by G. E. Uke, Reporter

Animatronics are scary as hell. 

A lot of people feel this way. There’s something unnatural about the way they move and the large glazed eyes that puts people off. They make the creatures look predatory in design… 

Five Nights at Freddy’s, based on the hit video game of the same name, capitalizes on this fear to cause anxiety in the player. The idea is that you can’t directly see the robots coming until it’s too late. Sure, you can see them in different spots. But they always freeze while you’re looking directly at them. This creates the impression that if you look away for a moment they’ll move again. The only time you get to see them move is if they reach the control booth, and by then they have you.

This is not, by itself, a great premise for a movie. There have to be relatable characters, a stable plot, and so forth. So in Emma Tammi’s new film, they delve into the lore of the game to provide an elevated experience.

Let me say right away that I found this movie deeply disturbing. The core theme is children being abducted and murdered by a serial killer who wears a suit to look like a lovable yellow rabbit, and he uses a family entertainment center as cover. As the father of a 10 year old and someone who witnessed the attempted kidnapping of his little sister at 14, it was way too real for me. I had nightmares. That said, this is a horror movie intended to scare people. 

Five Nights at Freddy’s is a remarkably well crafted tale, probably one of the best “video game movies” I’ve seen in a long time. This is all thanks to the character of Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson, aka Peta from The Hunger Games series). Mike is a psychologically traumatized young man who witnessed the abduction of his little brother many years before. He has since lost both his parents, leaving him to care for his little sister alone. Josh did an amazing job with this character. His emotional depth, his desperation, his fixations, his exhaustion, everything was top notch. I would almost go so far as to say that half the movie is about his struggle to cope, and it’s very engaging. You feel for him.  

The animatronics are, of course, the monsters of the game. But in the movie they are much more than that. There are many occasions where the protagonists interact with them non-violently, even going so far as to play with them all night. I found this refreshing because homicidal ghosts are rarely humanized. Portraying them as enraged killers AND lonely kids made them PEOPLE instead of caricatures. If you think this softens them, you are wrong. It just means that when they become dangerous it’s not just horrifying, it’s sad. 

The real killer doesn’t appear until the end of the movie, and his acting is first rate. Even if he doesn’t get a lot of screen time. Matthew Lillard (Stu Macher from Scream) does a great job as William Afton, the deranged serial killer who wears a rabbit suit and murders children. His appearances are truly terrifying. 

The one piece of constructive criticism I do have regarding this movie doesn’t concern the acting, but rather the screenwriting. If I was in Mike Schmidt’s shoes and I learned that a bunch of murdered kids were haunting animatronics in a family entertainment center, my top priority would be to ask “who killed you”, or “how can I help”, or to call the police and report a lead on multiple homicides. Mike doesn’t do any of this. All he wants to know is who killed HIS brother, demonstrating a total lack of concern for the other children that makes him seem single mindedly callous. This does not jive with the honest-yet-exhausted spirit of nobility we see in him elsewhere. If he’s willing to beat a guy who he suspects is kidnapping a kid in a mall, he should care about other kids in general.  

ComicsOnline gives Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 out of 5 animatronic stars. It does everything it sets out to do quite well. Writing a screenplay that was both engaging AND compliant with the premise was hard, yet they did it.

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