Director: Emma Tammi
Run time: 1 hour 49 min
Five Nights at Freddy’s had everything working in its favor. The film’s cast has a solid cinematic genealogy. Jim Henson Creature Shop assisted with animatronics. FNAF fandom waited in anticipation for years, continuing to world-build and create lore. But for some reason, the film sells itself short, even with Blumhouse Productions behind it, choosing to explain the narrative and reveal its mystery multiple times. Even if an audience member is naive to the world, there were moments that created a large sigh in the theater.
FNAF created an event atmosphere, in the vein of Barbie, so costume critters were throughout the theater, laughing and cheering and singing along, but also grumbling during some of those exposition-heavy scenes. The film features a young adult named Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), struggling to raise his sister Abby (Piper Rubio) on his own. Before she was born, Mike was 12 and camping with his mother, father, and little brother. While momentarily taking his eyes off his brother, the boy was abducted. This haunts Mike throughout his life and is one of the reasons he’s struggling to raise his sister. Their aunt is threatening to take Abby away, potentially to use the monthly support from the state for other reasons. Mike visits William Afton (Matthew Lillard), his career counselor, and begrudgingly takes a desperate job: security guard at Freddy’s Funhouse.
While on the job, Mike meets a local police officer named Vanessa, who fills him in on the details of the place. The rest, he learns through employee videos. Eventually, Mike has to take his sister to work with him–the regular babysitter is coincidentally unavailable–but when the aunt hires locals to trash the funhouse and get Mike fired, the funhouse fights back.
Instead of leaning heavily on the lore of the film–which fans of the series often connect on their own since the games reveal the history in pieces–FNAF plays a safe game, retreading an obvious horror storyline. Unfortunately for non-fans, the film also doesn’t really take advantage of any available themes–child endangerment, trafficking, metaphysics, or childhood trauma–nor fully runs with the themes it does choose either. This leaves a surface-level story, which 2 or 3 characters slowly reveal, explaining itself away before audiences can really get invested. The film breaks down the animatronics, softballs the know-it-all cop, and the young sister’s abilities too. The film may as well open with exposition and then proceed through an hour and a half of murders.
Even for a PG-13 film, there isn’t much violence or gore, which is also paired with a stock buildup to scares and iconic kills from the video game that end up muffled instead of refreshing. The film does allow the characters some insight and the ability to laugh at themselves along with the audience, but there’s still a sense that the producers should consider making a sequel that prioritizes the fan base and pushes the intelligence more. The ease of the movie merely makes it too easy to move in and out of the world.
Though the casting of Hutcherson and Lillard, along with a few guest appearances from YouTubers, were supposed to pull in fans, the film’s actual standouts were Lail and the animatronics. Though Lail plays a character composed of other notable characters from the franchise, and even becomes a bit of a stereotype, she does the role of nosy cop well. Every other human character is a little too surface-level, which leads us to the animatronics. They’re furry, detailed, creepy, realistic, and nostalgic. Until the halfway point in the film, they’re very intriguing and provocative. Bringing the Henson team to the film was a genius move. Films such as Labyrinth and the Dark Crystal still illustrate some of the scariest, man-made creatures in film history. I can only imagine if Henson’s team helped in the script department as well.
Coming from a non-horror fan, scarred for life by the opening kill in Jurassic Park as well as the aforementioned 80s films, Five Nights at Freddy’s wasn’t nearly as scary, frightful, or thrilling as expected. The film creates an atmosphere, thanks to the solid production design and iconic musical nods from the game, but many of the scary moments fell into the familiar horror tradition, and not in a positive way. The film provides the bare minimum (eerie ambiance, muffled footsteps, off-screen kills, minimal blood splatter, shadows) for the genre, making it somewhat of a safe entry.
This film was an opportunity to support the fandom as well as the current horror renaissance–which is so consistent now, it’s more of a moment rather than an upward trend–but it seems the film aimed for something different. With an amazing opening weekend gross, day-and-day release on streaming, I’m curious to hear the director and producers goals down the line. One possibility is that FNAF, when placed in the larger context of Blumhouse films, covers a missed area of legitimate family or entry horror, which is the current debate online. FNAF barely overlaps with M3GAN in terms of style and maybe that was the goal.
Though the current world wide gross sits at $217 million, time will additionally tell what the fandom thinks of the film’s approach. Unlike many IPs, FNAF has an assortment of games as well as fan connections and theories building and creating simultaneously. This is a very different franchise than Marvel, Star Wars, or Game of Thrones. Fans of these other franchises imagine additional histories and certainly participate in different levels of fan fiction, but for the most part, the series produce so much material, of different types, that fans are somewhat satiated or can at least argue over productions. FNAF is a series of 10 games and 10 spin-offs, all of which present a different amount of the overall story, but there are also an unlimited amount of fan games and videos produced by the digital community. Fans almost produce and create more text than actually exists in the game. For the future of the franchise, this could spell an interesting arrangement.
Overall, FNAF is the seasonal Halloween movie, particularly since Disney’s Haunted Mansion released months ago in hopes of a digital resurgence. I didn’t expect FNAF to reach $200 million so soon, but potentially by the end of its run, it could creep toward $300 million. I don’t believe FNAF will quite land with die-hard fans nor with horror buffs, but there’s clearly an audience finding their way to the night shift.
