Stephen King is an amazingly prolific writer, and his ability to generate ideas is so strong that he is sometimes known to give away plot hints for free. Twitter turned out to be a great vehicle for this, as he shared ideas with his followers, such as “Me”, “Jason” (the sequel to “Friday the 13th” with the killer as the main character) and “Predator vs Corn Kids” (that’s exactly how it sounds).). His latest presentation is not a continuation of the well-known franchise, but that makes me no less eager to see how it will happen, since it sounds like a great premise for the end of Summer slasher: Slaybora Day.
Stephen King’s next novel, The Fairy Tale, will go on sale in a few days; he is working on his follow-up book called Holly; and he has a novella in the works called Rattlesnakes, which he described as a sequel to Cujo, but all this work does not prevent the author from putting film ideas on his personal Twitter page. Playing on the tradition of holiday slashers such as Silent Night, Bloody Night, New Year’s Evil and My Bloody Valentine, King came up with a pun based on the long weekend that falls at the beginning of each September:
How about a horror movie about the end of summer called SLAYBOR DAY? August 27, 2022
Of course, I wouldn’t be writing this article if Stephen King had just suggested the title of a horror movie with a silly title based on a pun. A few minutes later, he used 182 characters to compose the film’s logline, name the main villain, and even establish how the plot could be a critique of modern capitalism. He wrote in a subsequent tweet,
Drunken union workers (and their Green Party ladies) spend a three-day weekend at the end of summer in a secluded house in the woods, and a distraught, disfigured capitalist named Joe Mansion pursues them one by one…
Is this an idea that needs to be fleshed out a bit in order for it to become viable for a feature film? Absolutely. But this is an activity that filmmakers have been practicing for many years, since a large number of adaptations of Stephen King are made based on his short stories (a story that I describe in detail in my weekly column “Adaptation of Stephen King”). We’ve seen films based on short films, short stories and novels by King, so maybe Slabor Day could be the first film based on one of his tweets.
Smart Money says Stephen King’s “Slabor Day” won’t be a title we’ll see on the billboard anytime soon, but there are plenty of adaptations in the works, and you can track them all with our upcoming Stephen King movies and TV Program. You can also learn how to create the Ultimate Stephen King Collection, and read our ranking of the best Stephen King films of all time.
