Hulu’s ‘Freaknik’ Documentary Features Nudity, Sex in the Street, and Huge Dildos: “It Was Like a Peep Show”

The long-anticipated Freaknik documentary on Hulu—aka Freaknik: The Wildest Story Never Told—is finally streaming and has quite a few past Freaknik attendees shaking. In fact, according to a report from News One, there was even a small group of Black professionals who sued Hulu, arguing they never signed media releases for the archival footage used in the film. The implication? There’s unsavory footage of now-grown adults “freaking” as college students in the ’90s at the now-legendary festival.

For the uninitiated, Freaknik was 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. And yes, it was on camera. The documentary’s director P. Frank Williams employs a wealth of archival footage, though strategic blurs and grainy camcorder image quality go a long way toward protecting modesty. In fact, the vast majority of the film is focused not on salacious “gotcha” moments, and more on the history of the festival and light-hearted ’80s and ’90s nostalgia.

That said, eventually the doc does get into some of the wilder days of Freaknik in the late ’90s. At it’s height, the festival was so popular that it wasn’t just college students coming to Atlanta for Spring Break—it was men in their 30s and 40s too. And they weren’t on their best behavior. We see grainy videos of a man grinding on a woman on the sidewalk, of another massaging a woman’s crotch (her face blurred) on the hood of a car, and of men lifting a woman’s shirt as she walks down the street. There’s shot after shot of women lifting their skirts to reveal thongs while they shake their butts. And, of course, you can’t over look the huge, realistic dildo hanging from the window of a car.

One Atlanta resident, Kathleen Bertrand, remembers driving through the festival and seeing “a flatbed truck, I’m sitting behind this truck, and there are women all sitting with their leg wide open and no underwear. It was insane the things that I saw. I was just glad that my kids weren’t in my car.”

“It was like a peep show,” another attendee says. “That’s the best way to describe it.”

As many of the interviewees in the film point out, white students were partying, drinking, doing drugs, and having sex in Daytona, Florida for their spring breaks, but escaped much of the criticism.

But there was undeniably a dark side to the festival, including a violent sexual assault incident caught on camera. An attendee named Stacy Lloyd was aggressively ripped from a car by a group of men, who pulled off her clothes. Lloyd says in an interview for the documentary that she blames the police and the strategically blocked off streets for getting her into the situation in the first place—and then not showing up to help her. “Where are the people that are supposed to protect and serve?”

Freaknik: The Wildest Story Never Told is now streaming on Hulu.