The first trailer for A24’s upcoming comedy horror movie Y2K is here packed with nostalgia and apocalyptic gore, taking us right back to New Year's Eve 1999.
The trailer opens with main character Eli (IT’s Jaeden Martell) working up the courage to talk to his crush Laura, played by The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes star Rachel Zegler. But before he can even ask her out, she heads for a New Year's Eve party where a bunch of teens are ready to welcome in the year 2000 with a Superbad-like bash. However, things take a turn when household appliances and toys start attacking the guests, from a flying VHS tape to an evil Tamagotchi.
Eli, Laura, and friends manage to escape but find the world outside burning due to a "global computer apocalypse." The clip ends with the crew working together with some eccentric characters to save themselves from the Y2K scare. Watch the full trailer below.
From the studio that brought us similar teen horror adventures like Bodies Bodies Bodies and I Saw The TV Glow, Y2K looks at what would have happened if the world did end at the turn of the 21st century. The synopsis from A24 reads, "On the last night of 1999, two high school juniors crash a New Year's Eve party, only to find themselves fighting for their lives in this dial-up disaster comedy."
The horror comedy does in fact play upon real fears at the time when many believed that the millennium would bring about the apocalypse. This was mainly due to the Y2K bug, or the idea that computers wouldn’t be able to cope with date formatting after the year 2000 and cause hospital closures, plane crashes (which we do actually see in the trailer), and other technological-related tragedies.
In an interview with A24, writer Evan Winter said the idea came from a conversation he and director Kyle Mooney had during a New Year's Eve Party in 2019. The two theorized what it would be like if Y2K really happened, "Early on we considered whether it would be fully realistic, in terms of the fears of what people thought Y2K would be where everything shuts off," said Winter. "Then pretty quickly we steered it towards practical effects, the animatronics, and creatures that we both really loved from the ’80s and ’90s."
Alongside Zegler and Martell, the upcoming movie stars Julian Dennison, musician The Kid Laroi, Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst, and more.
Y2K hits theaters on December 6 in the US, an international release date is yet to be announced. For more, check out our list of the best horror movies, or keep up with upcoming horror movies heading your way soon.
