The Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNAF) movie was based off of a series of survival horror video games with the same name. This series is created by Scott Braden. The movie was directed by Emma Tammi, who co-wrote the script with Seth Cuddeback. The video game creator is Scott Cawthon according to imdb.com. The film stars Josh Hutcherson playing Mike Schmidt, and it covered the backstory of the game and what happens while playing the game.
The film is about a man struggling to provide for him and his sister, he then gets a new security job at an abandoned family entertainment center called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. He is hired to just watch over the place during the nighttime, but he finds out there is more to the job than that. When he brings his sister to the job with him one night, he finds out the animatronics are living.
A lot of it focuses on the loss of Mike’s little brother that was taken during a family camping trip. Mike has a poster he puts above him every time he sleeps. He has it to remember his little brother and try and figure out what happened to him and who took him.
The film tells the story of the game and shows the viewers the real FNAF experience. It is a very dark setting and was somewhat scary for younger viewers. Most of the movie is at Mike’s house or at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. The film displays a lot of dark emotions and how someone can cope after losing someone.
A lot of people felt differently about the film, and people online said it was “rushed” or didn’t cover the whole game backstory, but I thorou ghly enjoyed it. I think it did cover the game back story for a movie. To cover the whole entire game backstory, they would have to probably make a whole series of the game because of how much goes into it and how many details there are going into the backstory.
One thing I would change about the film is how they didn’t emphasize how scary the game is, the age group for the majority of the fan base for FNAF is 12-17 according to comingsoon.net. They didn’t make it scary enough to compare to the game. The game includes a lot of jump scares and is very dark and has empty buildings. It builds up the players’ adrenalin and gets them very anxious to try and complete the game. While the movie had very few jump scares that weren’t scary enough to scare most of the older viewers that watch the film. I would’ve liked it if it made me feel more frightened, but it mainly made me feel very interested because there was still a lot that went into the movie and made it a great watch.
The casting for the movie I felt was very appreciable, Josh Hutcherson emphasized the role of Mike the security guard great. Even though the security guard doesn’t have much of a personality in the game it is still a very important role without the security guard the game and movie wouldn’t make sense. Hutcherson also really displayed how hurt “Mike” was about the loss of his brother in the movie. Matthew Lillard has played in movies previously as the antagonist, so I think that he fits his role very well, since he already has had experience with the mean and villain look in movies.
Overall, the movie was very similar to the game in a lot of ways and showed the viewers the true backstory of FNAF.
