I’m not a big gamer but I was there in the summer of 2014 when a small YouTuber called Markiplier went viral with a series of playthroughs of a new indie horror game called Five Nights At Freddy’s. Watching Mark Edward Fischbach navigate the nightmarish labyrinths of Five Nights At Freddy’s 1, 2, 3, 4, and Sister Location made me more tense than most horror films had. After Sister Location I felt that the series had done everything it could so I tuned out of Markiplier’s playthroughs

I was of course very excited for the film and now after having seen it, I’m thankful that I opted out after Sister Location as the film specifically deals with the backstory of the first 4 games. However, it is backstory and story in general that plagues this adaptation. If there’s one thing about the games that this film fails to capture it’s their suspense.

Desperate to keep the custody of his younger sister from his greedy aunt, Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) accepts a night shift at an abandoned family pizzeria. What starts as a boring night watch escalates to a fight for survival as the pizzeria’s animatronic mascots, Freddy, Bonnie, Chia and Foxy, come to life and hunt the watchmen.

The Characters

Five Nights At Freddy’s has the opposite problem that most mainstream horrors suffer from, especially ones from Blumhouse. Most run-of-the-mill horrors are all style-over-substance, there’ll be a decent story but the main attraction will be the jump scares, the gore or the spooky monster. Five Nights At Freddy’s has an elaborate story with compelling characters, which would make for a good standalone horror, but for an adaptation of Five Nights At Freddy’s it feels misplaced.

The film is nearly 2-hours long and a good chunk of it is dedicated to fleshing out Mike’s character. We learn that as a child he witnessed the kidnapping of his younger brother. His body was never found and his kidnapper never identified. This trauma has made him overly protective of his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio) and has even inspired him to develop a bizarre sleeping habit, enabling him to relive his brother’s capture so he can get a clear look at his kidnapper.

While this is all really good stuff, it totally dilutes the deliciously simple premise that made the games a worldwide phenomenon. Mike Schmidt should just be a surrogate for the audience, an every man, a blank slate. I can’t believe I’m writing this about a Blumhouse film since the most common complaint Blumhouse films get is that their protagonists aren’t complex enough but, this Blumhouse film’s protagonist is too complex.   

The main upside is that he’s not boring to watch, the complete opposite in fact. His mission to uncover his brother’s kidnapper and maintain custody of his sister will silence any impatient cries for Freddy, Bonnie or the other animatronics to appear on screen.

Abby also makes for an engrossing viewing. Attaining her affection is Mike’s goal as when the film opens, their relationship is casual at best. However, she eventually develops a link to the pizzeria and the animatronics that reveals all its secrets and history to her. She becomes our guide to the lore of the pizzeria, which would be great if this wasn’t the first part of a Five Nights At Freddy’s film series.

The Horror

In this section I’ll be mostly talking about how the film adapts the plot of the games but that is relevant to the film’s effort to evoke fear and unease.

In the first Five Nights At Freddy’s game, you didn’t know why the animatronics were alive and hunting you. There were some clues here and there but their origin and motivations were mostly in the shadows. The first Five Nights At Freddy’s was, at its core, a survival horror, hence adapting it into a film should be straightforward.

We learned more with the sequels of course, each one giving us an extra piece of the puzzle and by the time we got to the end of Five Nights At Freddy’s 4, we knew the whole story.

This film tells that story, start to finish. The mystery of the animatronics and how and why they do what they do will not disturb anyone unfamiliar with the series for long as by the end of the second act, everything’s explained away. This is like if the first Alien revealed everything that was shown in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant and still expected you to be scared of the xenomorph.

The most devastating consequence of telling this story is that it eradicates the survival and suspense elements of the game. The sequences where Mike is sitting in his office, watching the monitors, noticing the animatronics move, are very short and minor. There are jump scares but most of them occur beyond Mike’s office.

As a game adaptation, you can’t call it unfaithful and you certainly can’t call it bad but maybe you could say that Five Nights At Freddy’s made some wrong calls. Specific choices that, while devastating, can easily be redeemed in the inevitable sequel.

I give Five Nights At Freddy’s a mixed 7 out of 10.