By day, Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza is teeming with screaming children, worn-out parents, and the happy singing of the restaurant’s animatronic band. But when the sun goes down and you’re locked inside for the night, you have a feeling you aren’t alone after all. From your glitchy security room, you watch grainy monitors in horror as the once sweet animatronic animals are now moving from room to room, and they don’t look so friendly anymore. Five Nights at Freddy’s is a freaky horror game that fans adore, and soon it’s going to be a movie too!
Blumhouse has picked up the story and tasked Emma Tammi to direct the movie. If you love horror movies, you’ve probably watched a Blumhouse movie. They are the production company behind Halloween Ends, the Stephen King adaptation Firestarter, and The Black Phone as well as many more. As for Emma Tammi, her record is concise but not unimpressive. She directed the horror movie, The Wind, as well as the TV series, Into the Dark. The creator of the original 2014 PC game, Scott Cawthorn, hand-picked Emma Tammi for the project. He said, “In meeting with Emma, I felt she had a great understanding of the franchise, and really felt that she could craft something that would please the fanbase and keep people on the edge of their seats.”
Scott Cawthorn is going to join Emma Tammi and Seth Cudebech on the writing team, so we can be optimistic that the script will capture the kind of fear that Five Nights at Freddy’s did the best way that it can. With such a full deck of experienced horror pros, there’s just one thing left to consider: how to make the creepy mascots. The answer is, don’t just make them fully CGI and call it a day.
Jim Henson’s Creature Shop will be creating the animatronic monsters! This company is behind a lot of great projects that make large puppets like Sesame Street, Dead Mau’s helmet, and The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. Their previous work has been more on the sweet side and focused on children, but that might be what makes them the perfect choice! The Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza animatronics are meant for children by day, and Jim Henson’s Creature Shop will nail that. Let’s see how well they can design a puppet that will scare a grown man too.
It will be interesting to see how the team takes on adapting the survival horror game because it may be tricky to transfer what made Five Nights at Freddy’s so scary as a game into a movie. In the game, you play the security guard overnight in the restaurant. You don’t wander around in the dark or go check on strange noises. Instead, you sit in your security room and watch with growing horror as the lifesize dolls move from room to room. You know that you only have so much power to watch the grainy monitors, keep the hall lights outside of the security room turned on, and power a few electronic doors. If you use all of your power, you won’t be able to stop them from coming into the security room. It’s all about the tension of waiting for morning and conserving your power while also resisting the urge to not keep all the lights and cameras on constantly. The only thing worse than seeing a killer doll is then losing sight of the killer doll.
The movie begins filming in February 2023, so we still have a while to wait and wonder. In the meantime, here are some survival horror games that you can play to pass the time.
