A24 did not announce this one. Audiences who turned up for Resident Evil this weekend got a teaser for Slayground before the feature, and as of Sunday it has not been posted online anywhere official.
The teaser plays as grain-heavy security camera footage from inside a dimly lit haunted house attraction, cutting between angles until it lands on the title card. It closes by pointing viewers to RunLikeHell.com, an A24 page currently running a countdown clock and asking for an email address.
That is the entire campaign so far. No release date, no online trailer, no press release.
Jeremy Saulnier Made It
Jeremy Saulnier wrote and directed, which is the detail that moves this to the top of the list. Saulnier is the filmmaker behind Blue Ruin, Green Room and Rebel Ridge, and nobody working right now is better at the specific dread of ordinary people sealed inside a building with something that wants them dead. Handing him a haunted attraction on Halloween is almost unsporting.
The film shot in Vancouver from September 22 to December 3, 2025 under the working title Moustache, then spent roughly a year in post as October. The retitle to Slayground is recent. World of Reel reports the current cut runs about two and a half hours, which for this director is enormous. Green Room was 95 minutes.
Who Is In It
Cory Michael Smith leads. Per Bloody Disgusting and HorrorFuel, he plays a man suspected in a mass killing who slips police custody and vanishes into the haunted attraction the film is named after, with a manhunt closing in around him. Smith played the Riddler across five seasons of Gotham and Chevy Chase in Saturday Night, and he is unusually good at men whose composure is the frightening part.
Around him: Imogen Poots (28 Weeks Later, Fright Night), Sophie Wilde (Talk to Me), James Badge Dale, Chase Sui Wonders, Young Mazino, Matty Matheson and Stephen Root. Magnus Nordenhof Jonck shot it.
Wilde and Wonders both came up through A24 horror, in Talk to Me and Bodies Bodies Bodies respectively. That is either a coincidence or a casting department working off a very specific shelf.
The Title Has a Past
Horror fans with long memories will note that Slayground is already a movie. The 1983 thriller of the same name, directed by Terry Bedford and starring Peter Coyote, adapts Richard Stark’s 1971 Parker novel, in which a heist goes wrong and Parker ends up trapped in a shuttered amusement park called Fun Island while mobsters close in. A criminal cornered in a shuttered attraction is a premise with some mileage on it, and Saulnier has picked a title that carries it.
What the Countdown Is Counting
HorrorFuel clocked the RunLikeHell.com timer at roughly 30 days, which would put a full trailer somewhere in mid-October. That timing is not an accident for a film set on Halloween, and neither is dropping the first look in front of the weekend’s biggest horror opening rather than on YouTube.
A24 has not released the teaser online, so the only legitimate way to see it right now is in a theater. Nobody has announced a release date for Slayground either. Our release calendar will have it the moment one exists.
