Slay Day (2027): Release Date, How the Interactive Slasher Works, and Is It Scary?

Slay Day opens in theaters on Friday, February 12, 2027, across more than 1,000 screens in North America. The date sits on the long Valentine's Day and Presidents' Day weekend, alongside the Super Bowl, which the producers have pointed to as a deliberate choice for a night-out release.

Because it is an interactive film, it plays only in theaters equipped for the CtrlMovie voting system, and the interactive version is the point of the release. If you are buying a ticket, check that the screening is billed as the interactive event rather than a standard showing, since the experience depends on the whole room voting together.

After the theatrical run, the producers plan to bring Slay Day to gaming platforms including Steam, PlayStation and Xbox, where it becomes a branching version you play at home. This page is updated when a runtime, a content rating or ticketing details are announced.

The story is set on Friday the 13th in 1987, in the picture-perfect town of Belle Falls. Six teenagers are getting ready for the biggest night of their year, the Sadie Hawkins dance. When the town exhumes the body of the real Sadie Hawkins to dig into the truth behind her killing spree fifty years earlier, a malevolent force returns and the dance turns deadly.

The ensemble includes Jayden Bartels, Emma McNulty, Caleb Brown and Luke Mullen, with Shelby Simmons from Bunk'd, Corrado Martini and Lyndon Smith from National Treasure: Edge of History. The premise puts it in the small-town, teens-picked-off tradition of the 1980s slasher, dressed in the period it is set in.

To be clear on one point search results confuse: despite the Friday the 13th setting, Slay Day is an original film and has no connection to the Friday the 13th franchise or Jason Voorhees. The date is the setting, not the property.

Slay Day uses technology from CtrlMovie, the studio run by Kino Industries. During the film the audience votes on their smartphones in real time, and the system tallies the room's choices and plays the most popular option, so the movie branches as it goes.

The producers describe more than fifty decision points across the film, choices that shape the fates of six central characters and seven more around them, adding up to over 8,000 possible narrative paths and more than twenty distinct endings. In practice that means two screenings can diverge early and end in completely different places, and the version you see is the one your specific audience voted into being.

This is the same lineage as Late Shift, the 2016 film the same studio made, which is generally credited as the world's first interactive feature. Late Shift ran the audience through its choices the same way, aggregating votes to a single path, and won a BAFTA for its trouble. Slay Day is the studio applying that model to a slasher, where the choice on screen is often simply who lives and who dies.

We have not watched it, so there are no Darkly scores to give you yet. What is on the record is the register it is working in. This is a throwback teen slasher built around a night-out gimmick, and the marketing leads on the fun of deciding who survives rather than on a particular style of scare, so the early signal points toward a playful, crowd-driven slasher more than a dread piece.

One genuinely unusual thing for the genre is that the film has no single runtime, because the path changes from screening to screening. That is a structural difference from a normal slasher, and it is worth setting expectations around before you go.

On release day we watch it and put up Fear, Gore, Atmosphere, Intensity and Overall on the film page, and this preview becomes the review. There is no jump-scare count for it yet either, because the jump-scare databases do not catalogue a film before it comes out.

Slay Day is directed by John David Buxton, who also cut the film, and written by Andrew Matisziw. It was financed by BasePoint Capital as the first project in a new partnership with Kino Industries' CtrlMovie.

CtrlMovie is a Zurich company that developed the app-based voting technology behind interactive cinema, working through Kino Industries, a venture it formed with the Los Angeles outfit Silvatar Media. Its calling card is Late Shift, written and directed by CtrlMovie founder Tobias Weber, which in 2016 became the first feature-length film to let a theatre audience decide the story in real time.

Slay Day is the studio's bet that the format works for horror specifically, where the audience choosing who to save, or sacrifice, has an obvious hook. The producers frame the February rollout as one of the first large-scale theatrical releases of an interactive film.