. It gives away very little else. Jeremy Saulnier, the writer and director of “Blue Ruin”, “Green Room” and “Rebel Ridge”, made the film, and A24 releases it only in theaters on January 29th, 2027.
A24’s official synopsis describes a scare actor, “Metal Mike” Graves, who wakes up in a haunted attraction surrounded by the dead bodies of his co-workers with no memory of how they got there. As a state-wide manhunt closes in, he races to uncover the truth, “even if the trail leads straight back to him.” The attraction is called Slayground, which is where the title comes from, and World of Reel reports that the name has no relation to the Donald E. Westlake novel or the 1983 movie that share it. The trailer shows a great deal and explains almost none of it. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for everything shown in the “Slayground” trailer.
The trailer shows a great deal and explains almost none of it.”
The upload on A24’s own YouTube channel runs 88 seconds and is titled “Official Teaser HD”, even though Polygon calls it the film’s first trailer. It follows a 42-second promo that A24 posted in September, a version of which had played in theaters ahead of “Resident Evil.” The gap between the two is the gap between a rumor and a case file, since the promo was built mostly from grainy black-and-white security-camera footage of visitors screaming through a haunt. Its cards promised the film “this fall” and pointed to a web address, runlikehell.com. The new trailer keeps only brief inserts of that footage. It swaps the season for a January 29th date, and spends most of its time in the world outside the haunt, among police, newsrooms and a grieving town.
Taken in order, it opens by sending the viewer back. After the single name, a voice says, “Let’s go back to October 24th”, and the picture slips through a candlelit haunt parlor full of portraits, stuffed birds and skeletons with glowing red eyes. A woman with brown hair walks past a figure in a shaggy fur costume. Then the scene cuts to a misty forest, where a rusted car is being swallowed by ferns and a pair of feet moves along, a chain running between the ankles. The first clue that this is a story about a town and not just a building comes next, a pair of handcuffed hands resting on a copy of the “Oregon Gazette.” Its front page announces that a “Handyman” killer has slaughtered six, with a smaller story in the left column headlined “Police Urge Vigilance as Investigation Intensifies.” The photograph under the headline shows a compact car with a phone number and “Paint All Jobs” hand-lettered across its rear window. The next shot finds that same car at night, outside a lit-up store, so the handyman is more than a headline. A long-haired, bearded man is also glimpsed laughing at a diner counter, surrounded by friends, which might be the last ordinary moment before the night in question.
The haunt itself arrives next, first as a black-and-white security-camera view of people bunched together and then as a crowded back room. A crowd, some in costumes and some in work clothes, raise their arms to answer a call of “When I say Slay, you say ground!” with “Slay!” and “Ground!” and “Move it!” A strip of yellow tape runs across the bottom of that frame, which could mean the pep rally is being remembered from the aftermath. The mood collapses in a cut. A long-haired, bearded man in a heavy coat sits on a bare floor under a work light, blood on his face, and what look like bodies lie strewn behind him. A dispatcher’s voice reports a “mass casualty incident with multiple fatalities”, while police silhouettes with flashlights file through a dark hall, past a lit exit sign. A man in a jacket marked “Detective Division” stands in a haze of green light. Then the camera moves to a roadside memorial of candles, flowers and a pumpkin carved with the word LOVE, with photographs, cards and a teddy bear fastened to the chain-link fence behind it. A voice cries “You killed my baby!” as the first title card, “From Jeremy Saulnier”, lands in blue type, over a hooded figure walking away along a metal catwalk.
From there, the trailer widens into a portrait of the town around the haunt. A child in a gray costume runs through fallen leaves on a quiet street, a red pail swinging. A girl in a pumpkin costume points toward something beside a table of pumpkins as a voice says “Let us hear it.” Nearby, a mustached man in a white shirt looks off to the left, and a figure in dark clothes stands behind him at the edge of a cornfield. A long-haired figure in a dark coat scrambles over mossy logs in a fog-bound forest, and a small plane banks over the treetops. A thermal-style map display, stamped with the airport code PDX and a time stamp that reads “Wed Oct 28”, shows tiny white figures strung out along a winding road. An armored police truck rolls up beside a cornfield, while officers in helmets fan out. A minivan sits on a forest road, its door hanging open, beside a cobwebbed skeleton, which is either a prop from the attraction or a very bad omen. Two more title cards close the stretch, “The Director of Green Room” and then “The Director of Rebel Ridge”, set over an aerial of fir forest.
The middle of the trailer is where it turns into a procedural. A woman with curly hair draws on a safety-style sign that reads “It has been” and “Days since the last homicide”, putting a face in the blank where the number should go, and the face she draws ends up a frown. A voice says “Multiple murders at the Slayground haunted attraction.” over a wall of television screens. They show a news anchor beside a mug shot of the long-haired man, labeled Michael Chaplain Graves, under chyrons about a manhunt for a “Slayground suspect” described as armed and dangerous. A bloody sneaker sits in an evidence bag, and a silhouette waits behind frosted door glass. A man’s hands turn the page of a case file marked with a red fingerprint while the voice says “You were discovered at the scene.” A gray-haired figure lies slumped across a porch staircase. A woman in a dark top looks back over her shoulder, in a red-lit room, as the voice adds “Covered in blood.” Then the voice says “Help us bring the light to the truth.” The picture is a long-haired man lying motionless on his back, his shirt torn, while a blonde woman leans over him to speak. A clenched fist fills the next shot.
Then the pace picks up. A police dog leaps in a suburban yard, and a patrol car and an SUV race down a highway at dusk. A mustached mechanic in a denim work jacket and a motorcycle-shop T-shirt looks up from his garage. Tattooed hands count out bills. A woman in a white top leaps from the awning of a building marked SunnyDays. An SUV and a pickup collide at an intersection while a crowd looks on. A scarecrow with a skull mask rides in a pickup bed beside crates of produce and a sign for Ella’s Organic Farm. The last stretch goes back to the long-haired man, hunched over in a room lined with shelves of glass jars while the blonde woman watches from behind. A woman in a dark top stands beside a green stained-glass lamp, as a voice says, “Oh my god.” A pale figure in a teal jacket and a white mask appears at a window. Then the long-haired man and the blonde woman return as a voice says “I was there.” Reactor’s writer hears that as a character trying to dig into his memories to see what happened, a reading that fits a synopsis in which the lead wakes with no memory.
The editing then goes frantic. A spotlight beam gives way to a pale grinning face in black-and-white security footage, then to a long-haired man in an orange plaid shirt, outdoors at night, his hair blowing. A hand scrawls in green marker on a whiteboard planner that lists a “Halloween Eve Briefing” for the full staff, a woman at the wheel of a car watches a man walk toward her down an alley, and sparks fly off a blade as a masked figure glows blue behind the haze. The title “Slayground” arrives in black type on a blue field, and then in blue type on black. A card gives the date, and A24’s membership end card closes out the 88 seconds. The footage dwells on aftermath and rumor rather than the killing itself, which is a sensible way to sell a mystery. It leaves the audience to guess whether the long-haired man is a suspect, a witness or a victim who is being asked to remember.
Writers have already tried to name what kind of film this is. World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy calls it “The Fugitive” run through the raw style of the man behind “Green Room”, based on what he has been told about it. SlashFilm sees something that “looks like part procedural, part supernatural thriller, and part grimy slasher.” Dread Central says the earlier teaser “gave me a very different idea of what we were getting” and writes that the new one shows “a lot more going on here than a killer chasing people through a Halloween maze.” That mix seems to suit Saulnier, whose record runs from small and mean to widely seen. His 2007 debut, “Murder Party”, was a Halloween-night horror-comedy about art students who lure a stranger to a party, which may be a murder trap. SlashFilm notes that “Moustache”, the title of an early attempt at that film, was also one of the working titles for “Slayground.”
“Blue Ruin” followed, which World of Reel calls one of the great modern indie thrillers. Then came “Green Room”, in which a touring punk band witnesses a murder and is trapped backstage by neo-Nazi skinheads, with a cast that included Imogen Poots, Anton Yelchin and Patrick Stewart. “Hold the Dark” and “Rebel Ridge” both went to Netflix, the latter starring Aaron Pierre and Don Johnson, and World of Reel notes that “Rebel Ridge” skipped theaters even as it became a streaming hit. “Slayground” brings him back to A24, which released “Green Room” a decade ago, and to the big screen. World of Reel reports that the studio landed it a little over a year ago, after a bidding war that included Netflix.
A24’s page lists Smith, Chase Sui Wonders, Sophie Wilde, Stanley Simons, James Badge Dale, Stephen Root, Chris Sullivan, Young Mazino, Poots, Matty Matheson and Macon Blair. Dale was in “Hold the Dark”, Poots was in “Green Room” and Blair is a frequent Saulnier collaborator. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are composing the score, and Film Music Reporter says the pair are also producing the film with Saulnier. World of Reel reports that an internal screening ran about two and a half hours, and that the film was retitled from “October” because A24 would not hold the release for that month.
Whether the film delivers on all of that is the open question. A story that begins with a mass killing, a manhunt and a suspect who cannot remember has to resolve every thread. A trailer that cuts between a memorial, a news desk and a slasher in a spiked mask could be hiding a tone that never settles. Alamo Drafthouse is helping the wait along, since it brings “Green Room” back to select locations, for its tenth anniversary on October 30th, with a free “Slayground” popcorn bucket. Dread Central adds that Alamo plans a Saulnier retrospective in early 2027 that includes “Blue Ruin”, “Murder Party” and “Green Room.” For now, the 88 seconds do their job, because nobody leaves them knowing what happened on October 24th.
What Do You Think? Is the long-haired man a killer, a witness or something stranger, and does the “Handyman” headline settle anything for you? Would you rather this stayed a straight haunted-house slasher, or does the manhunt and procedural angle make it more interesting? And is January too long to wait for a Halloween movie?
See you on the next binge!
