'Five Nights at Freddy's' Is Sure a Movie that Happened

By Alison Lanier | Film | November 3, 2023 |

By Alison Lanier | Film | November 3, 2023 |

Five Nights at Freddy’s (2014) works as a game by leaning on the archetypal horror of those scary animatronic oversized animals that haunted my generation’s childhoods via Chuck E. Cheese’s. The premise of the game is simple: you are a first-person security guard sitting in front of your bank of surveillance monitors. The power is faulty; the murderous animatronic characters wander the restaurant. Locking the doors and using the lights from the control center of the surveillance office uses up the limited electricity, and then you can’t lock any more doors or use any more lights. And the monsters get you. Your shift lasts from midnight to six in the morning. Survive five nights. That’s the game.

It’s terrifying. By the time you see the murder robots coming at you, you know you’re dead. The mechanics are simple and the monsters retain a level of instinctive horror.

Not so with the movie.

Josh Hutcherson stars as main-character-energy-guy Mike; the movie makes some loose gestures toward contextualizing his character via childhood trauma and the machinations of his evil aunt who wants to take guardianship of his young sister away from him. Mike’s a bit of a deadbeat, trying to discover through his dreams who it was who abducted his little brother when they were kids. Yeah, the logic’s shaky. And the story only gets shakier. The whole plot is incredibly transparent from the get-go, making the reveals exhausting rather than thrilling. And sure, the murder robots at Freddy’s kill everyone else … but they become friends with Mike and his little sister Abby (Piper Rubio)…because main characters! They build a pillow fort together! Wow! So much fun!

Needless to say, the creepy-crawly horror of the animatronics is vastly diminished, and hence any hope of actual horror is pretty much dead in the water at this point. There’s a big bad lurking somewhere off-screen, and the pretty small-town cop (Elizabeth Lail) with the awkward maybe-romance plot is hanging around. Truly these are horror movie characters with a single motivation and very poor decision making. It is truly just a flat formula with a franchise glazed on top and sprinkled with what might very generously be called acting.

You can just imagine it: A room of executives looks at the market data. People love video game adaptations! Let’s do that! Blumhouse can get in on this trend, too! And make it a scary movie that comes out at the end of October! Money! What video game will we grab? What’s a game that people love? We could go for something with silly things like characters and plot, say something like Left 4 Dead. Zombies, am I right? Or. We could go for something more fundamental. More ubiquitous. I mean, everybody who played video games in the 2010s played Five Nights at Freddy’s, right?

The movie pulls heavily on Stranger Things ’80s vibes, aiming for some awkwardly shoehorned nostalgia (and also the appeal of a much more successful franchise). Does it help? Not really. Well, actually just no.

It’s a fun, stupid, scary movie. If you played and liked the game, it’s a bit frustrating to see how the opportunity for a truly scary and engaging game got squandered. With a cast of one, a single setting, and minimal dialogue, the game did much better storytelling than its overloaded failed-trope adaptation.

Turn it on for some background noise or for some laughs if you’re already subscribed to Peacock. And if not…this one is most certainly not worth the price of subscription.

Five Nights at Freddy’s is now streaming on Peacock and playing in theaters.