Stephen King is a remarkably prolific writer, and his skill for ideation is so powerful that sometimes he has been known to give story prompts away for free. Twitter has proven a great vehicle for this, as has shared ideas with his followers like I, Jason (a Friday The 13th sequel with the killer as the protagonist), and Predator vs. Children Of The Corn (which is exactly what it sounds like). His latest pitch isn’t a sequel to an established franchise, but that no less makes me want to see it happen, as it sounds like an excellent premise for an end-of-summer slasher: Slaybor Day.
The next Stephen King novel, Fairy Tale, is arriving in stores in a few days; he’s been working on his follow up book, titled Holly; and he has a novella in the works called “Rattlesnakes” that he has described as a sequel to Cujo – but all of that work is not stopping the author from throwing movie ideas out on his personal Twitter page. Playing on the tradition of holiday slasher titles like Silent Night, Bloody Night, New Year’s Evil and My Bloody Valentine, King came up with a pun based on the extended weekend that comes around at the start of every September:
How about an end-of-summer horror movie called SLAYBOR DAY?August 27, 2022
Of course, I wouldn’t be writing this article if Stephen King had simply pitched the name of a horror movie with a silly pun-driven title. A few minutes later, he used 182 characters to provide a logline for the film, name the principal villain, and even establish how the plot could be a critique of modern capitalism. He wrote in a follow-up Tweet,
Hard-drinking union workingmen (and their Green Party ladies) take the 3-day summer's end weekend at an isolated house in the woods and a crazed, disfigured capitalist named Joe Mansion goes after them, one by one...
Is this an idea that needs to be fleshed out a bit more to be viable for a feature film? Absolutely. But that’s an activity that filmmakers have been practicing for years, as a great number of Stephen King adaptations are made based on his short stories (a history that I detail at length in my weekly Adapting Stephen King column). We’ve seen films made based on King shorts, novellas, and novels, so perhaps Slaybor Day could be the first made based on one of his Tweets.
The smart money says that Stephen King’s Slaybor Day is not going to be a title that we see on marquees any time soon, but there are plenty of adaptations in the works, and you can keep track of them all with our Upcoming Stephen King Movies and TV guide. You can also learn how to build the Ultimate Stephen King Collection, and read our rankings of the best Stephen King movies of all time.
