A24 Just Quietly Unleashed Jeremy Saulnier’s Slayground — And Its Haunted-House Marketing Is Already Working

A24 has started teasing Jeremy Saulnier’s next horror movie, Slayground, in possibly the most seasonally appropriate way available: by sneaking a mysterious trailer in front of another horror movie and sending everybody who noticed it down an internet rabbit hole.

The teaser began appearing ahead of theatrical screenings of Resident Evil this weekend. Rather than behaving like a normal movie trailer and explaining what the movie is, it reportedly looks like security footage from inside a seriously unpleasant haunted attraction. It eventually reveals the title Slayground and points viewers toward RunLikeHell.com, where the marketing continues through a bank of creepy surveillance feeds and a countdown.

Which is pretty much how you advertise a Jeremy Saulnier movie if you understand the assignment.

Slayground is the movie previously known as October, and Saulnier wrote and directed it for A24. The cast includes Cory Michael Smith, Imogen Poots, James Badge Dale, Matty Matheson, Chase Sui Wonders, Sophie Wilde, Young Mazino and Stephen Root.

There is not yet an officially announced release date.

That last part matters because the countdown on the viral site is going to tempt everyone — including us — into doing some extremely enthusiastic calendar math. A countdown means A24 intends to reveal something when it expires. It does not automatically mean the movie arrives that day.

So: pencils down, conspiracy board people.

What we know about the film itself is already plenty interesting. Reporting around the project has described it as a Halloween-set fugitive thriller centered around a haunted attraction. Cory Michael Smith reportedly plays a man suspected in a mass-murder investigation who escapes custody and attempts to clear his name while being hunted.

That is a wonderfully Saulnier-shaped premise.

This is the filmmaker who turned a punk show into a pressure cooker in Green Room and built Rebel Ridge around the terrible experience of realizing every available exit is controlled by somebody who does not want you leaving. Saulnier is very good at stories where physical geography becomes part of the threat.

Putting one of those stories inside a commercial haunted attraction is almost unfair.

Those places are already engineered around disorientation. Wrong doors. False hallways. Actors you are supposed to ignore. Rooms where screaming is expected. People running from chainsaws while everybody nearby assumes they're participating.

Now put an actual fugitive in there.

Better yet, put somebody hunting him in there.

The teaser's surveillance-camera approach suggests A24 understands exactly what is fun about that setup. Instead of selling the movie primarily through faces and dialogue, the early campaign is selling a place. You're looking into rooms. You're scanning camera feeds. You're waiting for something in the image to move that probably shouldn't.

It also gives Slayground a significantly different personality from its old title.

October sounds austere. Maybe melancholy. Possibly the name of a prestige thriller where somebody stares through a rain-covered kitchen window for seven minutes.

Slayground sounds like someone is getting hit with a rubber axe at 11:47 p.m. behind a fog machine.

I mean that as a compliment.

There is also something pleasantly old-school about A24 keeping the teaser out of the normal online trailer cycle, at least initially. Horror marketing works unusually well when audiences feel like they've discovered something rather than received it through the usual promotional firehose.

A strange trailer appears before Resident Evil. Somebody catches the URL. The URL leads to surveillance footage. There's a countdown.

Now horror people are doing exactly what horror people do: staring at screens for clues.

Whether the countdown eventually gives us a full trailer, a release date or something stranger remains speculation.

But Slayground has already managed the more difficult trick.

It has made the movie feel like the door is open.

And now we're wondering why someone told us not to go inside.