Summary
- The Five Nights at Freddy's movie follows the franchise's shift towards layered, inferential storytelling, pleasing fans who appreciate the complex lore and theories surrounding the series.
- Die-hard fans of the franchise will appreciate the film's deep references and validation of their story-building efforts, as it adapts theories and connects the universe's stories.
- However, the film's storytelling approach alienates general audiences, who may struggle to understand the narrative without prior knowledge of the series' lore, resulting in a relatively disjointed and confusing experience for them.
WARNING: This article contains SPOILERS for Five Nights at Freddy's. Proceed at your own risk. The Five Nights at Freddy's movie was finally released last week after being announced way back in 2015. Marketed as Halloween 2023's go-to horror flick, despite its PG-13 rating, Five Nights at Freddy's shattered the box office during its opening weekend. On the review side, however, FNAF couldn't be more polarizing, as critics have awarded it with universally negative reviews, while fans praise the film as a near-perfect adaptation. Those in the negative review camp may be shocked by this disparity, having left the film questioning both its tone and narrative trajectory. However, the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie’s polarizing scores are easily explained.
The Five Nights at Freddy's film was first announced in 2015, a time when adapting the property would have been a much simpler endeavor. Many knew the series for its "jump-scare-sim" reputation. That said, the FNAF franchise has gone through quite a shift in the years since, becoming one of the most non-linear, yet lore-heavy, narratives in popular media. This shift included a departure from traditional horror, in favor of layered inferential storytelling. Modern Five Nights at Freddy's games, books, and free PC titles don't tell stories outright; they reference or confirm fan theories while leaving breadcrumbs from which fans piece together a new narrative. To the shock of both fans and critics, the Five Nights at Freddy's movie largely follows suit.
Five Nights at Freddy's is Tailor-Made for Die-Hard Fans
While the Five Nights at Freddy's movie was in development, the team behind it, including producer Jason Blum, series-creator Scott Cawthon, and Director Emma Tammi, made a point of keeping fans' expectations up to date, promising a film tailor-made for them that wouldn't cut corners in its adaptation for the big screen. Specifically, Tammi set expectations for the film's tone, using films like 2019's Joker as a reference to her inspiration in exploring Mike Schmidt's story. The film wasn't to be an adrenaline-fueled thrill ride, but rather an exploration of the franchise's most mysterious character, with scares that reflect the jarring moments of violence in the classic game titles.
Jason Blum claims that Scott Cawthon had a part in creating the film at every level of development, and it doesn't take fans long to confirm that fact. Cawthon used his full range of work, rather than the first Five Nights at Freddy's game alone, in considering what should make the final cut. What results is a film that treats Five Night at Freddy's most devout video game fans as its general audience. The film's narrative, references, and style of storytelling are aimed at pleasing those who are heavily invested in the series' incredibly complex lore across all mediums, not just the games.
To date, Five Nights at Freddy's most basic lore spans 13 games and 24 books, with free supplemental titles like last week's Chica in Space providing hints and teases for the franchise's trajectory. The Five Nights at Freddy's movie doesn't just reference the assumed narrative shared across these mediums, it assumes fans know the theories and lore that surround them.
For example, the Sparky the Dog animatronic, shown frequently during crucial scenes in Freddy Fazbear's Pizza Place, is based on an urban legend about the original title having a secret sixth animatronic. Likewise, some of the film's most important and straightforward moments of storytelling feature a doll-like animatronic, whom super fans will quickly identify as Ella, a doll/animatronic exclusive to various book series, and who holds an incredibly critical position in Five Nights at Freddy's lore.
Details like Sparky, Ella, and even the depiction of Phone Guy as William Afton, himself an original to the books, make the Five Nights at Freddy's film feel like an adaptation of theories, rather than a single game. For die-hard fans, this creates a unique experience, in which they find themselves being outright told how the universe's stories are connected. For this reason, fans love the film, as its constant deep references validate their previous story-building efforts at the highest levels while handing them a new continuity with details to connect and explore. The same can not be said, however, for those in the general audience.
Five Nights at Freddy's Method of Storytelling Alienates its General Audience
The Five Nights at Freddy's film is veiled in its storytelling, at best, leaving those with little reference to figure out even its most simple elements on their own. The problem is that the film provides no on-ramp from which they can enter the narrative. Rather, general audiences are left to experience what they likely believed to be a "killer robots" movie, as it spends nearly 90 of its 110-minute runtime hinting at tragedies and violence that are depicted through speech or recurring dream sequences. When the film's final act goes full-throttle, general audiences experience a rapid succession of seemingly unrelated events, instead of the climax to a multi-layered revenge narrative.
General audiences are likely to begin grasping the central concepts of Five Nights at Freddy's about 20 minutes into its runtime, as Mike's second dream sequence features the children's spirits for the first time. Some may have even connected the spirits to Five Nights at Freddy's animatronics. Still, due to creator Scott Cawthon's reliance on unspoken lore, even those audience members have already been left in the dust at this point in the movie. Fans who see this dream sequence would be quick to identify that there are five spirits, but only four animatronics, designating the blonde-haired boy as Golden Freddy.
Golden Freddy, a vengeful spirit whom the lore calls Cassidy, is central to the series' overarching plot, as it holds an immense hatred for Afton. Fans who identify this child during his first appearance can easily follow the core narrative of the film, identifying him as the secondary antagonist, while knowing that Afton is pulling the strings of the other animatronics. General moviegoers have no clue about these facts, leading to a majority of the film becoming harder to grasp. Even when Golden Freddy appears point-blank in the film's climax, many audience members, like Abby Schmidt, may think him to just be Freddy, with his pleasant response to Abby of "Not Freddy" lacking both the massive impact and sinister undertones the moment elicits for fans.
The narrative surrounding Golden Freddy is a perfect example of Five Nights at Freddy's polarizing reviews, as one of the film's most central storylines can be completely missed by general moviegoers, due to its being seen but never heard. In the end, Five Nights at Freddy's is a disjointed series of events for casual moviegoers, and even some casual fans, but a fever dream made reality for those most committed to its lore. This duality explains the polarizing nature of its review scores, a fact that even die-hard FNAF fans have been vocal about understanding. Many fandoms have received a film adaptation that they wish was more faithful to the source material. Five Nights at Freddy's is the rare example of a studio actually delivering that film, despite its relative inaccessibility to general audiences.
Five Nights at Freddy's
- Created by
- Scott Cawthon
- Creation Year
- 2014
- Developer(s)
- Scott Games, Mega Cat Studios, Steel Wool Studios, Illumix
- Publisher(s)
- Scott Games, Clickteam LLC USA, Illumix
Five Nights at Freddy's is a first-person survival horror and resource management game from Scott Cawthorn that raced to popularity thanks to its creepy animatronic enemies and its array of panic-inducing jumpscares. Bringing life to a cavalcade of well-known characters like Freddy Fazbear, Chica, Foxy, Bonnie, and more, Five Nights at Freddy's has seen immense success, spinoffs, and fan games.
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