Throughout the nightmares, night terrors and jumpscares, Five Nights at Freddy’s has been around since 2014 and is to this day, one of the best horror franchises ever created. It’s so popular that many content creators online have made successful careers through uploading videos on Five Nights at Freddy’s. The movie creators shared the love back, featuring a few familiar faces, like MatPat from The Game Theorist and CoryxKenshin.
There are so many ways to tell the story under the Five Nights at Freddy’s name, whether it’s a book, video game or movie. Created by Scott Cawthon, he has made around nine main games. However, many fans have taken the mechanics and story of the games and created their own, expanding this franchise even more.
Before 2023, the series expressed the story through hundreds of novels, dozens of games, and many videos online. Finally, after many requests and years of waiting, Scott Cawthon teamed up with Blumhouse Film Productions to bring Five Nights At Freddy’s to theaters. Blumhouse accepting the role in creating this movie makes it the best piece of FNAF. Blumhouse has a history of amazing horror movies, including The Black Phone, Happy Death Day, M3GAN, and Halloween Ends, plus Cawthon’s incredible creativity with past FNAF content.
So far, the reviews have been quite mixed, many people say it’s what they’ve been expecting and enjoy a different story compared to the games. However, others say it was not scary enough, upset it was rated PG-13 and wanted a better story. Instead of the terrifying, brutal story from the games, the movie was set by a book called “The Silver Eyes.” The story is based on the animatronics once being children, which makes them less aggressive and scary in the movie. For a PG-13 movie, do not mistake it, as there is still a lot of gore and killing involved, including someone getting chomped in half by Freddy. One thing that could be a problem for the movie is that it’s recommended that the viewer either read the books or played the games to understand and enjoy the movie. Some newer fans going into the FNAF world can be confused and feel it is hard to pick up what’s going on. However, the movie does rather well at answering many questions.
The movie so far has been so successful; it’s the biggest Blumhouse opening ever, as it continues to rise up the charts with success. It got hit rough, with a 27% on Rotten Tomatoes but an 89% audience score. To the true fans, the story and film were well made and met its expectations.
The casting by Terri Taylor was put together with perfection, as well-known Josh Hutcherson played Mike Schmidt perfectly, really catching and playing off the role of Freddy’s newest security guard. Matthew Lillard was a good idea for playing the twisted William Afton, a crazed killer that hunts down children, possessing animatronics. A past project Lillard played as was Stu Macher from the classic 1996 Scream movie. There were many references to the games in the movie, and one of the biggest was William Afton saying “I always come back” and being crushed inside the springsuit before his death.
Overall, after about nine years of waiting for an adaptation to come to theaters, this did not disappoint. Even though it was limited to a PG-13 rating, they managed to still capture how horrific and terrifying this franchise is, tied in a beautiful two hour scene. Blumhouse, Universal Studios and Scott Cawthon have already teased a lot towards Five Nights At Freddy’s 2, and fans are already creating many theories.
