Five Nights at Freddy’s skips scares for melodrama and slowly sucks the power from a punchy property

Emma Tammi’s 2018 haunted horror flick set in the settling of the Wild West, The Wind, remains an internal benchmark here at The Pitch for the standard by which we hold creepy, budget-light indie thrillers. It was as dazzling at its Panic Fest debut in KC as it is remains revisiting on streaming five years later. When news dropped that she would be helming the feature film adaptation of the popular horror video game franchise Five Nights at Freddy’s, the entire film squad here appropriately readjusted our expectations for what we could expect. I mean, Tammi literally made a film that’s just a woman alone on the planes, up against nothing but wind, and carved a part of our immortal souls out with that simple, effective tool.

While FNAF gets nowhere near clearing the high bar of the director’s former work, it’s a frustratingly acceptable slice of pie that is both undercooked but still plenty edible. In pizza terms, it’s Domino’s not Spin, and sometimes a warm pizza that actually makes it delivery is better than nothing at all. That’s this.

Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), a troubled security guard, accepts a night-time job at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a once-successful but now abandoned family entertainment center. He’s working through some shit as he’s attempting to recovered buried memories of his kidnapped brother while also raising his little sister. Forced into this night security role by job supervisor Steve Raglan (Matthew Lillard), it’s up to Mike to make things work so he can prevent his sister Abby (Piper Rubio) from falling into the clutches of a dastardly aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson) while also playing nice with a possible love interest in local cop Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail).

If that sounds like a lot of people doing a lot of non-connected storytelling, well, it is. Josh Hutcherson spends a solid third of the film talking about trauma he may not be remembering correctly, while trying to open up to near-strangers about feelings he might not really feel. It’s a lot of storytelling that feels like giving “the ole college try” to grounding some source material that, frankly, would thrive with much of the serious moviemaking stripped away.

It’s a rare criticism from us, but it’s painful how much FNAF would have ruled if it’d been allowed to be a lot dumber.

See, the wildly popular, world famous video game series this is taken from is all about a night manager at an abandoned pizza place doing run and hide battle with a series of animatronic mascots: Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy, who all come to life in the middle of the night with murderous intent and jump scares galore. Those animatronic monstrosities are the stars of the show, not the childhood trauma of Security Guy Mike. Yes, Five Nights at Freddy’s lore, hinted at throughout the game’s many incarnations and dropped like bread crumbs, does dabble in the murder of children who wind up possessing these robots and fueling their bloodlust, and while that has a place in the storytelling, it just isn’t that interesting when it isn’t the fiction adding a slight layer of icing to a non-stop tension headache of frightful fun.

So without much in the way of jump scares, what does Freddys the film offer up? A mostly bloodless affair, with a few off-screen deaths and little to push its PG-13 rating. Now, in other eras that “PG-13 horror” signifier would’ve been a derogatory note, but Freddy’s comes via the Blumhouse pipeline and producing team that showed up they could do hilarious, brutal, spooky horror hijinks with M3GAN, which is one of our favorite new franchises, hands down.

You can see a lot of the same machinations at play here on a film similarly bound for the Peacock streaming platform. There’s plenty of clever little touches throughout, and most notably a real sense of macabre delight to be found when the animatronics in FNAF, like M3GAN before them, temporarily become friendly with our main characters—creating a mix of childlike wonderment and escalating teeth-gritting as the inevitable heel-turn comes ever closer.

No, the failings here stem from having a wonderful setting, monumentally iconic horror creations, a setup too simple to fuck up, and then wasting an hour of screen time maddeningly leaving all of this off the screen.

Scott Cawthon, the creator of the game series, has been rumored to have the driving force behind the numerous false starts the film adaptation has had in the last decade, in pursuit of a suitable creator-approved script. That this would be what all the fuss was for seems, well, misguided at best. It struggles to be taken seriously and in the process jettisons the fun and frights that could’ve come to the screen, in favor of a fine-adjacent but fully forgettable frolic.

Five Nights at Freddy’s is currently in theaters and streaming on Peacock.