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Although A24’s Y2K has an original premise, the upcoming horror comedy also owes a creative debt to a more family-friendly spin on the same idea. It is pretty easy to work out the creative origins of A24’s upcoming horror comedy Y2K. Y2K follows a pair of likable, nerdy teens who attend a booze-fueled party on New Year’s Eve 1999. In this movie’s reality, Y2K’s “Millennium Bug” turns out to be a very real fear as electronics all over the world go maliciously haywire at the stroke of midnight and begin massacring humans.

What follows is a classic genre mashup that blends a “One Wild Night” teen comedy with an apocalyptic horror. Y2K is effectively a horror version of Superbad, or an unlikely mashup of Can’t Hardly Wait and Miracle Mile. While taking the robotic apocalypse of The Terminator movies and transplanting it into the world of Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle is an inspired idea, there is another influence that director Kyle Mooney’s upcoming movie also borrows from. As noted by a handful of commentators online, Y2K takes cues both visually and story-wise from an underrated ‘90s classic.

Y2K is effectively Small Soldiers with an R-rating due to its “Bloody violence, strong sexual content/nudity, pervasive language, and teen drug and alcohol use.”