Atlanta Season 3 Trailer: It's After The End Of The World In This Creepy Teaser

On Halloween this past Sunday, "Atlanta" co-creator, producer, writer, director, and star Donald Glover tweeted a link to a mysterious website which allowed viewers to check out an unnerving teaser trailer for the highly anticipated third season of the FX series. But there was a catch: each person who visited the site could only watch the video between the hours of 8:00 P.M. and 3:00 A.M. local time. Spooky season, indeed.

Now FX has unlocked the teaser and made it available for all to see, regardless of the time of day (or night). And as you've likely come to expect by now with all things "Atlanta," this is not a conventional trailer.

"Atlanta" has leaned into creepiness before, with that unforgettable "Teddy Perkins" episode probably being the peak of the show's dips into uneasy territory. However, it's the mundanity of some of these images that contributes to this teaser's odd vibe. 

"Atlanta" has always been a show that feels like it's set in a world that's almost our own, only pitched off-kilter by just a few degrees. (Example: Justin Bieber is Black in the show's world.) The way in which this trailer cuts from empty location to empty location recalls the earliest days of the pandemic, a time of true horror that we all experienced in our real lives. The chilling refrain playing throughout the whole teaser ("It's after the end of the world, don't you know that yet?") underscores that connection, and it almost feels like the show is reaching out and trying to tell us that even though we haven't seen it since the season 2 finale aired in 2018, its characters have experienced the same thing we have.

It all culminates with an unsettling, Kubrick-inspired push-in toward Paper Boi in a fancy room with two attendants turning staring into the wall like they've just been put in time-out. But don't sleep on some of the other off-putting shots in the trailer, like a room of chaotically strewn chairs positioned in front of a bank of television sets, or the fact that a peacock is inexplicably perched inside a restaurant where the patrons are all frozen in place. This show was compared to "Twin Peaks" when it first debuted, and those vibes are especially strong here.

Donald Glover, Brian Tyree Henry, Zazie Beetz, and Lakeith Stanfield all star in "Atlanta," which will premiere its third season sometime in 2022. The second season ended with Paper Boi, Earn, and Darius heading off on a European tour, hence the shot of the Eiffel Tower in this trailer.