My Son is Obsessed With the Idea of Five Nights at Freddy's. He's Going to be SO Disappointed by the Reality
I wrote earlier about how my nine year old son Declan-Haven Dilla Rabin is obsessed with scary stuff even though, by his own admission, much of it scares the junk out of him. .
My son will be reading and editing this piece so I’m keeping it PG with the family-friendly language I love to use and you love to read.
Like a disconcertingly vast number of our young people, our innocent, innocent children with their pure hearts and suggestible minds, he is absolutely OBSESSED Five Nights at Freddy’s, a video game about an EVIL version of Chuck E. Cheese or Showbiz Pizza, or rather an even more evil version of the popular pizzerias from the 1980s and, I suppose, today.
My son doesn’t really play video games and he doesn’t seem particularly interested in Five Nights at Freddy’s on that level. He doesn’t even seem that excited about watching the movie, although he just assured me that that’s not the case.
What fascinates him about Five Nights at Freddy’s is the lore. What he finds mesmerizing is the aesthetic. He’s absolutely obsessed with the world-building and mythology.
In other words he has fallen in love with the idea of Five Nights at Freddy’s. That’s understandable. It’s a lot easier to get excited about something that is abstract and theoretical and consequently has all of the promise and potential in the world.
I will be the first to concede that a really good Five Nights at Freddy’s game or movie would be creepy and intense and memorable. The closest we’ve probably come to that is the Banana Splits movie from a few years back that reimagined the kitschy kiddie rock and roll group as crazed monsters more interested in murdering children than in entertaining them.
Freddy Fazbear and the rest of the Five Nights at Freddy’s gang occupy a curious place in that they’re figures of horror and fright to children like my morbid, death-obsessed son.
Yet they’re also irresistible to that demographic in part because they take something that children are already all too familiar with—the accidental but intense creepiness of animatronic bands like The Rock-afire Explosion—and ratchet up the disturbing elements to horrific levels.
Five Nights at Freddy’s doesn’t take something wholesome and innocent and make it dark and child-unfriendly. Instead it takes something whose creepiness is rooted in no small part by its ostensible wholesomeness and innocence and gleans the nightmarish elements that have always been there, lurking just under the surface.
My son talked to me for an hour and a half about Five Nights at Freddy’s, a movie he’s never seen and a video game series he’s never really played. He could have talked for five more hours about what he refers to as FNAF.
A lot of what Declan draws these days is Five Nights at Friday’s-derived. I recently bought him a whole bunch of Five Nights at Freddy’s stuff from Funko despite having zero affection for the franchise myself.
I have no doubt that the version of Five Nights at Freddy’s that exists inside Declan’s head and his exceedingly vivid imagination is infinitely superior to the dreary version that made hundreds of millions of dollars at the box-office.
I’m sure it’s funnier and weirder and more creative because it has the innocence and purity of a boy making up crazy stories to amuse himself rather than cynical adults exploiting a pop culture phenomenon that has captured the minds of generations too young for it, its animatronic anarchy and mechanized madness.
Someday Declan will actually experience Five Nights at Friday’s. I suspect that he will be wildly disappointed and let down but who knows? He possesses the pure heart of an innocent child so maybe he can find it in himself to forgive Five Nights at Friday’s for being, like so much in this sick, sad and unknowable world, nowhere near as exciting or as much fun as they’re supposed to be.
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