By ELLA SILVA
It feels genuinely insane to be able to say that the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie is officially out and you can go watch it now!!!! As an avid Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNAF) fan, I feel like I have been waiting for this movie to exist for longer than I have been alive on this planet. So the fact that it’s a real movie that I have now seen? Insane.
If you’re unfamiliar with the FNAF franchise as a whole, it is currently made up of 20 video games (10 main games, 6 spin-offs, and 4 troll games), and a total of 48 books (3 novels, 21 anthologies, 8 graphic novels, 5 guidebooks, 3 coloring books, and 8 other books).
It’s certainly most known for its main games though, which started to gain popularity around 2015, when let’s play YouTubers started to play the original FNAF 1 game because of its simple mechanics and spooky jumpscares. Fans loved to see their favorite YouTuber scream and jump in terror when something scary happened in the game, and from there, the rest of the games would follow with similar levels of popularity.
The games themselves focus on a fictional pizzeria called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, which is a Chuck-E-Cheese-style restaurant with a cast of animatronic characters to entertain kids. In the first two games, you play as a night security guard for the restaurant, and you have to contend with the animatronics that come to life at night and attempt to catch you.
This very basic premise is essentially what the movie is based on, so I will spare you an explanation of the more in-depth lore, an explanation that could be the length of a final dissertation (but if people want me to write about FNAF lore I would write more articles about it in a heartbeat.)
The movie itself follows Mike, a man who is struggling to make ends meet to keep custody of his younger sister. In a last-ditch effort to make things work out, he takes a job as a night security guard at an abandoned Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza place. All he has to do is watch the cameras and make sure no one gets in since the owner of the building just wants to maintain the closed-down restaurant. He soon discovers that the animatronics are far more than just your typical children’s entertainment and that they have ties to a past incident involving multiple children who went missing at the restaurant. But that’s not all, because they also seem to be connected to Mike’s sister, as well as maybe being able to provide answers to Mike’s lifelong quest to find out who kidnapped his brother when they were young. Animatronic shenanigans ensue.
This movie, plain and simple, was silly. I’m honestly not sure how silly they intended for this movie to be, but in general, the FNAF franchise is questionably silly so it seems to fit with the general tone. It was incredible to be able to see these animatronics and locations that had only before been seen in brief shots during the games come to life on screen.
Truly one of the most incredible parts of this movie was how the animatronics were made, they looked perfect, and the way they moved perfectly matched the animatronic unsettlingness that I always imagined when thinking about these games. It was equally awesome to see places in the restaurant that had only been shown in the blurry camera footage in FNAF 1 be recreated in full detail for this movie.
In terms of plot, this was in no way groundbreaking. Does it have larger FNAF lore implications? Maybe. But those connections aren’t so much that they overshadow the film, allowing it to be enjoyable both for fans who know the FNAF universe inside and out, and those who only know the basic premise. Are there plot holes? Yeah. Is the pacing potentially questionable? Yes. Is this movie the best movie of all time? Certainly not. But does it bring me the exact kind of joy I always hoped to get from a FNAF movie? 100% yes.
Featured Image Credit: Cam Stenberg’24
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