The first time I played the horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent, it was in a proto-livestream setting. I had my computer hooked up to the living room TV of a friend’s college apartment. We’d turned off the lights, drawn the curtains and poured ourselves drinks. Over the course of the evening, a room stuffed with increasingly rowdy viewers watched me navigate the uncanny depths of a cursed castle, my impotent hero pursued by shadow monsters. It scared the hell out of me. My friends, scaredy-cats all, loved it. Five Nights at Freddy’s found its fame in similar fashion: Let’s Play videos filled with freaked-out gamers, hamming up their reactions as they played for an audience of horror newbies, reveling in the bond-forming chemical reaction between vicariousness and schadenfreude. The film adaptation of the animatronic horrorshow gave the box office a jump scare, but it’s no surprise why: The franchise, and how its viewers/players interact with it, is a natural evolution of the guided rites of passage that have long welcomed initiates into the wider world of horror.
As our Tara Bennett wrote in her review of the adaptation, Five Nights at Freddy’s “is firmly an entry-level tween/teen horror film meant to woo that age demographic into the world of scares with some edge and blood.” She’s not alone in thinking so. BJ Colangelo makes the case that Five Nights at Freddy’s is both gateway horror and camp cinema. Agreed. Singin’, dancin’, killin’ Chuck E. Cheese parodies powered by the souls of murdered kids…that’s an idea ridiculous enough (and in poor enough taste) that I’m sure John Waters would find it hilarious. I’ll add to that: Five Nights at Freddy’s is gateway horror, camp cinema, and a multimedia blend that reminds us how the internet has influenced the youthful discovery of the impermissible.
When Five Nights at Freddy’s turned out to be a hit, my friend lamented that the movie sucked. Another replied that he was simply too old to appreciate it. He didn’t have the built-in mental overlay that so much of the film’s intended audience automatically applied to the film: A small implied box in the corner of the screen, with its webcam focused on the next generation of horror hosts. Having that association certainly won’t make the movie—an ouroboros of B-horror ideas, recycled into half-hearted videogame ideas and back again—any good, but it will make it more accessible for a certain crowd.
The series is angled towards the horror-curious, who found an entry point thanks to a degree of separation that’s long helped indoctrinate new converts to the genre. Now, though, the home of horror-by-proxy has shifted from staying up late for the midnight movie to browsing YouTube’s algorithm-driven database. There, whether you’re looking or not, those after gameplay videos can find thousands of Let’s Plays centered on horror. Many of these boast magnetic, superlative titles.
Markiplier, who made his bones hamming it up in Amnesia freak-out videos, named his first filmed foray into Five Nights at Freddy’s “SCARIEST GAME IN YEARS.”
An eye-catching pullquote, a hint of danger—YouTube’s video store is stockpiled with the same taboos that’d have a kid trying to sneak an R-rated title past the clerk at a Blockbuster in the ‘90s. A goober making a cartoon face while pointing to a game screencap (with the game itself boasting a camp-horror reimagining of a kid’s birthday destination) can be just as tantalizing, and ultimately tame, as the box art of Stuart Gordon’s Dolls.
Obviously every kid is gonna try to rent this.
As those over-the-top facial expressions—wide-eyed and shocked—flooding your search results imply, these videos are hosted by players putting on a show. They lean into the genre’s trappings, playing up their reactions to match the theatricality at hand. And they found that the more they leaned in, the bigger their success.
The most viral games of the mid-2010s were horror games, games that were better as spectator sports. Like the schlockiest B-movies that still hold a fond place in your heart, being good was secondary to attracting an audience. Though riffing, explanation and theorizing are common Let’s Play practices across genres, horror games especially encourage this constant patter. It allows the player to make the game accessible, but also to compensate for fear felt by their audience and themselves—to stave off anxiety from the telegraphed sound cues and the inevitable, reflexive flinches that their errors will bring.
And when those errors come, the viewers love it. Scare compilations do numbers. We like to see someone freak out. You empathize with the terror, but from an empowering amount of distance. It’s the same logic as being more excited than scared when listening to an older sibling tell campfire stories or recount murderous urban legends. You’re just on the edge of the forbidden, brought there by something familiar.
Blending performance and participation, these Let’s Players (or Twitch streamers, for that matter) speak directly to their viewing audience, and in doing so create the same kind of characterized chaperone companionship as the bolo-tied Joe Bob Briggs or the OG Big Tiddy Goth GF Elvira. It’s camp, it’s connection, it’s an invitation for continued investment in the genre. As the box office for Five Nights at Freddy’s shows, those invitations were accepted en masse.
Five Nights at Freddy’s is not the scariest game, and that’s partly what made it such a success. It’s a series filled with repetitive interactions and the same jump scares. It’s built to be predictable, and the sprinklings of deeper lore are there to keep you hooked after the ironically comfortable familiarity of the horror design has won you over. This allowed the franchise to make a smooth transition away from Let’s Players, who’ve been criticizing the franchise, its massive hype and its one-way ticket towards burnout, since 2015.
“Everyone wants me to play this game to get scared, but after four games, I don’t know what to tell you,” said PewDiePie. While there was a cynical gold rush among content creators towards games like Five Nights at Freddy’s (which rushed out sequels, completing the success-chasing cycle), the series was relatively unique as it was embraced by a larger grassroots community even when the first wave of enthusiasm moved on. Like the most dominant media franchises, FNaF quickly moved beyond the text to the meta-layer of fan art, fan theories and deep lore explainers.
It’s here that we come back to director Emma Tammi’s film adaptation. Or, to perhaps be more accurate, the film adaptation from game creator Scott Cawthon. According to the New York Times, the movie’s conception and production was under the thumb of Cawthon. “There is no amount of money you could have offered Scott up front to say, ‘Let us have the rights to FNaF and we’ll invite you to the premiere,’” said Blumhouse CEO Jason Blum. “Sometimes it was difficult. Scott would say this director isn’t going to work or that writer isn’t going to work.”
“It became clear that if I pushed it,” Blum explained, “he was going to throw me off the movie, too.”
Cawthon, a Texas Republican who pivoted to horror after Christian games didn’t work out (which might explain why the conservative, family-and-soul-oriented Five Nights at Freddy’s shares its weird fixation on child abduction with another of this year’s surprise box office hits, Sound of Freedom), was both a producer and writer on the movie, and was clearly dedicated to keeping his vision intact. This may be why, in addition to being a horror movie with training wheels, it’s an IP movie with training wheels.
As much as the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie mirrors the game in that it “relies on a lot of jump scares,” as Bennett writes, it is also a movie that holds its audience’s hands as it goes through the motions of brand recognition. There’s a reason it condenses a convoluted story, pieced together by Wiki users and forum posters over multiple games, into a clear single narrative. That’s one of the most important things about this franchise to those who know it. But so is the look and feel. Tammi’s camera lingers for applause and reactions, her two-hour movie sacrificing pacing for conspicuous space set aside for its audience to assess and appreciate the accuracy of its major plot and design elements. We ogle the bright, sinister animatronics from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, perfectly evocative of the familiar ‘bots, and constantly revisit the lore-deepening dreams of security guard Mike (Josh Hutcherson). His little sister’s drawings are as key to the story as creepy pictures are in the games; beyond the demographics of the target audience, it makes thematic sense that the movie’s perspective tries to split the difference between the wide-eyed wonder of Mike’s loner sister (who’s affectionate towards the animatronics, not terrified) and the divorced dad vibes of depressed, sleep-deprived Mike. And let’s not forget the Easter eggs, ranging from YouTuber cameos to mid-credit appearances by future franchise characters.
It’s in these choices where the layer of commentary that, for many, always came packaged with the source material, exists in the film. Adjacent to the applause breaks in superhero movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home, this emphasis on adaptive fidelity (and the pop-off reactions that such creative respect would elicit) augments a genre already best when experienced with others. The result is a horror adaptation that is, for good and ill, quintessentially for the modern media landscape. It’s for a young audience instead of their parents. It acknowledges and embraces the expectations of its streamer-weaned fans (especially smart, releasing simultaneously on Peacock for communal watchalongs). It prizes superficial moments of referentiality over quality. But most importantly for those burgeoning horror fans that found each other in the Five Nights at Freddy’s rabbit holes, it’s a welcome mat to another art form.
Horror has proven time and time again that it will continue to be the most profitable and accessible genre, with a shapeshifting community constantly adapting to better find each other. To that end, it continues to embrace every facet of the internet, moving beyond Screenlife movies and into the new frontiers of organic, connective storytelling. Just look at how differently (and successfully) the YouTube-born movies Skinamarink and Talk To Me spoke to corners of the online world this year alone. One channeled nightmarish creepypasta, the other married modern thematic sensibilities with the old-school practical effects that keep people coming back to the pages of Fangoria. Five Nights at Freddy’s leaned into another corner of this grassroots world—the allure of Let’s Play horror—and surprised everyone who wasn’t paying attention.
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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