The Slayground teaser is online. The cut that played only in theaters ahead of Resident Evil over the weekend went up on A24’s YouTube channel on Monday, September 21, labeled “Official Promo,” and it is now the first piece of Jeremy Saulnier’s Halloween thriller anyone can watch at home.
On Sunday there was no online version at all. The only way to see it was to buy a ticket for something else.
What Is on the Monitors
The teaser tells you almost nothing, and that is the design. It plays as grainy security camera feeds from inside a haunted attraction, cycling from room to room. The rooms announce themselves by their signage: a Tomb of Doom, Satanor’s Lab, a Portrait Room, a kill chamber and a dungeon. Some feeds show figures moving. Others drop to static. It plays as a blend of fake Halloween scares and real ones, which is exactly the problem with a haunted house on the worst night of its year: nobody inside can tell the difference.
It ends by sending viewers to RunLikeHell.com, where A24 is running a countdown clock. Outlets have pegged the timer to the third week of October, give or take a day, and nobody knows yet whether it counts down to a release, a full trailer or something else. A24 has not announced a date.
A Fugitive in the Funhouse
The premise: Cory Michael Smith plays the prime suspect in a mass murder who escapes police custody on Halloween night and goes on the run to prove his innocence. The attraction called Slayground is where his character works. So the one place he knows how to hide is a building designed to make people scream at shapes in the dark.
Saulnier wrote and directed, and the film spent most of its post-production life under the title October. World of Reel reports the cut runs about two and a half hours and that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross composed the score. A24 has confirmed neither.
Back in a Locked Building With Saulnier
The cast detail worth circling is Imogen Poots. She played Amber in Green Room, the siege film that locked a punk band in the back room of a neo-Nazi club. Slayground puts her back in one of his sealed buildings a decade later, this time one with fog machines.
Sophie Wilde, who broke out in A24’s Talk to Me, is also in the ensemble, alongside Chase Sui Wonders, James Badge Dale, Young Mazino, Stephen Root, Stanley Simons and Matty Matheson.
A teaser this spare, this close to Halloween, for a film set on Halloween, reads like a studio that wants the date to be the second surprise.
