A haunted attraction, a mass casualty event on the night of October 24, and a scare actor who wakes up among his dead co-workers with no memory of how he got there. A24 dropped the official trailer for Jeremy Saulnier's Slayground on October 20, and it is the clearest look yet at what the Green Room and Rebel Ridge director has been cooking.
What we know
The film follows "Metal Mike" Graves, played by Cory Michael Smith, a performer at a haunted attraction. When he comes to, the place is full of bodies, and a statewide manhunt is closing in. As he tries to work out what happened, the trail increasingly points back to him. Saulnier wrote and directed. The cast also includes Chase Sui Wonders, Sophie Wilde, James Badge Dale, Stanley Simons, Stephen Root, Chris Sullivan and Young Mazino, with Imogen Poots, Matty Matheson and Macon Blair listed on A24's page. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are reported to be scoring it.
Slayground opens in theaters on January 29, 2027. It was previously titled October, and an earlier teaser on September 21 was mostly black-and-white security footage of people screaming their way past monsters in costume.
Why this one is worth watching
Saulnier's best work takes a genre premise and plays it painfully straight. Green Room was a punk band trapped in a neo-Nazi venue, and Rebel Ridge turned a small-town shakedown into a tense thriller. A haunted attraction is a clever setting for that approach: a place where screaming is part of the job, where fake gore is the product, and where nobody can tell what's staged when something real happens.
The "amnesiac protagonist might be the culprit" hook is a familiar one, so the question is whether Saulnier does something specific with it. His track record is the reason to hope so. He tends to care more about logistics, geography and consequences than about twists.
It's also an unusual release slot. A Halloween-set slasher timed for late January suggests A24 sees this as more than a seasonal scare. We'll know more once reviews land.
[AFFILIATE: Green Room on Blu-ray — natural pointer for readers who want to revisit Saulnier's last great siege thriller before January]
Jeremy Saulnier at a Paris preview of Green Room. Photo: HaguardDuNord / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0