In Defense of Five Nights At Freddy’s: The Movie

22% Critics Score and 90% Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes. What’s going on here?

Five Nights of Freddy’s is a game that is very much a product of 2000s nostalgia. I grew up during the prime of arcade gaming. I remember watching infomercials for a special place “where a kid can be a kid” on television. I remember racking up bundles of tickets from arcade games for cheap collectible prizes and going to plenty of greasy pizza birthday parties at Funplex. And of course, I remember being among the last generation to bear witness to the creepy but iconic charm of the Chuck E. Cheese animatronics, which would be discontinued a decade later.

But with the advent of easily accessible mobile games on the newly released iPad, these traditional venues for “fun” just seemed to lose their appeal. Advertisements for these spaces began disappearing from the air in what appeared to be the downfall of the great arcade empire. And from the embers of this downfall emerged a terrifically twisted version of childhood nostalgia in the form of the horror video game series Five Nights At Freddy’s, or as its fanbase refers to it, FNAF. Throughout middle school, I watched the Jacksepticeye and Markiplier playthroughs through jump scares and abandoned pizzerias. I watched (and continue to be a fan of) MatPat’s Game Theories on YouTube unpacking the game’s complicated lore. Hell, now my instinctual gut reaction to the Toreador Song from Georges Bizet’s Carmen has forever cemented a mental image of a not-so-friendly brown animatronic bear.

So it goes without saying that when I learned that Five Nights At Freddy’s was being adapted into a three-part movie trilogy, I was excited. I booked out an entire row with my friends at our local movie theater for opening night. The theater was ecstatic and alive, unlike any other movie I have ever seen before. Fans of all ages came with their FNAF-inspired outfits and handmade trinkets, ranging from Foxy stuffed animals to a recognizable assortment of fan favorites like Chica, Baby, and Bonnie as well as some more obscure references to Phone Guy (the anonymous ringer that explains the tutorial for the controls of the first game) and Vanessa (the briefly mentioned security guard from the latest installment in Five Nights of Freddy’s: Security Breach). I came into the theater wearing…