Is the Next Jay and Silent Bob Sequel Going to Be a Horror Movie?

It’s been 30 whole years since the release of Clerks, and Kevin Smith’s breakout slacker duo Jay and Silent Bob are still popping up in movies, TV shows and the occasional Degrassi-themed rap video.

At the end of last year, Smith revealed that he’s currently writing yet another Jay and Silent Bob movie, a follow-up to 2019’s Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, which starred Smith, Jason Mewes and every working actor in Smith’s phone contacts.

While not much is known about the movie at this point, Smith recently took to Instagram to share a photo of one of the upcoming sequel’s props — an evil book, bound in human flesh, that resembles Silent Bob’s tortured face. 

Obviously the prop is a facsimile of the Necronomicon from the Evil Dead series, just with a beard and a backwards baseball cap. Smith joked that it is “The Book of the Dead Film Careers,” then clarified that it’s actually the “NecroBobicon,” made by artist Nick Brown. “The NecroBobicon doesn’t swallow your soul,” Smith wrote, “but legend has it that misuse of the book will leave the reader forever silent…”

This post does beg the question: Is the next Jay and Silent Bob movie going to be a horror-comedy?

In a lot of ways, it would make sense for Smith to combine the characters he’s most known for with the horror genre. Obviously, the director is famous for his goofy comedies involving stink palming and/or poop monsters, but he has also taken a number of big swings in the scary movie department, beginning in 2011 when he made Red State, about an evil evangelical church that kidnaps a trio of horny teenagers. Kind of like a cross between American Pie and the life of Kirk Cameron. 

More unusually, in 2014, Smith directed Tusk, about a man who is surgically altered to resemble a walrus against his will. The unhinged body horror story began with a conversation on one of his podcasts about an online ad that was really a hoax. It’s easily the weirdest Justin Long movie that in no way involves singing chipmunks.

Smith has been trying to make a Canadian riff on Jaws called Moose Jaws as well, and he directed the 2022 horror anthology Killroy Was Here, which hardly anyone has seen because it was released as an NFT, which is the ideal way to release a movie that you don’t really want anyone to actually see.

Smith introducing supernatural horror elements into the Jay and Silent Bob-verse would arguably be a welcome change of pace. Reboot was essentially a beat-for-beat facsimile of 2001’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, so it would be nice if he threw some parasitic demon creatures into the next movie just for variety’s sake.

It wouldn’t be all that out of character for the duo either, considering that Jay and Silent Bob already appeared in a horror movie: Scream 3.

Although that baffling cameo wasn’t an artistic choice, so much as it was an order from one of the Weinstein brothers. Which is scarier than anything that happens in the movie, to be honest.

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