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By Grant Rindner
Freddy Fazbear superfans, your time has come The Eras Tour: Five Nights at Freddy’s, a horror comedy film directed by Emma Tammi and based on the popular independent video game series of the same name, hits theaters this Friday.
The slate of horror movies of 2023 has seen animated originals (Talk to Me, M3GAN, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster), but also a slew of sequels and reboots ranging from clever dividers (Evil Dead Rise) to strangely clever (Saw X) (The Exorcist: Believer). Five Nights at Freddy’s is coming to this busy stadium just in time for Halloween.
Scott Cawthon’s franchise, which disappeared in 2014 and spawned a slew of sequels and spin-offs in the decade that followed, has a passionate cult following, but its remnants are unknown to casual moviegoers, meaning it’s a desirable wild card given its main release date before Halloweekend. . .
Below, GQ walks you through the story of Five Nights at Freddy’s, the main players involved, and most importantly, the movie will be good.
What is Five Nights at Freddy’s about?
The film will be based on the plot of the game, in which the protagonist is a security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a Chuck E-style restaurant chain. Cheese features a host of friendly-looking animatronic animal characters that come to life on the night shift. with fatal consequences.
Okay, that sounds great, but is there any chance of a very confusing canonical explanation for why those animatronics walk around and kill people?We keep our hands crossed that the answer will come with the words “blood, mucus and bad smells. “
According to Wikipedia: “From the third game on. . . it is retroactively established that the animatronics are actually possessed through the spirits of the young men killed by the restaurant’s co-founder and main antagonist of the franchise, William Afton, who filled the bodies inside the animatronics and then accidentally committed suicide while dressing up. He put on an animatronic suit and activated its springs. This story alludes to the presentation of the first game, when the guy overheard on the phone explain that the restaurant’s reputation was shattered when blood, mucus, and foul odors began escaping from the animatronics’ eyes and mouths.
Who created Five Nights at Freddy’s?
The franchise was originally created through Scott Cawthon, who evolved Five Nights after a stagnant career making Christian-centric games and movies. The first Five Nights was made independently and released in 2014, garnering rave reviews and a huge fanbase for a standalone game. Several sequels and in the following decade similar spin-offs emerged, adding an interstellar branch called Freddy in Space.
Cawthon completely withdrew from the game’s progression in 2021, following questionable revelations that he donated thousands of dollars to several Republican politicians in 2020, including Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. In a lengthy post on the popular FNAF subreddit, Cawthon wrote, “I’m a Republican. I’m a Christian. I’m pro-life. I believe in God. I also believe in equality, science, and common sense. Despite what some may say, all of those things can go hand in hand. It’s not an apology or a promise of change, that’s just the way it has been. He proclaimed his help for LGBTQ members of the Five Nights community, but also casually wrote, “If I’m canceled, then I’m canceled. »
When he left, Cawthon said he would find a successor to lead the franchise, and Five Nights seems to be moving forward under new control: Five Nights at Freddy’s Help Wanted 2 was announced at May’s PlayStation Showcase and, according to IGN, appears to be a sequel. to a 2019 spin-off originally released for VR devices.
Jason Topolski, a Pixar veteran and head of Steel Wool Studios, has been involved in directing a few recent installments, but it’s not yet clear who will be in charge of the franchise instead of Cawthon.
Who’s in the movie?
When the FNAF trailer was released, non-gaming horror movie enthusiasts no doubt noticed its striking resemblance to Nicolas Cage’s 2021 horror film, Willy’s Wonderland, even though Cawson’s franchise notoriously preceded Cage’s hilarious release. (Five Nights has been widely invoked in Willy’s reviews, and there has been some controversy on the gaming network about the similarities between the two. )
While FNAF doesn’t have genre film appeal on a cage-scale scale, it does have a strong culture of skill in front of the camera. Josh Hutcherson, the ubiquitous child star and deuteragonist of The Hunger Games, plays the lead role, and has already excelled in the invisible horror comedy with Tragedy Girls. Other key roles include Gossip Girl’s Elizabeth Lain, actor Matthew Lillard (Stu Macher in Scream and Shaggy in 2000’s live-action Scooby-Doo films), and Mary Stuart Masterson, best known for films like Fried Green Tomatoes, but also a talented genre performer who showcased this facet of her art in Daniel Isn’t Real.
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The director and co-writer is Emma Tammi, a flexible filmmaker whose 2018 horror western The Wind fuses two disparate genres: the loneliness of pioneer life proves a formidable backdrop for this harrowing tale of survival. (It’s like The Revenant if The Revenant had angry bear demons. ) Obviously, the tone of Five Nights is funnier than The Wind or Blood Moon, Tammi’s contribution to the Hulu anthology Into the Dark, but she’s already demonstrated artistic versatility: In 2014, she directed the running-centric film. documentary Fair Chase.
Cawthon earned co-writing credits for the film, which was already in progress when he stepped away from the franchise.
Is this movie going to be good?
Both trailers released through Universal are promising, and Blumhouse has a solid track record of making big, ridiculous horror videos: M3GAN, Happy Death Day, and Freaky, to name a few. As it turns out, Tammi’s movie makes encouraging use of the arcade environment. And the creature’s design feels cinematically amplified and true to the games.
One worrying aspect, as The Direct pointed out, is that the film is subject to a very tight embargo period before its release. This is a sign that the studio fears negative comments about the project and needs to minimize the amount of time. other people have to read reviews and ask themselves if they really need to invest their time and money in this movie. However, this is not a hard and fast rule. Saw X lifted its embargo incredibly late and still commanded some of the most productive reviews in franchise history. Critic embargoes can also be a tactic to avoid spoilers; This is often the explanation for why big superhero videos have fairly narrow windows, although, as The Direct wrote, that’s unlikely to be the cause here, since the film will premiere on streamer Peacock before coming to the cinemas.
Some hardcore horror enthusiasts would possibly be put off by Freddy’s PG-13 rating, which sets him apart from R-rated Willy’s Wonderland. In an interview with Inverse, Tammi explained that they wanted the new film to come with younger fans of the franchise, which forced them to be artistic when depicting violence. “In some cases, we leaned on shadows, silhouettes, and sound design to feel the moment in a shocking way without it looking like blood,” Tammi said.
In the end, Five Nights turns out to be enough time, especially for younger horror fans. It remains to be seen whether the game’s story and the franchise’s story prove useful or inconvenient.
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