A Conversation with Director Kyle Mooney on A24’s ‘Y2K’ – Chicago Maroon

It is known that I hate horror movies. I’m the person who will tell her friends to never wear one.

I blindly walked into an early screening of Doc Film Y2K Knowing one thing: Kyle Mooney was the director of the movie, so it was going to be funny.

And it was funny. The film introduces us to best friends Eli (Jaeden Martell) and Danny (Julian Dennison), two high school students in 1999. This year, they decide they are going to do something. Wild. They sneak alcohol, crash a party, and try to flirt with girls. Their teenage awkwardness and relatability initially present this film as a funny and relatable coming-of-age film.

Until, seconds after Y2K rings off, a propeller gets stuck in someone’s head, a toy car burns off their face, and a Tamagotchi kills someone else. You can imagine my expression when I realized that I was now also tied to a horror movie.

What followed for the next 80 minutes or so was a horror-comedy that asked: What if the year 2000 actually happened and technology took over the world? We follow Eli and his friends as they escape from killer robots and seek to save themselves and the rest of humanity. With all its blood and gore Y2K It takes us on an hour-and-a-half adventure where relationships are built, adversity is overcome, and teens grow into themselves in the face of unfathomable disaster. It was exciting, scary (but maybe that’s just me), funny, and heartwarming. With sentient robots as the film’s antagonist, Y2K He plays on fear that seems eerily real. But this fear allows the film to ask: What does it mean to be human, and to come together in our humanity?

Director Kyle Mooney said in a college roundtable with Chicago Maroon. He linked the fear at the turn of the century to our modern fear of technology in 2024. “Today, I feel like we’re so consumed with our phones, and I think the internet is a very scary place, and social media can be very intimidating and scary as well.” […] Now, it feels like it has become very threatening and something we should be aware of and how it affects our lives.

From 90s pop culture references, slang, and fashion, Y2K It also serves to transport audiences to the year 1999. Most notably, CJ (Daniel Zollaghadry) – one of the quirky teenagers we are introduced to in this film – exists deep within the underground hip-hop scene. According to Mooney, the character’s love of the genre was inspired by his character in high school. “Maybe at the beginning of my sophomore year in high school, I got really into underground hip-hop, and I was in a group with a couple of my friends. We were called the Intelligence Tools. “The whole thing was like bragging that we weren’t mainstream. And it was very corny and corny, and I made beats… and collected records and sampled stuff. I’d like to think I was more self-aware than CJ, but maybe I wasn’t. So I don’t have to say it proudly, but I definitely relate to him a lot, and a lot of what he says and does are things I would say and do.

Mouni also spoke about the film’s hero Eli. “With Eli — I don’t know that I was incredibly confident in socializing, especially at the beginning of high school… you could say I’m still incredibly insecure with that. So I think I can definitely relate to him and that difficulty and challenge of fitting in.” And kind of knowing who you are […] Which I imagine is fairly universal, but I definitely felt it.

Most coming-of-age comedies try to say: Be yourself. But as a film that also categorizes itself in the horror/disaster genre, it also seems to ask us to come together in our collective humanity. “It’s so easy to forget that we’re all human,” Mooney said. “There’s a lot of anger and hate, and I’m involved in that […] But it’s something that I think, whatever age you are, you have to work on and you have to be aware of it.

“It was really special meeting people, especially young people like you, who haven’t been there [in 2000]”And if you can relate to it, if there’s any universality to it, that means a ton,” Mooney answered when asked what sharing this film with a younger, college-age audience means to him.

Y2K It premiered on December 6 and is now showing in theaters across the country.