Five Nights at Freddy's stunned the gaming community when it was first released in 2014, holding a 4/5 approval rating on the gaming platform Steam, and PC Gamer gave it 80/100 when it debuted.
It ticks all the right boxes when it comes to a horror game. There's a creepy location, where the player is confined in a small security office looking at CCTV cameras. There are once cute, now creepy animatronics that you need to keep a very close eye on.
Each night comes with increased difficulty and more challenges, with the fifth and final night being the trickiest. It's an atmospheric, one-location game and your only other source of company (you know, besides the murderous bear and his friends) is a recorded message from Phone Guy, which gives you tidbits of lore as you progress.
So why am I saying all of this? Well, this would have been the perfect springboard for the Five Nights at Freddy's movie (our review isn't kind). It's a game series so rich in lore, that you've already got a story there ready and waiting.
Disappointingly, the movie goes off-piste and forgets what made the game so great in the first place, and as a result, ends up being inaccessible for both newcomers and hardened fans of the original game series.
I love the games. The third one is my personal favorite due to Springtrap, a character that is so ham-fistedly shoved into the movie that one of my colleagues had to ask me who he was. The movie relies on people to have extensive knowledge of the lore already while failing to adapt said lore properly. It's a very frustrating experience.
The Five Nights at Freddy's movie would have benefited from a more simplistic approach, based on the events of the first game. There's a lot to unpack, including The Bite of '87, a horrific incident in which a child's head was bitten by one of the animatronics. It's a famous moment that the movie fails to mention beyond one tiny reference.
While a small moment in the game, it's actually effective, because Phone Guy simply tells the player: "It's amazing that the human body can live without the frontal lobe, you know?", which is a horrific mental image and that dialogue alone is enough to make you want to run out of there screaming.
By deviating from the original game and its mechanics too much, it's actually not a very scary movie. I am the first person to criticize horrors for an over-reliance on jumpscares, but on this occasion, even a couple of genuinely effective scares would have elevated the movie. The game sees characters hurling themselves at you, screaming at the camera, which could definitely have been adapted for the big screen.
There's not much suspense to make up for the lack of scares either. Alfred Hitchcock once said: "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.", which is something that the Five Nights at Freddy's games also do quite well. You're spending the whole time working tirelessly to ensure you don't get scared, creating some excellent tension.
One thing I do understand is giving a proper backstory to the protagonist Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), as the character doesn't have much information in the game beyond simply "being a security guard".
Mike's motivations make a lot of sense in the movie. He's down on his luck, hugely traumatized, and fighting to keep custody of his sister so it makes sense why he's taken on a night security job in this creepy, condemned family pizza restaurant.
Mike is a peak horror character and he could have been tormented way more than he actually was. Instead, he doesn't have a great deal of interaction with the animatronics. I expected to see Josh Hutcherson trapped in a tiny little security office fighting off a fox or a bear, which never happened. Good for Josh, bad for fans like me.
One location horrors are hugely successful. Take a look at found footage hits like Paranormal Activity, or Buried where Ryan Reynolds is trapped in a coffin for 90 minutes, and you'll see that. If most of the movie had taken place within the confines of the pizzeria, I would have been much happier with it. Instead, it loses momentum, taking us to places we really don't need to go.
Sometimes, less is more. Five Nights at Freddy's had humble beginnings as an independent, one-location horror hit, that streamers and YouTubers are still playing to this day. A more straight, faithful adaptation would have worked wonders and delivered more effective scares.
