Hulu’s ‘Freaknik’ Documentary Review: A Joyous Counterpart to the Festival’s Salacious Reputation

The running joke about the long-anticipated Freaknik Hulu documentary—which premiered at SXSW on Tuesday night and will stream on Hulu next week—is that Gen Z kids will be shocked to see their moms, dads, aunts, and uncles “freaking” on their screens. The annual Atlanta-based Spring Break festival, which was initially intended for students of historically Black colleges and universities, gained a reputation in the ’90s as a hotbed for scandalous behavior, including public sex, nudity, and, of course, booty shaking.

Hulu’s Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told doesn’t deny these allegations—after all, director P. Frank Williams opens his doc with a montage of blurred-out girls flashing the camera and dancing on cars—but it does offer an alternative to the pearl-clutching, unsavory narrative of Freaknik. Instead, the doc tells the history of a fun and empowering event rooted in pure, youthful, Black joy. If you’re hoping for salacious anecdotes, you might be disappointed. Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told is no gossipy exposé; it’s a light, fun’80s and ’90s nostaglia fest, anchored by informative interviews and a treasure trove of archival footage.

Executive produced by rappers Luke Campbell, Jermaine Dupri, and 21 Savage—the latter two of whom are Atlanta natives—Freaknik begins its history lesson with a crash course on the importance of the Georgia city to African American culture, business, and politics. Notably, the city is home to a handful of prestigious HBCUs, including Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, and Spelman College. It was at Spelman where the first-ever Freaknik was born in 1983, when the DC Metro Club student organization decided to throw a picnic for kids staying on campus over spring break. In a frankly adorable move, director Williams reunites five of those students—Emma Horton, Monique Tolliver, Amadi Boon, Tony Towns, and Sharon Toomer—in 2023.

“You all still look the same, except now Emma’s hair is blue!” Boon exclaims, amid the hugs and shouts of joy. The former classmates reminisce on their accidental legacy—which, they say, was never intended to be anything more than a PG-rated Southern cookout in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, for students who couldn’t afford to travel over break. Sure, there was beer, but there wasn’t anyone having sex in the street. The DC Metro Club already had a precedent of throwing “freak” themed events and parties, inspired by the 1978 song “Le Freak” by Chic. The spring break picnic, therefore, was dubbed “Freaknic,” a portmanteau of “freak” and “picnic.”

“People think that the ‘freak’ is ‘freaky,’ but when we were doing the freak, it wasn’t scandalous,” explains Tolliver in a talking head interview. “But it was fun.”

After the first successful picnic, the DC Metro Club turned it into an annual event. Word spread to other Black colleges in the area—and then, eventually, around the nation. By 1989, the event had become so known in African American culture, that the festival got a shout-out on the sitcom A Different World, a spin-off of The Cosby Show that followed Denise Huxtable to a fictional HBCU. After that, the real party was on. People weren’t just coming to the park for a picnic—they were coming to Atlanta for a city-wide celebration. While white college students were flocking to Daytona Beach in Florida, Black students were driving to Atlanta.

Even as Williams gets into the wilder days of ’90s Freaknik—featuring interviews with rappers like Campbell, Dupri, 21 Savage, Lil Jon, CeeLo Green, Too $hort, Killer Mike—the doc maintains its light-hearted, celebratory vibe. Campbell takes credit for bringing his raunchy Miami party vibes to the festival in ’94—but the focus is on the festival as a cultural wonderland of music, fashion, dancing, and fun. Yeah, there’s grainy camcorder videos of women shaking their asses and pulling up their tops. But their wide, goofy smiles make it look freeing and fun, rather than obscene or tawdry.

The documentary finally gets to the dark side of the festival—assault and rape allegations—near the end of the runtime. But it’s clear Williams and his fellow producers would rather not focus on such messy matters. Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told is an exercise in archiving a joyous moment that, try as 21 Savage might, can never truly be recreated. In that respect, the film is an unmitigated success. Getting your freak on has never looked so fun.

Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told will begin streaming on Hulu in the U.S. on Thursday, March 21.