This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Based on the wildly popular video game of the same name, Five Nights at Freddy’s follows Mike, a security guard, who tries to keep himself and his sister safe from the deadly animatronics of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. With names like Josh Hutcherson and Matthew Lillard involved, one might have expected a fun, campy, horror movie. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
I never played the Five Nights at Freddy’s video game so I’m not even going to attempt to talk about the lore behind the story. My only knowledge coming in was that it was extremely popular and it has a very loyal fanbase. With that being said, this movie feels very much like a Blumhouse movie.
There are cliche jump scares all over the place, and the atmosphere was not tense enough. While watching gameplay on YouTube, the one thing that stood out is how on edge you are as you flip between each camera. In the movie, there’s really only one scene that has any semblance of that tension, and even then it was ruined by cheap bits of comedy.
What you’ll hear the most about this movie is that it really lacks a tone. It tries at times to be a straight horror movie but other times it tries to be campy and fun. It doesn’t do either particularly well.
Now I might be a sicko, but nothing frustrates me more than when a movie limits its own potential by being PG-13 as opposed to rated R. Especially Five Nights at Freddy’s, which centers around killer animatronics, felt extremely tame. Outside of one bloody handprint and a person being bit in half in the shadows, you could’ve convinced me that the animatronics were just kidnapping people. The story lined up with that as well. The restaurant became a backdrop to a story essentially about dreams and it wasn’t fun to watch.
Josh Hutcherson felt really out of place. There are scenes where he lacked emotional intensity and others where he just lacked any emotion at all. Matthew Lillard was the name that got me interested and for the most part, he brought it, but it was too little too late for the movie.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Five Nights at Freddy’s will surely make a ton of money, thanks to the popularity of the game. I was not a fan of the movie at all, however. It doesn’t do well as a straight horror and isn’t campy enough to be fun. The animatronics looked pretty cool but it’s a problem when they outshine the human cast. This is a movie I probably won’t think about again.
