On an intellectual level, it’s easy to remember that 2016 has only been an arbitrary grouping of 366 days, and that blaming the year itself for the various awful things that happened in it is an exercise in year-end irrationality. On a more visceral level, though, it’s still pretty easy to see these past 12 months as some kind of stalking supervillain, wiping out beloved celebrities, summoning heartbreaking headlines, and even making our phones explode in our poor, trusting hands.
That’s the joke of this depressingly funny fake trailer from Friend Dog Studios, centering on a doomed couple as they make a fateful move into a horrible haunted house of a year. But while there’s something deeply, sadly silly about reframing “locker room talk,” Brexit, and Harambe as horror movie phenomena, the best thing about 2016: The Movie is the way it stays true to all the classic horror tropes, right down to having a creepy little kid whisper-sing “Auld Lang Syne” as the battered protagonists wearily wait for a probably-even-worse sequel to arrive and finish us all off next year.