If the embed above misbehaves, the film’s trailer is also on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsReYk7AqPg
A month ago, A24 slipped a teaser in front of Resident Evil that looked so much like an advert for a Halloween scare maze that a fair number of people presumably went home and tried to book tickets. It ended by sending viewers to RunLikeHell.com, which offered nothing but grainy security-camera feeds and a countdown clock. Yesterday the studio put out a poster styled like one of those workplace safety signs counting the days since the last accident, except that this one counts the days since the last homicide, with the number replaced by a big blue frowning zero. The clock has now run out, and the first full trailer for Jeremy Saulnier’s Slayground is here, along with an actual synopsis. Somebody in A24’s marketing department deserves a pay rise, or at least a lie-down.
The story, it turns out, is a fugitive thriller wearing a slasher’s latex mask. Cory Michael Smith, Gotham’s Riddler, plays scare actor “Metal Mike” Graves, who wakes up inside the haunted attraction where he works to find himself surrounded by the dead bodies of his co-workers, with no memory of how they got there. With a statewide manhunt closing in, Mike sets out to find out what really happened, even if the trail leads back to him. It is a cracking premise. Most of us have had a bad day at work. Few of us have had to explain to the police why we are the last man standing in a building designed to look like a crime scene, while dressed for the occasion.
The trailer opens with the massacre itself, on the night of 24 October, and puts at least one gnarly, armed scare actor on the prowl through the attraction’s halls. Smith’s Mike is very obviously in the frame as the prime suspect, and Chase Sui Wonders, Sophie Wilde and Imogen Poots also turn up. It is the kind of trailer that shows a great deal and explains very little, which is exactly what you would want from a film whose whole engine is the question of who actually did it. The genre is harder to pin down. It looks part police procedural, part grubby slasher and part something that may yet turn out to be supernatural, and A24 is plainly in no hurry to tell us which.
Saulnier is the right man to blur those lines. Blue Ruin was a revenge film that kept tripping over its own hero’s incompetence, Green Room trapped a punk band in a backwoods club full of neo-Nazis and became one of the nastiest, best siege films of the past decade, and Rebel Ridge made a small-town shakedown play like a ticking bomb. He has described this one as having music, Halloween and, to paraphrase him politely, fun stuff, and bringing back Green Room‘s Imogen Poots suggests he is back on familiar, blood-sticky ground. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are doing the music, so the score at least will not be playing anything soothing.
The rest of the cast is a lovely collection of faces you are pleased to see: James Badge Dale, Stephen Root, Chris Sullivan, Young Mazino, Stanley Simons, Matty Matheson (The Bear‘s Neil Fak, presumably not on catering) and regular Saulnier collaborator Macon Blair. The film was shot under the title October, and the story goes that it was renamed when A24 decided it would not be releasing it in October after all. It now opens in cinemas on 29 January 2027, which is the kind of post-Halloween scheduling that only a horror distributor could love. Still, a film about a man who cannot remember what he did on Halloween night arriving three months late seems oddly fitting. We have all felt like that on 1 November.
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