Re-Watching Five Nights at Freddy's with my Five Nights at Freddy's-Obsessed Son Was Revelatory. It Still Sucks, Though
As I have chronicled exhaustively in this blog, my nine-year-old son Declan is unhealthily obsessed with the Five Night at Freddy’s franchise. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that it’s all he can talk about from when he gets home until he goes to sleep.
He created a disturbingly realist Bonnie costume with his aunt and filled notepads with disturbing images of the popular haunted-animatronics-and-pizza-based multi-media franchise characters.
At any given time, I have between three and five Five Nights at Freddy' s-themed songs going through my head. There are a lot! They are catchy! They are, sadistically, excessively catchy. They’re the earwigs that make you want to take a screwdriver to your cerebellum in a doomed attempt to eject them from your psyche.
Because I love my son and what’s important to him is important to me, I pay attention at least some of the time when he monologues about FNAF, which is what all the kids are calling it. The brevity thing, I guess. I consequently know way more about Five Nights at Freddy’s than I ever imagined possible.
I’ve even read some graphic novels to understand better my son’s fixation on a video game and film series that asks, “What if Chuck E. Cheese and the Showbiz Pizza gang were even more disturbing and evil?”
My son loves everything spooky, yet he’s terrified of adult entertainment traumatizing him. Over the past few months, he has contemplated whether or not he was ready to watch the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie with the kind of thought and deliberation other people would put towards choosing a college or a life partner.
If Five Nights at Freddy’s were R, it would be verboten, but, like many egregiously non-scary horror movies, Five Nights at Freddy’s is rated PG-13.
There are terrifying movies that are PG-13, but they are the exception rather than the rule. By avoiding an R rating, horror movies sabotage themselves by deliberately eschewing the gratuitous violence, non-stop profanity, and sex that make horror the greatest of all genres.
I’d seen Five Nights at Freddy’s when it came out for my Substack newsletter, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas, and was thoroughly unimpressed. It didn’t seem too scary for children, but I also didn’t want Declan to see something that would give him nightmares.
Finally, Declan decided he was ready to experience Five Nights at Freddy’s. I wanted to re-watch it with him because I wanted to see the movie through his eyes, the eyes of a super-fan whose life now revolves around the ghoulish tale of Freddy Fazbear, Chica, Foxy, Bonnie, William Afton, and, of course, the ghost children stuffed inside giant animatronic animals.
The world of Five Nights at Freddy’s is a bleak one. It’s the story of a serial killer of children and the dead children he hid inside the animatronics at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza.
The violent murder of children is not typically child-friendly fare, but the great thing about Five Nights at Freddy’s, and also the terrible thing about Five Nights at Freddy’s, is that it’s not too scary or intense for a nine-year-old.
Declan talks to everyone about Five Nights at Freddy’s. It’s not necessarily that he thinks they care about the franchise or have questions about it, but rather because he needs to talk about Five Nights at Freddy’s. He can’t not talk about Five Nights at Freddy’s. That’s the nature of obsession, and, as someone who still intends to watch all over 1000 episodes of Saturday Night Live for my Every Episode Ever project, that’s something that I know all too well.
That’s something we share beyond various neurological conditions; we’re obsessive about the things we love. We both have ADHD, so it can be tough to focus on the things that we are not obsessed with. The flip side is that when we’re obsessed with something like, I dunno, Saturday Night Live or movies about filmmaking, it can be hard for us to talk about anything other than our obsession.
Declan provided a running commentary throughout the film. It was like an excitable child version of VH-1’s Pop-Up Video or receiving extensive oral footnotes on how the film dealt with FNAF lore and which characters were from which game.
The film was full of Easter eggs that filled him with joy and the most aggressive, pandering kind of fan service.
Watching the movie with Dex made me realize that it was not made for me. It was not made for adult horror buffs. It wasn’t made for adults, and it certainly was not made for people with discerning taste in fright flicks and terror tales.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie was made for Five Nights at Freddy’s fans, and Five Nights at Freddy’s fans tend to be on the young side.
In a wildly successful exercise in pandering, Five Nights at Freddy’s gives an ostentatious cameo to MatPat, a popular YouTube personality famous for his online theorizing.
I am at least ostensibly a grown-up, so MatPat’s bit part as a waiter with some theories of his own meant nothing to me.
That was before my son fell deep into the bottomless well that is Five Nights at Freddy’s mythology/fandom. I’m now more familiar with MatPat’s voice, personality, and quirks than I am with some of my family members.
Declan had a much different reaction. Throughout the film, he was like that meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing excitedly in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The movie may not have much in the way of suspense or laughs, but it has Easter eggs up the wazoo.
If you know lots of things about Five Nights at Freddy’s, as my son does, then the film is full of things you will know. It’s foolish to underestimate the cheap buzz of recognition that powers so much of contemporary popular culture.
Watching Five Nights at Freddy’s with Declan and through the eyes of an innocent child fixated on a game about the violent slaughter of tots proved a revelatory experience, even if my response to the film was the same as the first time around.
Five Nights at Freddy’s is a bad movie with a lot of glaring, obvious faults and only two redeeming facets: cool-looking animatronics courtesy of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and an enjoyably hammy villain turn by Matthew Lillard as the final boss.
At one hundred and nine minutes, Five Nights at Freddy’s is way too long and way too dour and grim for a movie about what is essentially a killer Chuck E. Cheese.
There’s a profound disconnect between the lumbering animatronics who move slowly and mechanically and subjective shots from the perspective of the musical monsters where they seem to be running at lightning speed.
As a horror movie, Five Nights at Freddy’s is terminally non-scary, but as an exercise in brand extension, it’s savvy and effective.
Declan’s take on it has fluctuated since we've seen it. Sometimes, he remembers it fondly, and sometimes, he shares my dislike of it.
Being possibly disappointed in the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie has done nothing to dim his enthusiasm for the franchise, however. He continues to be obsessed, and while I will not weep when this phase passes, I’m glad that he remains deeply passionate about art and entertainment, even if it’s Five Nights at Freddy’s.
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