A niche of mine that I have enjoyed for the past decade has been Five Nights at Freddy’s, I first stumbled upon FNAF through Markiplier and since then I have continued to watch his content on it as well as Game Theory’s live let’s plays and theories. And of course many years ago a film was teased to the public, but now it’s actually coming to fruition I’m really intrigued as a 20-something that absolutely adores this series and has read the trilogy of books too, how it’s going to go.

The teaser trailer is only 47 seconds long but if any of us know MatPat we know he can take those seconds and turn it into an hour long deducing session of every moment that has some importance or relevance to the overall game and story. In the trailer we see Josh Hutcherson playing the role of Mike as he becomes the new security guard for Freddy Fazbear, we also get to see Matthew Lillard in the lead villain role which is very exciting, and even a bunch of children which we can deduce as the dead children that William Afton took.

Throughout the teaser things slowly get darker in terms of horror, at the start it seems very kid friendly and exciting, and as the trailer continues we see the animatronics come to life and hunt down children in the pizzeria. While the look of the pizzeria is very reminiscent of the first FNAF game, and is very true to the source material, I do wonder what realm this world is actually going to embody.

I found an article from 2015 when this movie was first teased to the public saying that the age rating would be PG-13 (12a) because there are a lot of children that enjoy the franchise, but if we actually look at Five Nights at Freddy’s as a whole it is a completely dark and twisted world including children being killed and animatronics that are meant to be your friend playing the murderer. To me, this film I worry, will be no good unless it has at least a 15 or 18 rating to really bring out that horror.

With the video games because you don’t actually see any of the murder they can get away with a lot and have a lower age rating because of it, but if you’re going to show this sort of stuff on the screen then you need to have a bit more terror in it. In the game it’s all first person, either you as the main character are being killed by these monsters or the children that are being killed are in 8-bit, and because of this you can detach yourself from the horror that you’re seeing of these children being killed. Whereas in the film everything is real, it’s real people, it’s not animation and so how are you supposed to know that children are being murdered or having hints of children being murdered with it having such a low rating?

It’s a hard line to balance because on the one hand you have lots of children who are into FNAF because of the amount of plushies and merch they sell, and the Game Theory videos that are very popular with an array of generations. But you also have the adult audience, people that have grown up with FNAF much like myself and so want to see these movies be something terrifying, because at the time when they were younger the video games terrified them too.

I worry with the thoughts of getting bums on seats and making the most money possible this line is going to be very hard to work with because if you want to show the real scares then you have to have a higher rating, which means children can’t go watch it, but if you want children to see it then you can’t have those scares be as prominent and as terrifying. For me, I’d love to see the animatronics literally pull a child into their ‘oversized cake/piñata holes’, I’d love to see Matthew Lillard play and torture these children to get their remnants and see him kill these children as well outside the pizzeria like we did in the video games, but because that would be so raw and because that would be so on the nose and dark I really don’t think that’s what’s going to happen.

So while I’m very excited for this film to come out and I really can’t wait to see how it translates onto the big screen: 1. I am worried seeing it in the cinema because I don’t want to be surrounded by a load of children in a horror film and 2. if it does have a lower age rating to accommodate the tweens and young teenagers I don’t think it’s going to capture the real horror that makes Five Nights at Freddy’s so good and won’t be as dark as I imagine many of us want the film to be.

What do you think of Five Nights at Freddy’s?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding