Five nights at Freddy's make a hard man humble
I will say this about Five Nights at Freddy's, an extremely unlikable piece of shit movie whose enormous, instantaneous box-office success has filled me with the gloomy suspicion that we're staring down the gun barrel of a new epoch where the only movies that become hits are the ones that can be turned into memes: absolutely stunning animatronics. There's a rule as old as horror cinema, that if you have a really great monster, your film can't be a total washout, and no matter how badly everything else is going, it will still ultimately have been sort of worth the time spent watching it. And that is the absolute most spectacularly generous level I can rise to in praise of Five Night's at Freddy's; indeed, suggesting that it's worth the time makes me feel like I'm betraying all the trust I have ever earned as a film critic. The movie is quite dreadful. But the animatonics....
Said animatronics play the part of the characters at a defunct 1980s pizza parlor/arcade, Freddy Fazbear's, which is blatantly modeled on Chuck E. Cheese's, the very weird restaurant franchise founded by Atari co-creator Nolan Bushnell in 1977, mostly because he felt it would help with video game sales. As a child of the 1980s, I can confirm, readily, that the clattering singing animal robots of Chuck E. Cheese's were indeed the most disquieting, horrifying nightmare fuel, and it was a remarkable thing that the restaurants were such a ubiquitous fixture of birthday celebrations given how monumentally off-putting and uncanny they were as environments. The leap that brings us to an abandoned husk of such a place as the setting for a terrifying horror story is really no leap at all, and really the only surprise is that it took until 2014 for someone to pounce on that: in this particular case, Scott Cawthorn, a designer of Christian video games who designed and programmed the video game Five Nights at Freddy's largely as a solo project. In the intervening decade, his brainchild has become a generation-defining game, though based on what I can tell, this is mostly because of people watching online streams of other people playing it, not because people like playing it themselves. Based on the almost nothing at all I know about the game (I said it was generation-defining; I didn't say it was my generation), it sounds sort of dull, a security guard simulator where you push a button to lock or unlock doors while watching video footage of the scary robot animals idly pace around the restaurant in the darkest hours of the night. But apparently it does a good job delivering jump scares.
If my very secondhand understanding of the gameplay is accurate, it also suggests that the game Five Nights at Freddy's is a whole lot more genuinely scary and intense than the long-gestating movie based on it. In the film (which film neophyte Cawthorn co-wrote as a condition of selling the rights, and I do not expect that helped) the four main towering killer robots - Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie the bunny, Chica the chicken, Foxy the Fox - are generally presented as inexplicable but fundamentally benign, at least as far as concerns our protagonist, traumatised hothead Mike (Josh Hutcherson). They kill the godalmighty fuck out of a group of teenage rapscallions on the second night, so we do know that they have the capacity for being dangerous, but Mike doesn't seem to be more than unnerved by the them the first two nights, and the third night, when he brings his little sister Abby (Piper Rubio) along - her babysitter was one of the dead rapscallions - and they befriend her, it's all over as far as making them a source of real terror goes. Director Emma Tammi has dutifully staged a pretty substantial number of jump scares, almost all of which are telegraphed so hard that it's awfully hard to jump at them, and in so doing I gather that she has discharged her primary duty towards this franchise and its armies of Gen-Z fans. But other than the raw fact of jump scares, I couldn't tell you what's actually supposed to be scary here.
To be fair to the movie, at least somewhat, it's obviously not really trying to be scary. There's a level at which this is ostensibly a kind of "my first horror movie" experience, gloomy but safe, with all the hard edges sanded off. The problem is there are other levels as well: parts of this are clearly trying to be a nice little story about overcoming very generic trauma in a very generic way, parts of it are gleefully obsessed with the violence of the whirring blades and other sharp bits inside the robots, and parts want to be all about the scary atmosphere of a weird and unpleasant space with all the lights off at night, the better to see the glinting, glowing eyes of the robotic hellbeasts stalking through it. It's trying to combine way too many possible audiences and different approaches for those audiences, so it ends up being a confusion of moods and tones, and Tammi's not remotely enough of a battle-tested director to keep help us navigate around those swerves. It just ends up feeling messy and unfocused, veering unsteadily between kiddie shit with far too much of a nasty attitude for its own good and an actual horror movie for slasher fans that is much too soft and juvenile to possibly work on that level.
This is all smacking about in the context of a narrative that I will happily admit completely defeated me. To be sure, at the end of the film's erratic 109 minutes, I could tell you what "happened": I know who the bad guy was (to be fair, this is also because the bad guy is introduced in a scene that has all but been painted in neon reds and pinks to call attention to the fact that this minor character, played by an actor far too recognisable for such a tiny part, is harboring some kind of dread secret), I know what the bad guy did that intersected with Mike's story, I know what motivated the robots. This is the difference between "story" and "plot": I understood the "story", the overall "what happened and why" of the movie. The "plot", the scene-by-scene progression of events that communicate the story, I just have no goddamn idea. The plot of Five Nights at Freddy's is like a tangled ball of yarn, where you keep being able to tug a bit of knowledge loose here or there, but you can't quite find the starting point, or trace how all of it's connected. An entire character, hhighly-suspicious pretty young cop Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail, giving a singularly terrible performance of deer-in-the-headlights mystification), just sort of appears her way into the film and is accepted by the rest of the cast like she makes sense; the consistent ambiguity between "the robots are scary" and "the robots are charming" is not remotely reflected in how the robots are used within the movie. The script very obviously assumes an audience of game fans that already knows what's going on, and even then it feels awfully thready about explaining precisely what causes anything else. And just to top it all off, the movie spends endless minutes on the story of Mike, Abby, and their harridan aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson), who is trying to wrest custody of Abby away from Mike for no obvious reason than because she knows it will make Abby unhappy. Impressively, the movie manages to make Jane so despicable on purpose that it doesn't throw the story out of whack that it has made Mike incredibly despicable by accident. Either way, this material is a complete black hole of drama, endless minutes of family conflict that do not receive any kind of added texture or nuance from the situation with the scary robots in Freddy's.
It's all very tedious when it's not confusing, and it can't even count on atmosphere to salvage it: this is a terribly bland horror movie that only tries to arrive at "spooky" by virtue of Lyn Moncrief's cinematography refusing to actually light anything such that we can see it. Freddy's itself is a profound failure of a set, an allegedly abandoned place of mystery and urban legend that just feels like an empty restaurant after hours, neat and clean except for a few boxes randomly staged around. Mike's various dream sequences of creepy ghost children start of promising, but all of them do the same thing the same way, and soon even the reliable scary movie trick of having children behaving weirdly has burned itself out.
So all we have left is the animatronics. They're terrific (though, like the restaurant set, they're much too clean and unweathered). They were designed as full-body suits with offscreen puppeteering teams by the Jim Henson Creature Shop, and they're as good as you could hope for something from that holy brand name: big and menacing with highly expressive faces that never betray the story limits of what these robots "are". They can be creepy or cute as needed, the only thing about the movie actually designed well to navigate those tough tonal U-turns. They're practical effects which move in strange ways and have been light to feel slightly separate so that they still don't quite seem to intersect with the reality of the movie. Is this enough? On all of its other merits, would consider myself being unreasonably forgiving to give Five Nights at Freddy's a 1.5/5 star review, and here I am nudging it up to 2/5. So maybe it's not that the animatronics are enough; maybe I'm just an easy mark. Regardless, the film is a dreadful, confusing slog, badly acted and quite ugly - these things are undeniable. The creatures are very good - this, I think, is also undeniable. You know if you're the kind of person who cares about that kind of thing.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Said animatronics play the part of the characters at a defunct 1980s pizza parlor/arcade, Freddy Fazbear's, which is blatantly modeled on Chuck E. Cheese's, the very weird restaurant franchise founded by Atari co-creator Nolan Bushnell in 1977, mostly because he felt it would help with video game sales. As a child of the 1980s, I can confirm, readily, that the clattering singing animal robots of Chuck E. Cheese's were indeed the most disquieting, horrifying nightmare fuel, and it was a remarkable thing that the restaurants were such a ubiquitous fixture of birthday celebrations given how monumentally off-putting and uncanny they were as environments. The leap that brings us to an abandoned husk of such a place as the setting for a terrifying horror story is really no leap at all, and really the only surprise is that it took until 2014 for someone to pounce on that: in this particular case, Scott Cawthorn, a designer of Christian video games who designed and programmed the video game Five Nights at Freddy's largely as a solo project. In the intervening decade, his brainchild has become a generation-defining game, though based on what I can tell, this is mostly because of people watching online streams of other people playing it, not because people like playing it themselves. Based on the almost nothing at all I know about the game (I said it was generation-defining; I didn't say it was my generation), it sounds sort of dull, a security guard simulator where you push a button to lock or unlock doors while watching video footage of the scary robot animals idly pace around the restaurant in the darkest hours of the night. But apparently it does a good job delivering jump scares.
If my very secondhand understanding of the gameplay is accurate, it also suggests that the game Five Nights at Freddy's is a whole lot more genuinely scary and intense than the long-gestating movie based on it. In the film (which film neophyte Cawthorn co-wrote as a condition of selling the rights, and I do not expect that helped) the four main towering killer robots - Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie the bunny, Chica the chicken, Foxy the Fox - are generally presented as inexplicable but fundamentally benign, at least as far as concerns our protagonist, traumatised hothead Mike (Josh Hutcherson). They kill the godalmighty fuck out of a group of teenage rapscallions on the second night, so we do know that they have the capacity for being dangerous, but Mike doesn't seem to be more than unnerved by the them the first two nights, and the third night, when he brings his little sister Abby (Piper Rubio) along - her babysitter was one of the dead rapscallions - and they befriend her, it's all over as far as making them a source of real terror goes. Director Emma Tammi has dutifully staged a pretty substantial number of jump scares, almost all of which are telegraphed so hard that it's awfully hard to jump at them, and in so doing I gather that she has discharged her primary duty towards this franchise and its armies of Gen-Z fans. But other than the raw fact of jump scares, I couldn't tell you what's actually supposed to be scary here.
To be fair to the movie, at least somewhat, it's obviously not really trying to be scary. There's a level at which this is ostensibly a kind of "my first horror movie" experience, gloomy but safe, with all the hard edges sanded off. The problem is there are other levels as well: parts of this are clearly trying to be a nice little story about overcoming very generic trauma in a very generic way, parts of it are gleefully obsessed with the violence of the whirring blades and other sharp bits inside the robots, and parts want to be all about the scary atmosphere of a weird and unpleasant space with all the lights off at night, the better to see the glinting, glowing eyes of the robotic hellbeasts stalking through it. It's trying to combine way too many possible audiences and different approaches for those audiences, so it ends up being a confusion of moods and tones, and Tammi's not remotely enough of a battle-tested director to keep help us navigate around those swerves. It just ends up feeling messy and unfocused, veering unsteadily between kiddie shit with far too much of a nasty attitude for its own good and an actual horror movie for slasher fans that is much too soft and juvenile to possibly work on that level.
This is all smacking about in the context of a narrative that I will happily admit completely defeated me. To be sure, at the end of the film's erratic 109 minutes, I could tell you what "happened": I know who the bad guy was (to be fair, this is also because the bad guy is introduced in a scene that has all but been painted in neon reds and pinks to call attention to the fact that this minor character, played by an actor far too recognisable for such a tiny part, is harboring some kind of dread secret), I know what the bad guy did that intersected with Mike's story, I know what motivated the robots. This is the difference between "story" and "plot": I understood the "story", the overall "what happened and why" of the movie. The "plot", the scene-by-scene progression of events that communicate the story, I just have no goddamn idea. The plot of Five Nights at Freddy's is like a tangled ball of yarn, where you keep being able to tug a bit of knowledge loose here or there, but you can't quite find the starting point, or trace how all of it's connected. An entire character, hhighly-suspicious pretty young cop Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail, giving a singularly terrible performance of deer-in-the-headlights mystification), just sort of appears her way into the film and is accepted by the rest of the cast like she makes sense; the consistent ambiguity between "the robots are scary" and "the robots are charming" is not remotely reflected in how the robots are used within the movie. The script very obviously assumes an audience of game fans that already knows what's going on, and even then it feels awfully thready about explaining precisely what causes anything else. And just to top it all off, the movie spends endless minutes on the story of Mike, Abby, and their harridan aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson), who is trying to wrest custody of Abby away from Mike for no obvious reason than because she knows it will make Abby unhappy. Impressively, the movie manages to make Jane so despicable on purpose that it doesn't throw the story out of whack that it has made Mike incredibly despicable by accident. Either way, this material is a complete black hole of drama, endless minutes of family conflict that do not receive any kind of added texture or nuance from the situation with the scary robots in Freddy's.
It's all very tedious when it's not confusing, and it can't even count on atmosphere to salvage it: this is a terribly bland horror movie that only tries to arrive at "spooky" by virtue of Lyn Moncrief's cinematography refusing to actually light anything such that we can see it. Freddy's itself is a profound failure of a set, an allegedly abandoned place of mystery and urban legend that just feels like an empty restaurant after hours, neat and clean except for a few boxes randomly staged around. Mike's various dream sequences of creepy ghost children start of promising, but all of them do the same thing the same way, and soon even the reliable scary movie trick of having children behaving weirdly has burned itself out.
So all we have left is the animatronics. They're terrific (though, like the restaurant set, they're much too clean and unweathered). They were designed as full-body suits with offscreen puppeteering teams by the Jim Henson Creature Shop, and they're as good as you could hope for something from that holy brand name: big and menacing with highly expressive faces that never betray the story limits of what these robots "are". They can be creepy or cute as needed, the only thing about the movie actually designed well to navigate those tough tonal U-turns. They're practical effects which move in strange ways and have been light to feel slightly separate so that they still don't quite seem to intersect with the reality of the movie. Is this enough? On all of its other merits, would consider myself being unreasonably forgiving to give Five Nights at Freddy's a 1.5/5 star review, and here I am nudging it up to 2/5. So maybe it's not that the animatronics are enough; maybe I'm just an easy mark. Regardless, the film is a dreadful, confusing slog, badly acted and quite ugly - these things are undeniable. The creatures are very good - this, I think, is also undeniable. You know if you're the kind of person who cares about that kind of thing.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
