Overview and review of Five Nights at Freddy's premiere on Halloweekend
The popular video game franchise made its debut on the silver screen.
Halloween is just around the corner: a season of scares, costumes, and eating enough candy to make a dentist cry. Oftentimes, during this season theaters will be premiering movies taking advantage of the festive spooky spirit, and this year is no exception.
While previous years have featured franchises such as Halloween, Scream, and others that have existed for decades now, this year’s Halloween-time horror movie is from a franchise many Bethel students likely grew up with — that being the Blumhouse production and popular video game franchise Five Nights at Freddy’s.
Overview
The first game became a smash hit overnight, in large part thanks to the fairly new style of entertainment videos on sites such as YouTube of people playing video games. It became the topic of lunch, recess, and passing period: a game that revolutionized the simplistic point-and-click style while introducing the horror genre to the new generation.
After the first game’s release in 2014, the indie game became a full-force mass media franchise. Today, a total of 10 games have been released, including a virtual reality (VR) game and an augmented reality (AR) game, with a sequel VR game expected to be released soon. There are also a total of 28 related books, ranging from more kid-friendly graphic novels and guidebooks to thrilling and suspenseful novels. Merchandise can be found in many name-brand stores such as Walmart and Target.
Fan-made knockoff games can be found on various indie developer game sites, trying to capitalize on the craze surrounding the new horror franchise. And with the movie released on Oct. 27, the support for our scary robot terrors is likely to continue for years to come.
The movie itself, as mentioned, is produced by Blumhouse, a horror multimedia company that has produced popular movies in recent years, such as the Halloween reboot sequel (2018), Freaky (2020), Insidious (2010), and M3gan (2022). The cast is also a fairly well-known group, starring Josh Hutcherson as Mike — popularly known for his portrayal of Peeta in the Hunger Games movie franchise — who will face off against the franchise villain William Afton, portrayed by horror veteran Matthew Lillard.
Lillard may be best known for his voice acting roles as the current voice of Shaggy Rogers of the Scooby Doo franchise with one of his most famous early roles as Stew Macher, one of the Ghostfaces in the original Scream movie. Other cast members include Elizabeth Lail as Vanessa and Piper Rubio as Abbi.
Review
After researching the movie (which had high audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes), I had mixed feelings coming out of the film. Cameo appearances and references from the franchise had me excited to get that hit of nostalgia I expected coming into this movie, and overall the set design and special effects for the four animatronic characters were fantastic.
I felt Lillard’s performance was leaving people on the edge of their seats, and the rest of the cast gave a heartfelt performance. From there, there really wasn’t much to say about the movie. The plot at times left several unanswered questions before introducing new devices which were also left unresolved. And though the film ended with the setup for a sequel, I feel that a potential follow-up may have several questions to answer for its predecessor.
It was a fun, zany, nostalgic movie, and for those who may not be massive horror fans, I feel this movie can still give a few good scares. For me though, I left wishing we had gotten more spook for the season.