They thought their Freaknik days were behind them. No, wait for the tape.

At the time, hundreds of thousands of young people, mostly black students, came to Atlanta every spring for the loud and raunchy event called Freaknik. Artists like Notorious BIG, OutKast and Uncle Luke perform shows all over the city. Traffic barely budged, and why should it? The party was there on the street.

Three decades passed. Partygoers became professionals. Children were born. Castes have evolved. All the while, some who had been in the thick of it were perfectly content in the knowledge that their youthful exploits, which might be a little embarrassing today, had been tucked away. They had their memories. Photos were stored in shoe boxes. As for whatever was caught on tape, who has a VCR anymore?

But a new documentary threatens to shake things up.

“Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told” promises to be more than a racy exposé, exploring the transformation in the 1980s and 1990s from a modest spring break cookout for students at the city’s historically black colleges to a sprawling spectacle that seized Atlanta.

Still, the conversation surrounding the documentary, which was released Thursday on Hulu, has been for months about the curiosity and anxiety of attendees, now in their 40s and 50s, wondering whether they would appear in it.

The concerns led to threats of legal action. One participant preemptively requested divine intervention. “I pray that Jesus will be a big, high privacy fence,” she wrote on social media platform X.

In a nod to the unease, producers have said releases were signed by those who shared their images, and that faces were blurred to protect identities in scenes that were more explicit.

Be that as it may, much of the conversation was good-natured and fun, with the sense that whatever appears in the film will provoke a cringe rather than a scandal. Nevertheless, it has suddenly thrust members of the camcorder generation into a TikTok-era predicament.

“You don’t think, ‘In 20, 30 years, someone will see me,’” says Ronda Racha Penrice, a cultural expert. historian and writer who participated in Freaknik twice in the 1990s.

That said, she and others argue that any inconvenience is worth it if it means exploring the complexities of a meeting often remembered in Atlanta for the disruption it caused and its ignominious demise. City officials came down hard on Freaknik, effectively killing himprior to the 1996 Olympics. (Smaller variations using the Freaknik name have continued.) In the mid-1990s, there were allegations of sexual assault, public drunkenness, and looting during the days-long event.

“It was a headache for some, and I understand,” said DJ Mars, who performed at Freaknik as a student at Clark Atlanta University before launching. a career that included tours with Usher and other great artists. “As an adult I see what the problem was.”

But for young people immersed in it, the atmosphere was electric. Freaknik – a mix of “freak” and “picnic” – is described as a black alternative to both Woodstock and the spring break madness that took over the beaches of Florida.

“It was like a takeover, an epic takeover,” says Lori Hall, co-founder of a marketing agency, who lived in Atlanta and participated in Freaknik festivities as a teenager. “We were living life and we felt like we had the power, the power to just be, and that was really cool for the culture.”

The event, especially at its peak, introduced the promise of Atlanta to a new generation. Many who came for a weekend ended up coming back for good, including Tyler Perry, the media mogul, who built one of the country’s largest movie studios on 330 acres in the city.

“While all the kids were getting numb, drinking and partying, I woke up to the possibility,” Mr. Perry, who grew up in New Orleans, wrote in his book “Higher Is Waiting.” “I saw that there were black people doing great things with their lives. There were black doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs,” he added. “I knew Atlanta was the place for me.”

For many, Freaknik represented something bigger than a festival: it was an annual transfusion of music, fashion and culture.

“It wasn’t the age of cell phones,” said Ms. Penrice, who first visited Freaknik in 1994 while studying at Columbia University in New York. “There was no internet. It was really word of mouth. It’s hard to explain how everyone knew, but everyone knew.”

The filmmakers collected footage from those holding their camcorder tapes and used it to capture the energy pulsating through the event and the city. The documentary, which premiered this month at South by Southwest, has high-profile backers. Jermaine Dupri, the rapper and producer, is an executive producer, as are rapper 21 Savage and Uncle Luke.

During a recent appearance on Tamron Hall’s daytime talk show, the host posed the question directly to Uncle Luke: “Should people be afraid of this documentary about Freaknik?”

“Yes,” he said, bursting out laughing.

His response likely did little to quiet the discourse that emerged as soon as the film was announced and has dragged on for months on social media, podcasts, YouTube videos and blogs.

“’Freaknik aunties’ are shocked,” reported Rebellion, an outlet for hip-hop culture. The comments can be found on butter.atl, a popular Instagram account in the city to reports about the film Among them were people who had similar concerns, or others who wanted to look closely to see if they could spot people they knew.

“I’m zooming in trying to find my man in his heyday,” one person wrote.

“They’re putting the mom and pop businesses on the street,” wrote another.

And perhaps most importantly: “Who handed over the images.”

Whether it was the filmmakers’ intention or not, the uproar has led to a “dream marketing maneuver,” says Miles Marshall Lewis, a pop culture expert. critic and author.

“Anyone who has experienced Freaknik in real time will watch at least once,” he added, “to protect themselves from incriminating footage.”

Mr. Lewis first participated in 1989, as an 18-year-old student at Morris Brown College, one of the city’s historically black institutions, along with Spelman, Morehouse and Clark Atlanta.

“Everyone of a certain age was there at least once or knew someone who went there,” he said, “and came away with outrageous stories about what happened.”

DJ Mars wasn’t all that interested in seeing which of those stories made it into the documentary. He wanted to hear the music. He wanted to see the fashion: the “Homey the Clown” bootleg T-shirts, the Nike Cortez sneakers, the African American College Alliance sweatshirts, the tennis skirts that weren’t complete without a pager attached to them.

“It’s basically a throwback to my childhood,” he said.