Let’s get one thing straight, Five Nights at Freddy’s is a well-made bore fest of a horror movie. Based on the point-and-click survival horror game of the same name, director Emma Tami jettisons the goofy fun and schlock kills for the characters to work through their collective trauma.
For the love of God, this is a film about possessed killer animatronic mascots that can shred their victims quicker than a chainsaw! Imagine The Banana Splits going ballistic and hunting you to death (hold on, that happened in The Banana Splits Movie) and trying to keep a straight face, or Nicolas Cage in Willy’s Wonderland taking time out to examine his troubled past rather than beating the psychopathic puppets to death with broken broom sticks.
Where’s the fun in that?
For what its worth, Five Nights at Freddy’s features a very serious Josh Hutcherson as Mike Schmidt, a security guard with anger issues who has parental responsibilities for his younger sister Abby. Abby has a penchant for drawing terrible pictures that might just hold the clue to Mike’s traumatic past and the present events when he takes the job as the night watchman at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza joint. Freddy’s has been closed since the 1980s but the owner, through a warped sense of nostalgia, can’t bring himself to demolish it. Maybe that’s a commentary on our own infantized culture, but don’t count on it.
Whilst Mike watches the analogue CCTV for movement, he’s kept company by an overfriendly and condescending cop, Vanessa. Why she’s got so much interest in a two-bit loser like Mike is anyone’s guess, but she turns up with such annoying regularity that she feels like the world’s first self-employed police officer. When Freddy and his friends finally jerk to life and stalk various ne’er-do-wells around the same corridors, we expect some good old-fashioned carnival carnage but there is more tension in an episode of Scooby-Doo, even one featuring Scrappy.
There are some toe-curling cringe moments when the grizzly gang try to bond with Mike and Abby by building a fort out of tables and chairs. The sequence is so bereft of comedy or pathos that we would find more life aboard the Mary Celeste. Going willingly to watch a film like Freddy’s, we expect to suspend our sense of disbelief from a very high vantage point, but the lack of whip smart (or even whip-stupid) zingers for a film like this is unforgiveable. Chucky would turn in his toybox if he was subjected to this level of blandness.
Still, Five Nights at Freddy’s is a success. It has taken $78 million at the box office in its opening weekend, despite being released simultaneously on Peacock to stream. Teenagers like my daughter wanted to see it in the theatres with their friends, and that should be applauded. My daughter is fourteen in a few weeks and Five Nights at Freddy’s is rated 15 in the UK. This would be her first time breaking the law (that I know of), trying to see her first film when underage. What a thrill.
We could only get tickets for a later showing so I took her and her friends but had to sit by myself, well away from them. We safely blagged the usher dutifully checking passports and other forms of identification from kids wearing Halloween make-up. This was the first time in my cinema-going career that I felt like an interloper when I took my seat somewhat awkwardly next to two teenage girls and a long line of teenage boys on the back row.
The atmosphere was suitably raucous, and phones were checked regularly but to sit in a full cinema is a rare treat these days and, for younger teenagers whose spaces have gradually been eradicated other the last fifteen years, the cinema is a rite of passage. My fellow back rowers shouted smart remarks, took the piss when required, and laughed at the few gags Freddy’s had to offer. They were scrupulously polite when they had to walk past me and loved the trailer for Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s follow up to Promising Young Woman.
As the lights come up, my daughter and her friends were buzzing. They loved it, loved sneaking in, loved the atmosphere and argued why Five Night at Freddy’s had an emotional core. I disagreed of course and told my daughter why she was wrong and why it was a well-made bore fest of a horror movie, but being a man of a certain age, my mind drifted to paraphrasing Mark Twain. “The reports of cinema’s death are greatly exaggerated.”
And, for that reason, we should celebrate movies like this.