How Parents Are Navigating the Five Nights at Freddy's Movie Taking Over the World
Children are very into these killer animatronics, and figuring out whether it's appropriate for your kid to indulge is a question with a thousand answers.
Five Nights at Freddy’s blew up at the box office over the weekend, taking home $78 million and notching both the biggest Halloween opening and the third best horror opening ever, behind juggernauts like It. It’s a huge success. And while Five Nights at Freddy’s success has been characterized as a surprise, it’s only a surprise if you haven’t been around kids lately and realized the horror franchise, alongside the rise of the backrooms and other young adult horror, have utterly gripped these audiences.
A quick primer, if you’re unfamiliar. The first game, Five Nights at Freddy’s launched in 2014. (There have been eight sequels, and many spin-offs, since.) You try to survive the night as a security guard in a busted up Chuck E. Cheese-like restaurant with killer robots walking around. In retrospect, it’s not shocking it took the world by storm. The point-and-click game is a jump scare factory, where the jump scare is the punishment for losing, and the animatronics have memorable, if artistically crude, designs.
And crucially, it’s really fun watching other people play. Five Nights at Freddy’s exploded on YouTube. Where are lots of young people spending their time…?
“We know from early research this idea of not letting kids have access to technologies and not letting them have access to entertainment media can actually be very stifling to them,” aid Teresa Lynch, associate professor of communication technology at Ohio State University, where she focuses on studying emotions, including fear, in video games, in a recent interview with me. “Both in the sense that they don't get to explore things they might be interested in, but also, kids use media as a reflecting point to socialize with one another.”
The thing about Five Nights at Freddy’s is that it’s utterly inescapable. My house is full of horror junk, but I didn’t introduce Five Nights at Freddy’s to my oldest daughter. She brought Freddy Fazbear and company home, because these characters, and so many characters influenced by them, are all over YouTube, Roblox, and other platforms.
“Our kids are obsessed, like most kids, with this weird crossover of wholesome-looking things with horror,” said Mark, a father of three, including a 12-year-old son and two eight-year-old twins. “FNAF, Poppy's Playtime, etc. We don't let them watch the stuff or play the games, we don't have any of the toys in the house, but it's somewhat inescapable because their friends at school are all immersed in this stuff.”
Horror can feel edgy and boundary pushing, and that’s attractive to many kids. But it’s also the case that these characters are often fully removed from their original context when seen elsewhere. Freddy Fazbear, star of Five Nights at Freddy’s, does not look all that malicious, but it’s a lot different when a loud scream accompanies a jump scare.
Or, in the case of the film, when there’s a tense score and film editing meant to elicit a reaction from the viewer. Suddenly, when you’re supposed to feel scared, it’s not as fun.
“With our youngest son we've dealt with lots of sleep trouble over fears centered around this stuff, all based on stuff he's learned about from his friends,” said Mark. “We've dealt with weeks where he's having frequent nightmares, afraid to sleep in his bedroom, etc., all based around the characters from [properties] like these. I don't know why some creators are so obsessed with this shit, and I'd never be one to try to tell people what they can and can't make. But life as a parent would certainly be a bit easier if this stuff wasn't so present everywhere in our culture. We've even seen Poppy's Playtime crap at Target.”
Scott Cawthon, the designer of Five Nights at Freddy’s and co-writer on the film, did not respond to a request for comment. But Cawthon largely went silent following the discovery that Cawthon had financially backed a slew of regressive Republican politicians, including Donald Trump. He’s made only a handful of comments since.
“I'm a republican,” he said at the time. “I'm a Christian. I'm pro-life. I believe in God. I also believe in equality, and in science, and in common sense. Despite what some may say, all of those things can go together. That's not an apology or promise to change, it's the way it's always been. If I get cancelled, then I get cancelled.”
That’s a y i k e s.
If you stepped foot into a Spirit Halloween this year, most likely you saw costumes for Five Nights at Freddy’s or, like Mark points out, Poppy’s Playtime. They’re all playing with cuddly creatures secretly ready to murder, and the designs are frequently cool.
This approach has become pervasive among entertainment hitting younger players.
“The original idea was to target an older demographic,” said Alex Nichiporchik, executive producer of the ultimately kid-friendly horror franchise Hello Neighbor, “and we quickly discovered after our first public playable [version of the game] in 2016 that the game was more ‘kids friendly horror’ similar to the newly released (and amazing) FNAF movie. It's horror, yet it's still PG or E10+.”
E10+ is from the ESRB’s video game rating system, and is attached to a video game “suitable for ages 10 and up” and “may contain more cartoon, fantasy or mild violence, mild language and/or minimal suggestive themes.” Any parent can tell you that there’s a lot of children younger than 10 that are falling for Five Nights at Freddy’s and its ilk.
“The ‘uh oh, what do we do with this now’ moment was more in relation to how smart younger gamers really are,” said Nichiporchik. “We kept on releasing playable builds with increasingly more difficult puzzles and mysteries, and the community bonded over solving them in record time. "Yeah, that'll take them a few days to solv—’hold on, they just solved it.’ We've had some cursing in the very first build, and that was quickly taken out. In the game, you get to creep up on the Neighbor as he's doing daily chores and his routine. One thing we had to take out due to age ratings was him taking a leak. Other than that we didn't change much.”
I’ll get into this more fully in a separate post this week detailing our family’s own adventure with watching (and then not watching) the movie, but when I had kids, I didn’t dream of the day I’d put a controller in their hands, I dreamed they’d ask to watch The Thing, or whatever horror they were in to, with me. You can nudge your children’s tastes along but with horror especially, it’s complicated. (And crucially, I would not be disappointed if it didn’t take. They should have their own interests.)
“We don't let them watch the stuff or play the games, we don't have any of the toys in the house, but it's somewhat inescapable because their friends at school are all immersed in this.”
“I watch a lot of horror movies and my son always wants to watch them with me,” said Keegan, who has a seven-year-old son who’s been highly anticipating the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie, despite never having played the games. “I’m trying to find more tame flicks to introduce him to the genre outside of the specifically aimed towards children titles like Haunted Mansion or Hocus Pocus. So far he’s watched Poltergeist and Monster Squad. We also have been watching that new Goosebumps show and he likes it a lot.”
When they did watch the movie, Keegan’s son declared it was “really bad.”
It is a bad movie, in fact. Poor acting, nonsense plotting, and nearly two hours! But the animatronics are great, and it lovingly brings to life characters kids have really for.
“Kids today find horror in ways most of us never did,” said horror critic and filmmaker BJ Colangelo on Twitter. “Creepypastas, video games, and YouTube explainers about FNAF have replaced video store clerks, marathons on TV, and catching movies on HBO too late at night. In the quest to appease four quadrants in recent years, entertainment for kids has suffered tremendously. Most streamers have deprioritized stuff for kids, and with kids getting phones or iPads younger and younger, they’re seeking these thrills out in ways THEY know how—online.”
Just watch this video that recorded reactions from audiences in real-time to the movie:
How cool is that? It gave me chills.
We watched the movie at home because my daughter was unsure of her bravery level, but in this, she did miss out. It’s more fun to watch a horror movie with an audience because the highs and lows are shared communally. It also reduces some of the tension, because while the movie is on a bigger screen with louder speakers than what you have at home, you only need to glance over and see others are in this with you.
“Five Nights at Freddy’s is some real R.L. Stine-flavored nonsense,” said podcast host and Slashfilm news editor Jacob Hall on Twitter, “but it’s going to make a whole bunch of 8-year old kids feel brave enough to become horror fans and therefore exists firmly on my good side. The Henson Shop creatures are honestly pretty magnificent.”
Yep, the animatronics were made by the Jim Henson Creature Shop! They’re great.
“I watched the movie with two of my kids at home and it seemed to go really well,” said Jesse, father of a nine-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son. “You could definitely tell during some scenes that they were nervous because they would keep talking when things are suspenseful but they never really screamed or cried or became too upset, even during intense scenes. I think the movie did a good job pacing the intense scenes with the slower scenes so that it never really became too much at once.”
You can tell Five Nights at Freddy’s was shot to be PG-13. Which is much different from M3GAN, which was written and shot as a hard R, and became a PG-13 in editing, after the M3GAN dance went viral and the movie’s interest skyrocketed amongst younger audiences. (An R-rated version with more intense kills was later released.)
“We knew we were aiming for a PG-13 rating so that we could be inclusive of those younger audiences,” said Five Nights at Freddy’s director Emma Tammi in an interview. “A lot of that was just making sure that our scares and our kills were all executed in a way that was leaning into something that would still achieve that rating. So at times that’s seeing the silhouette instead of seeing the gore of an actual body. But for me, I really love that challenge because I think you get to, as a filmmaker, lean into creative new ways to show violence or insinuate it.”
It works well. The film is constantly setting up kill moments, and then pulls away at the last second, depicting the gore either offscreen, or, in one moment, as a shadow.
It’s not hard to imagine an R-rated version of Five Nights at Freddy’s, because all the tools are there, but it’s unnecessary! It also allows an audience that’s, perhaps, not ready for that version to settle into a genre. It’s why so many are rightfully calling this film a gateway movie, the kind of film that unlocks what’s interesting about horror to an audience that didn’t even know they were interested in it. On that, we’ll have to see.
The movie also feeds into the same ecosystem that produced it, which is the lore breakdowns and other analysis that surround the games and soon, the movie itself.
“My daughter was super hyped for the release and has zero intention of actually watching it any time soon, as she knows it would be too scary for her,” said Niall, father to a very excited 11-year-old. “She's excited for all of the reactions, theories, and reviews that will come from it.”
But for others, this weekend and the weekends that follow will be a pain in the butt. This movie is going to be absolutely everywhere. If your child isn’t ready for it, but their friends saw it, it’s going to cause stress and anxiety and jealousy. We already had to explain that my daughter had seen the movie to some neighbors, in anticipation of her bragging about the experience. It’s not my call about what their kid watches.
“As parents, our obligation is to try to stop them from watching things that are going to do direct harm, but it's not the case that much media is going to have that direct harm,” said Lynch, the associate professor studying fear in media. “It's a lot about the context in which they're watching it and that kind of thing. I have a set of practices that I engage in with how I allow [my son] to watch certain things. And there have been certain media that I think people are surprised that I've let him watch, and some of that is informed by research and some of it is just informed by my experience with him as a unique individual.”
The answers for parents on whether their kid can watch it is…it depends?
“My son is the most into Five Nights at Freddy’s,” said Jacob, father of a keenly interested eight-year-old boy, “and is collecting all the Funko Pops, got some with his pocket money and requested more for Christmas. [He] is keen to explore more of the 'universe.’ Unfortunately for him, he is terrified of everything, gets nightmares easily and I just know if I caved and let him see it it would probably give him nightmares.”
Jacob has a plan. He’s going to have his eight-year-old watch the games alongside him, as a way of making him comfortable with the world. Ahead of that, he bought a ticket to see the movie himself, and judge how to handle his kid’s inevitable request.
Bad news for Jacob’s son, though: Jacob saw the movie and decided it’s too intense.
Hey, maybe next time. There’s already rumors this is the start of a trilogy.
Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.
Also:
There’s ripe ground for a great sequel, because the bones of what’s present in this movie, however deeply flawed, to be something really cool on the other side.
I watched some Let’s Play videos with my daughter, in anticipation of the movie, and she’d never seen the format before. She got a real kick out of Markiplier.
It’s unclear if we’ll actually play the games, but she’s been toying with the idea.
I'm 33 with no kids so I'm mostly out of the loop with these kinds of games franchises. But this franchise is huge amongst teens. I released 3 YouTube shorts with FNAF cosplays from New York Comic Con, and it's been a little crazy, lol. I did teach middle school STEM afterschool for a bit, so that gave me a little insight into things, this contingent of teen fandom around stuff like FNAF, Friday Night Funkin, Undertale, that's very present on YouTube, as mentioned in your article, and largely gone unnoticed by adult gamer circles. We did watch the FNAF movie on Peacock this weekend, and it was an alright entry point movie, with great puppeteering from Jim Henson's Creature Shop. Your article pretty much summarized most of what I would've wanted to say. I do wonder what hearing from actual kids' opinions on the franchise would be like, as tough as that would be editorially.
My kids are 7 and 8 and somehow we've managed to avoid any FNAF interest here. My daughter is more of a rainbow and unicorns type and my son is obsessed with Pokemon, there hasn't been a single mention of Roblox or FNAF from either. There was brief interest in Minecraft a couple years ago but that faded quickly. I'm not sure how we've been so lucky but I'm happy to have one less thing to have to navigate as parents (so far).