The film adaptation of the popular video game, “Five Nights at Freddy’s”, is making waves at the box office. Despite its simultaneous release on the streaming platform Peacock, the movie is projected to rake in a whopping $68M in its opening weekend according to a Deadline report.
I’m honestly surprised at the audience praise, but I’m not at all knowledgable about the lore. I have fairly low standards for horror, especially around Halloween, and my expectations for this were really low: all I wanted was a guy working as a night shift security guard seeing a lot of spooky stuff. After the early sequence with the throw-away characters, I felt like there really just wasn’t any horror. Once there was a threat, it was fairly immediately dispatched.
I don’t mean to be a downer for anyone who enjoyed it, I just loved the idea and really wish I had liked it.
I wrote a snippet about it here but you can skip that. It wasn’t my thing either so I would not feel alone. I thought Lillard was wonderful but a lot of it was uneven. I felt more time with suspense and animatronics would have made it better. Outside of that, things often felt hamfisted. I gotta day again though, loved Lillard. I don’t know the games but I wished he were the lead and it were a simpler story set just in there.
Just a reminder that Scott Cawthon is a bigot who donated a significant amount of money to Trump’s presidential campaign. If you skipped Hogwarts Legacy because of Rowling, you should probably skip (or pirate) this too.
It’s getting hammered by critics and I’m not exactly sure why. I’m only vaguely familiar with the games because my kids played them but I thought it was pretty good. The acting was good for the most part and the first half set a pretty spooky vibe. I’ll probably watch it a second time on Peacock with my wife.
If you’re used to game reviews, then something to keep in mind is that movie reviewers (and most reviewers for that matter) use a full scoring scale, not the weird weighted bullshit where anything below a 6/10 is garbage that game major game reviewers use. That means that a 0 is a literal blank screen, a 10 is a masterpiece that should be mandatory viewing, and a 5 is not good or bad, just okay.
Additionally, reviewers tend to be harder on movies that break the mould, like what happened to Skinamarink. I haven’t seen it yet (though it looks like something I’m into, just haven’t had the time), however I’ve heard it was extremely polarizing. Some people loved it because they found it terrifying, some people hated it because it was too scary, and then a third group hated it because they found it incredibly boring. However, Skinamarink, from what I’ve heard (and the little bits I’ve seen), is basically Analog Horror^1 on the big screen, and was very well received by analog horror fans. Analog horror can be a very slow burn with little to no intentional jumpscares, which is why a lot of people struggled with it.
^1 analog horror is a genre of horror that involves replicating the feeling of late-night television during the analog era (typically public-access during the 1980s~2010ish) - where you were up at 3am and half-asleep and a surreal and bizzare commercial or psa aired and the morning after you can’t figure out if what you saw was real - or the feeling of looking through old camcorder recordings only to find that one of them is from a place you’ve never been, or features a person you’ve never met. It’s basically a subgenre of found-footage. Some good examples are Local 58 (which started it all), Gemini Home Entertainment, The Mandela Catalog, and the Monument Mythos (I disagree with the Monument Mythos being analog horror, it’s more analog horror-adjacent, but most people consider it to be analog horror). Out of these I personally enjoy Gemini Home Entertainment and The Monument Mythos the most, and I even if you aren’t into the other three, I’d recommend watching the Monument Mythos anyway. It’s extremely well written, to the point where I sometimes can’t help but wonder if “Alex Casanas” is a pseudonym for a popular author or filmmaker. Note: make sure you check for playlists on the channel, otherwise you may accidentally watch videos in the wrong order; particularly important with the Monument Mythos. Also make sure you have a notebook on hand for the Monument Mythos. You don’t have to take notes, but it’ll help you piece things together. Also check video descriptions.
Edit: damn, the footnote ended up being longer than the main comment.
Thanks for this footnote! We're going to look into those suggestions because I dearly miss the weirdness of public access channels and shortwave radio.
My brother and I used to stay up late scanning shortwave to "listen for alien transmissions." In retrospect, I think we actually heard one or two of the number stations that were still broadcasting into the late '80s. (The Tweeter and the Hellmouth, if memory serves. The Tweeter was very reliable).
The Conet Project (circa 2004-ish) was an audio compilation of numbers broadcasts. Highly recommended.
My kids, and my kids friends loved it. The games themselves are pretty simple with the exception of the last one that was released – so there’s not really a lot of “content” to work with, except for the lore. The movie was a tribute to the lore, and even added some confirmations of its own. It was exactly what I expected it to be. This wasn’t meant for anyone coming into it expecting something deep.
IF they already play the games, sure. There are multiple stabbings, but no overly drastic gore. If they haven’t been exposed to the games yet, it might be a small shock. My kids are 6, 12, and 15 - I left the 6 year old at Grandpas, but then he watched it on Peacock at home with no issues - but he’s been exposed to it via his sisters since birth basically.
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