Five Nights at Freddy’s (movie Review)

I would hesitate to call myself a fan of the Five Nights at Freddy’s series, but I would also hesitate to call myself a casual onlooker of the franchise. My wife, on the other hand, is an absolute die hard for Scott Cawthon’s animatronic horror.

I can remember when the series first came out, releasing four installments inside a two-year period. Some may think to call Scott Cawthon a workhorse, being able to release them that fast. Others may choose to say that shows the amount of polish, care, and overall effort that went into each installment. The real answer is likely someplace in-between.

Scott Cawthon created an interesting, and rather unique concept, both in terms of game play and presentation. The games were simple, but they felt different than anything we’d ever seen before, released at a low enough price point that it almost felt trivial to complain about any of their nagging flaws. The story though, that was what made Five Nights at Freddy’s a phenomenon.

People on YouTube absolutely obsessed over FNAF, analyzing every pixel like they thought they’d find all the world’s greatest secrets buried away in them. They didn’t, of course, but what they did find was a truly unique and enthralling ghost story about animatronics running around a closed down Chuck E Cheese style pizzeria.

Personally, I didn’t care for the original Five Nights at Freddy’s games. They’re loud, leaning heavily on jump scares, and I never enjoyed the overall game play experience they offered. That in mind, I was right there with fans, watching YouTuber’s like Matpat try and make sense about the videogames and their complicated lore (as many have noted, Matthew Patrick of Game Theory fame actually has a small cameo in this film, done as a wink and a nod to the internet community that played such a heavy role in the franchises’ success). In that way, I would say I was a fan of Five Nights at Freddy’s and that I was truly immersed in the convoluted story being told.

As it went on, I mostly lost interest in the game series. After a point, even if the game play improved (and it did, by a lot), it no longer had a hold over me. Once all the major plot points revealed themselves, every new development began to feel like a series trying too hard to reclaim former glory. I would equate it to the later Saw movies, where they tried to go back and make connections where connections simply didn’t need to be made.

If you are curious, I would recommend Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach (the best of the main series Five Night’s games, in my opinion, in spite of its many, many glitches) and I was a pretty big fan of Into the Pit (a sort-of side-story, what-if scenario from a different developer).

This review, however, is about the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie.

Frankly, a Five Nights at Freddy’s film just makes a lot of sense to me. Having a film set in a pizzeria with angry animatronics lurking around feels a wonderfully horrific time. I can envision the concept very well, and, the reality is, you wouldn’t have to change much about the base story at all in order to attain it. The game follows an every-man who agrees to serve as a security guard for the rundown building before he discovers the horrors hiding within. It’s a pretty basic premise that would allow the filmmakers to create an absolute feast of scares and creepy scenes without having to bog themselves down in too much exposition.

Likewise, too, the involved parties felt like choices I could get behind. Blumhouse is hit or miss in the best of times, but I felt like this film was perfectly in their wheelhouse, whereas hearing that Jim Henson’s Workshop was involved in the creation of the movie’s animatronics felt like a match made in a sadistic man’s heaven. Emma Tammi directs the film, a filmmaker whose directorial debut The Wind I reviewed a couple years back (it was alright, not exactly the stuff of greatness, but alright).

Unfortunately, I did not enjoy this film. In fact, I strongly disliked it.

Some of what went wrong, I believe, can be logically made sense of. When I laid out the basic fundamentals to you for what a Five Nights at Freddy’s film would look like, I based it on where the series initially began. The state of the videogame series is much different than where it first began, appealing to a different audience than what was likely ever intended. Whereas this film attempts to adapt the first videogame, it does so with the foresight of what the videogame series ultimately became. What began as a round around the edges, jump scare dispenser with a Creepypasta-esque story embedded inside of it, became a young-adult series that plays much closer to something by R. L. Stine than it does Wes Craven.

For this reason, the film feels like it is at odds with itself. The scares are sanitized, at best, with a much less gritty, more produced approach. Although the animatronics look nice, as does the overall aesthetic for the film (it feels a little too much like a movie set, but my biggest gripes about how the film looks pertain to the cinematography, lighting and directing more than they do how the set was made), there is something overwrought and off about the film. The animatronics that roam around the pizzeria don’t feel dangerous, but, rather, feel misunderstood and damn-near huggable. It’s jarring, but it does make sense when you consider all the places the series has gone since it was first released.

In my house, you will find about a dozen graphic-novels and young-adult books dedicated to all the unique, little mysteries that Scott Cawthon and friends have cooked up. None of them mine, but, rather, they all belong to my wife who remains an avid fan of the series in spite of its new direction. Five Nights at Freddy’s really is Scott Cawthon’s version of Goosebumps with stories that keep straying further and further away from where it all started.

For this reason, the Five Nights at Freddy’s film feels like it has a certain cognitive dissonance, striving to reach where the videogame series ended up with its characters (a young-adult phenomenon) at the expense of forgetting where it all began (an animatronic scare-fest).

The humor is unwieldy, with it still not being entirely clear to be what was meant to be funny and what wasn’t. Likewise, too, the characters are cookie-cutter and one-note, built from the ground-up as archetypes with traits that feel like they were lifted from a million other things and are in desperate need of a second draft. The actors involved are recognizable and presumably capable, with Josh Hutcherson acting as the big name of the film, but the dialogue simply does him no favors at all. The writing is cliched, stuffing as many possible tropes as it can in its runtime.

This, I think I also have a reason for as well and his name is Scott Cawthon. Scott Cawthon is, to me, a talented videogame developer who had a good idea and stuck with it. As a storyteller, my opinions are a little more skewed. I think of him as mechanically sound, an appropriate phrasing given how his work deals with animatronics. If you take the Five Nights at Freddy’s videogames and isolate them down, there isn’t really a whole, whole lot of surface level substance. It’s a basic story. What made it special was, both the presentation, and the fact that he was able to tell the story in an unconventional, unique way. He was able to tell the story through subtext and when things felt ambiguous, that only drove people to dig deeper, drawing conclusions sometimes where there weren’t any. Frankly put, it was fun, unique, a little creepy, and it captivated the internet.

However, if you were to take all of his tricks and sleight of hand and expose it for what it is – it isn’t exactly Shakespeare. And that’s okay! It was successful and people liked it, and it was clever, but I think the film exposes the weaknesses and inexperience of Scott Cawthon as a writer in a conventional setting.

The game works because, at a surface level, it’s a basic stealth-esque videogame, entertaining casual audiences through creepy visuals and jump scares. It’s when you peel back the onion like the fandoms do that you start to realize the intricate, more mechanical, deeper inner workings of the series.

Where the Five Nights at Freddy’s film suffers is that, to do an adaptation, one would have to offer a film with creepy visuals and jump scares, while having that same level of lore and subtle convolution. It tries to have both and, in this medium, with this approach, it simply doesn’t work. The ghost story feels heavy-handed and dull because it is being told you to with the subtlety of a baseball bat to the head which is exactly what the videogames didn’t do (hence why a million different YouTubers were able to come along and tell you what they’d pieced together – it was a great, big communal puzzle).

So, the story’s bland, the characters are cliched, the horror is far and few between, and while the animatronics and setting look good the whole film is kind of a mess. It could have been a fun, animatronic slasher flick, or, at the very least, a spooky ghost story ripe with scares, but it is neither of those things. It’s just kind of a dull and bland film that pulls its punches to keep a PG-13 rating and declaws its monsters to appease its core-demographic. That’s where we leave it, right? Not necessarily. You see, as the title suggests: My wife liked the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie.

She liked it a lot. So much so I bought the Blu-Ray for her the very second it became available.

In fact, a lot of the fandom seems to have really dug the film.

I think that means something – it doesn’t mean I think it’s a good film, because I don’t, but it does mean something. (Mostly that I’ll be reviewing the sequel.)