A pizza horror show: A review of ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’
"Five Nights at Freddy's" finally makes it to the big screen. This insanely popular video game series deftly used horror at a shut-down family pizza parlor and employed animatronic mascot figures as the adversaries. Created by Scott Cawthorn in 2014, the film adaptation has had a long and rocky road, changing producer, director, and screenplay several times over the intervening years.
The film in release is directed and co-written by Emma Tammi, and Cawthorn is both producer and cowriter; despite the lackluster reviews that the critics handed out, Cawthorn has kept his finger on this project and must be pleased with it. Justification and vindication for Cawthorn must be sweet, as the US and global box office figures have wildly exceeded initial projections since its opening last week.
Manila audiences now get to watch FNAF as it opened on Nov. 1, missing Halloween by a day. After a week of release elsewhere, it’s already the second highest-grossing film based on a video game, Mario tops that list; and it’s the best Blumhouse opening weekend of all time - $80 million in the US and $132 worldwide. The craziest fact is that the film had its streaming release simultaneous to its theatrical release, but that didn’t hurt its box office appeal.
Mike (Josh Hutcherson) is the nighttime security guard who will discover that the animatronic robots at his workplace come to life at night with hostile thoughts and murdering children in their minds. So it doesn’t help that he’s brought baby sister Abby (Piper Rubio) to work with him. And there’s police officer Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), who makes a mysterious appearance, knowing far too much about the history of Freddy Fazbear.
Josh Hutcherson and Elizabeth Lail in FNAF.
Ghosts, robots, lucid dreaming, and child abduction - several themes are swirling around the storyline of this first FNAF film, and a mid-end credits bonus scene holds the promise that this will be a franchise film with sequels lined up. The jump scares come with regularity, and you can’t fault the film for building up the atmosphere and turning the pizza joint into a child’s nightmare world.
But I will emphasize ‘child,’ as there is something simplistic in how the film’s exposition and narrative development is handled. Not much is created in adding depth to the characters, which may be the point, as most may just be waiting for the mascots to start causing mayhem.
But if this were a franchise, it would have been good to make more of an effort to make the main characters resonate. Still, we can’t argue with the success this film is enjoying; so who knows, the sequel may deliver more!