Although Stranger Things has been getting all the credit of late, stories about loser teens confronting deadly threats in ‘80s small-town America have been around since the ’80s itself. (See: The Goonies, The Monster Squad, the 1986 publication of Stephen King’s doorstop of a novel IT.) Now the subgenre, which is currently enjoying a revival, has another worthy entry in Summer Of ‘84, the new film from RKSS, the French-Canadian filmmaking collective behind 2015's Turbo Kid.


The film is set in (duh) the summer of 1984, where a serial killer dubbed the Cape May Slayer has murdered 13 t eenage boys in the small town of Ipswich, Oregon. Convinced his neighbor Mr. Mackey (Rich Sommer), a local cop, is the killer, 15-year-old Davey (Graham Verchere) recruits his friends—token fat kid Woody (Caleb Emery), ‘80s nerd Farraday (Cory Gruter-Andrew) and punk-rock delinquent Eats (Judah Lewis)—to help him prove that Mackey is the murderer. Their plan quickly gets complicated (and violent!), as you can see if the trailer for the film, premiering exclusively on The A.V. Club.

Summer Of ‘84 premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where horror site Bloody-Disgusting said it “create[d] a tone of dread without explicit gore” and “hit the sweet spot” of ‘80s nostalgia in its review. Daily Dead’s Heather Wixon added that the script “takes a few ballsy left turns that left me genuinely shocked,” so there’s a lot more than what you see in the trailer above.


Summer Of ‘84 hits theaters on August 10, 2018.