photo by Universal Pictures

One of the posters for the anticipated “Five Nights At Freddy’s” movie. It shows the title character, an animatronic bear named Freddy.

When you think of family restaurants with cheap pizza and unsettling animatronics, the place that comes to mind is Chuck E. Cheese, but for video game and horror fans alike, the answer is a different one. 

On the outside, the story may only seem like the setup for a bad, B-list horror film, but below the surface of creepy sound effects and glitching security cameras, is a haunting, tragic tale of two friends, and the sick, twisted murders of small children that caused their franchise’s (and their respective families) demise. 

Welcome to Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, where nothing is as it seems, and nighttime is the scariest time of all. Come along and join us for a bite.

Five Nights At Freddy’s (FNAF) began as a video game of the same name, created by Scott Cawthon. It was first released in 2014 on a free game site called IndieDB, where many indie game developers opened their games to the public. With the grimy, unsettling designs of the animatronics, the dark setting of the game, and hidden lore that left people hanging for more, it was a huge success. Pretty soon, popular YouTubers such as Markiplier and PewDiePie began uploading videos playing and reacting to the game and its jumpscares, and YouTube channels such as Game Theory found a goldmine hidden in the game, with all of the unanswered questions that Cawthon scattered out for fans. 

With all of this success, including 28 books and eight other games, with the most recent one out in July 2023, a movie telling the disturbing tale of missing children, eerie robots, murder, and cheesy pizza was bound to happen. However, it was originally set to arrive much earlier than this October.

The FNAF movie had previously been in the works only eight months after the game was released, in 2015. Warner Bros was supposed to distribute the film, and it had a director in Gil Kenan, who at the time had just directed the Poltergeist remake, but much to the disappointment of fans, development was stalled, and not much was heard about it again, until 2017, when Cawthon announced that the film was being picked up by Blumhouse. This sparked more excitement from fans, but once again, the movie wasn’t spoken of after that, this time due to screenwriting issues. All hope seemed lost of ever getting to see the weird, off-putting animatronics on the silver screen, but that would change once again in August of 2022, when Blumhouse teased the film with a behind-the-scenes image, and in April 2023, revealed a first look that included the main cast. 

The film isn’t set to come out for another few weeks, but fans from all over the world can hardly contain their excitement, for good reason. FNAF is a franchise that has enough content to last people months, and the movie news has only brought even more fans trailing to the dark, complicated town of Hurricane, Utah, with some even going back to revisit the game they’d once loved. Film Theory–the sister YouTube channel of Game Theory, even came out with the first of many theory videos to come on the film, based on the trailers already released to the public. Of course, while some YouTubers never stopped making content about FNAF, thanks to the newer games and absurd book plots, it’s still amazing to see the passion that people have for the franchise. 

We won’t know for sure how the movie will turn out until the fateful day of Oct. 27, but it’s a safe bet that even with the franchise’s crazy, fast-growing timeline and strange premise, the love for FNAF will only grow. As the main antagonist of the game, William Afton says: “I always come back.” He might have been talking about himself, but as it turns out, it was a fantastic prophecy for the franchise.