If you're not familiar with it, mascot horror has made its home in the world of independent video games. An absolute ton of them have been released on Steam over the last decade, with notable examples including Poppy Playtime and Bendy and the Ink Machine. But much like how Godzilla is the king of all monster movies, at the top of the entire "mascot horror" subgenre sits Five Nights at Freddy's.
Developed by Scott Cawthon, Five Nights at Freddy's began as a single game published on Steam in the summer of 2014. Indie games arrive and disappear all the time, so despite the good reviews it got, it likely would've just flown under everyone's radars had it not been for YouTube. Videos about the game by a number of super-popular YouTubers got millions of views, shining a spotlight on the game and helping make it a surprise success.
It was so successful, in fact, that Cawthorn created a sequel just three months after the first game's release, and it's snowballed from there. Five Nights at Freddy's has since blossomed into a franchise that's produced twenty official games by my count, as well as novels, tabletop games, Halloween costumes, coloring books, toys, an insane amount of fanmade projects, and an attraction as part of the 2025 edition of "Halloween Horror Nights" at Universal Studios Hollywood. One of its villains even appears alongside a cornucopia of iconic horror characters as downloadable content for Dead by Daylight.
So of course, Hollywood came calling to make a movie too.
After years of production delays and behind-the-scenes shake-ups during its development, Blumhouse Productions and Universal Studios released a Five Nights at Freddy's film adaptation simultaneously in theaters and on Peacock a few days before Halloween in 2023. And while it was largely panned by critics, it was a box office success and became one of Blumhouse's biggest hits.
Having never played any of the games (and never having had any interest whatsoever in them, if I may be honest), I didn't have a lot of interest in the movie. But the sequel comes out today and I could use some content for this blog, so what the heck, I might as well watch it. And truth be told, it's just okay at best. It's a passable movie that could've been worse, but it could have been much better too.
Meet Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), a man with low prospects and an unfortunate inability to stay employed. It leaves him unable to pay his bills, and at risk of being both evicted from his home and losing custody of his little sister Abby (Piper Rubio). But an odd opportunity soon presents itself when Mike is offered a job working as an overnight security guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. A combination of pizzeria and playground, it was immensely popular back in the '80s, but was shut down at its peak after five children went missing. Now it merely stands as an abandoned, dilapidated shell of its former self.
Mike's first few nights seem relatively unremarkable, mostly just dozing off on the job and dealing with the mess a group of vandals left behind. But when he has to start bringing Abby to work with him following the disappearance of her babysitter, shit really starts to hit the fan. It turns out the pizzeria's four animatronic mascots ― Bonnie, Foxy, Chica, and Freddy Fazbear himself ― can come to life. While Abby believes them to be her friends, Mike discovers that they have more malevolent intentions that put both he and his sister in grave danger.
I will be upfront and say that I am not the target audience for Five Nights at Freddy's. That's why it took me two whole years to bother watching the movie, because I had a feeling that much like the games, the movie just wouldn't be for me. And having actually watched it now, I can say that my suspicions were correct. But that's not to say I hated it either. There's a lot of stuff here that I wanted to like, a lot of elements that would've made for something fantastic had the movie itself just been stronger as a whole. Five Nights at Freddy's is one of those times where I saw there was a chance it could be really good, but it stopped just a few yards short of the goal line.
The biggest problem I had with the movie is that it felt like Emma Tammi's direction and the script written by she, Seth Cuddleback, and Cawthon didn't strike me as being very confident in knowing just what kind of movie was supposed to be made. The first half of the movie gives us a scene where Freddy and the other mascots separate and kill a group of vandals that have broken in, and you begin to think that's where the movie might go. There's lots of jump scares, and a sequence that's actually pretty tense by kid-friendly standards. But then the second half of the movie starts leaning more towards something that tries to be more psychologically thrilling when it really isn't.
The dueling plotlines of a custody battle between Mike and his aunt over Abby, and Mike's recurring and evolving nightmares about the abduction of he and Abby's brother many years earlier, feels like something I would expect from a horror movie that's a bit more mature. Maybe put a full-fledged cult in there, maybe put Ari Aster's name on there as a producer, and it'd be one of the "emotional trauma porn" horror movies that A24 and Neon have released over the last few years.
It doesn't really do the mature stuff well, nor the "killer Chuck E. Cheese animatronics" side either. Neither the director nor the script put the idea of being stuck inside an rundown arcade/pizzeria with a bunch of monsters to any good use. The set design is downright bland, and there's never any energy pulled from it. Outside of one scene near the end where Abby hides in an old ballpit, the setting itself is never really utilized at all. You're in an arcade and singing, dancing creatures that look like they escaped from a demented furry convention are trying to kill you, you can do something to play up the inherent silliness of it. The movie's concept and the outfits Freddy and his friends wear are too good to just half-ass it. I know the franchise's main demographic is kids, but this movie is begging for someone to use it as an excuse to completely rip off Chopping Mall.
And then there's a cast who I think weren't bad, but they deserved more than what they had to work with. Josh Hutcherson's performance feels like he was desperate for better material than what he was given, while I found Piper Rubio was adorable. I did like Elizabeth Lail as well, even though I thought her character (that of a local cop who slowly tells Mike about the pizzaria's dark history) was a little on the bland side.
The best parts of the whole movie, though, came from two people who are barely in the movie at all. One I wanted to highlight is Matthew Lillard. He's barely in the movie at all, showing up at just the beginning and again during the climax. But Lillard milks what time he has for everything it's worth, stealing what scenes he's in by overacting his ass off and being one of the most memorable elements of the movie because of it.
The other actor I wanted to highlight is Mary Stuart Masterson as Mike and Abby's aunt, who is trying to get guardianship of Abby solely so she can get financial assistance from the government. Much like Lillard, Masterson only appears in a few scenes and has roughly six or seven minutes of screen time in total. She makes it every second count, however, by being wonderfully bitchy and making you love to hate her character.
As I said before, Five Nights at Freddy's wasn't made for me. It was made for its fans. And that's perfectly fine! There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm on the outside looking in, watching a celebration of something that I know so precious little about. Speaking as an outsider, Five Nights at Freddy's is almost two hours of mediocrity. I don't want to say it was a victim of the old trope that movie adaptations of video games are bad, because it isn't. But it has so many half-baked ideas and so much unrealized potential that I'm more disappointed with the movie than anything else.
Today sees the theatrical release of Five Nights at Freddy's 2, and I'll likely give it a shot when it eventually hits streaming. So here's hoping that the sequel will be more satisfying than the first one.
Final Rating: **
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