Director – Emma Tammi, Screenplay – Scott Cawthon, Seth Cuddeback & Emma Tami, Screen Story – Scott Cawthon, Chris Lee Hill & Tyler MacIntyre, Based on the Five Nights at Freddy’s Videogames Created by Scott Cawthon, Producers – Jason Blum & Scott Cawthon, Photography – Lyn Moncrief, Music – The Newton Brothers, Visual Effects Supervisor – Melissa Brockman, Visual Effects – Fin Design + Effects (Supervisor – Jonathan Dearing), Special Effects Supervisor – Donnie Dean, Walkaround Suits & Puppets – Jim Henson’s Creatue Workshop (Creative Supervisor – Pete Brooke), Production Design – Max Fisichella. Production Company – Blumhouse/Scott Cawthon Productions.
Cast
Josh Hutcherson (Mike), Piper Rubio (Abby), Elizabeth Lail (Vanessa), Matthew Lillard (Steve Raglan/William Afton), Mary Stuart Masterson (Aunt Jane), Kat Conner Sterling (Max), David Lind (Jeff), Christian Stokes (Hank), Joseph Poliquin (Carl), Grant Feely (Ghost Kid – Blonde Boy), Tadasy Young (Dr Lillian)
Plot
Mike is suffering PTSD due to having witnessed his young brother Garrett being abducted as a child. While working security in a mall, Mike attacks a man thinking he is abducting a child and is fired. He is in danger of having his younger sister Abby taken away in a custody case brought by his aunt. In desperation, Mike takes the only job on offer – working night shift security at the abandoned pizza parlour Freddy Fazbear’s. For lack of a babysitter, he is forced to bring Abby along with him. Mike then finds that the animatronic creatures that form a music band in the restaurant come to life at night. While the animatronics befriend Abby, Mike discovers them to be threatening and murderous.
Five Nights at Freddy’s (2014) was a videogame created by Scott Cawthon. Cawthorn had originally started out making Christian videogames without any success. Five Nights at Freddy’s became a considerable hit due to word of mouth. In the game, the player is a security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s pizzeria who has to survive five night shifts as the animatronic toys come to life with malevolent intent. To date, there have been ten Five Nights at Freddy’s videogames, as well as five spinoff games. In addition, there have been a trilogy of novels, a series of graphic novels, a tabletop game and a soundtrack album, even editions of Cluedo and Monopoly released with game themes. Throughout the various games, a backstory has been developed about the animatronics created by William Afton that contain the souls of children.
A film version of Five Nights at Freddy’s has been planned fairly much ever since the first game came out. It was set to at one point go ahead at Warner Brothers under Gil Kenan, director of Monster House (2006), and then Harry Potter director Chris Columbus, with a script from Seth Grahame-Smith, author of Pride and Prejudice With Zombies (2016). None of these versions went ahead and the property was then taken on board by Blumhouse.
The film version is directed by Emma Tammi in only her second film after The Wind (2018), an eerily spooky work of psychological ambiguity with a pioneer woman alone in a cabin maybe beset by demons. Five Nights at Freddy’s opened with spectacular results on Halloween weekend of 2023, earning $130 million in its opening weekend alone. This makes it the biggest opening weekend Blumhouse has ever had and on track to become one of their most successful films ever.
Mike (Josh Hutcherson) surrounded by the evil animatronics
The one place the film doesn’t seem to have gone down well with is game followers. A glance through gaming forums shows a bunch of irritated and angry comments about the film’s lack of respect of game lore, including the introduction of new characters like Vanessa to the backstory. Although it is worth noting though that the script here is the one that was deemed the best by Scott Cawthorn, who rejected a number of previous script treatments, so what we end up with should be considered officially sanctioned. The most common complaint would be that the horror elements of the game have been watered down so that the film can receive a PG-13 rating – there is no blood and the deaths are only left implied.
I am not a gamer so went in to the film with no particular prior expectations other perhaps than being a fan of Emma Tammi’s previous film. And like most others, I found the results fairly “meh”. The premise of the evil animatronics has been stolen out from under the film by other recent efforts such as The Banana Splits (2019) and the Nicolas Cage-starring Willy’s Wonderland (2021), which perhaps shows how much of a following the game has. Both of these were fairly indifferent efforts and yet Five Nights at Freddy’s, which should have owned the field in this mini-genre, emerges as equally indifferent.
The Jim Henson Creature Workshop do a fine job bringing the animatronics to life, while Emma Tammi certainly lights and shoots them with some sinister threat. On the other hand, Blumhouse in their constantly watering horror down for mass consumption end up creating a film where there is little real threat or nastiness. The results are extremely lightweight and forgettable.
The evil animatronics of Freddy Fazbear’s
It is nice seeing Josh Hutcherson in a leading role where he can evolve out of the part of the teen lead that he was slotted into in The Hunger Games films, for which he is most known. With his brooding, slightly Neanderthal looks, Hutcherson seemed an awkward fit there, but this allows him to emerge as a sympathetic lead. The backstory about his missing brother is an interesting one but felt like it needed more playoff at the end, although some of this appears to be left open for a sequel. Similarly the backstory of William Afton doesn’t get as much time as you feel as though it needs to.
