MOVIE NEWS – Five Nights at Freddy’s, made from the terrifying video game series, avoids the strict age rating, but still has plenty of scenes that will give you the creeps. All this is achieved through creative solutions: no streaming blood, no flying severed limbs, and a chillingly sinister atmosphere and startling surprises.

Initially, the main question for the filmmakers was how to produce a lot of sacrifice without excluding younger viewers from the audience. “We tried to push the envelope to the limit,” writer-director Emma Tammi told Inverse, “The impressive thing about the grisly genre is that you get to show the gory killing one on one, but we had to kill off the characters in quick succession to spare the audience the gruesome details. We often resorted to showing shadows and silhouettes while rolling up the sound effects, so that everything is just as gruesome as if we were pushing the carnage to its fullest. So everyone can experience the horror without seeing it live, and the effect is perhaps more pervasive, as the point is left to the viewer’s imagination. It was fun to work in this way, while being heartened by the knowledge of how useful this method is, as we don’t lose a large part of the fans who belong to the younger age group.”

Five Nights at Freddy’s is being produced by Blumhouse Studios, which has a strong track record in producing light-weight, PG-rated horror. Just think of the five films in the Insidious franchise, which are at the forefront of gore-freakery, yet have not been given a strict classification thanks to their sophisticated depiction of horror.

In Five Nights at Freddy’s, the hero is a security guard (Josh Hutcherson – The Hunger Games) who watches over a closed pizzeria at night and is forced to go into survival mode as the animatronic puppets that were once the attraction of the establishment come to life after the clock strikes midnight. Given that the original video game has evolved into a vast entertainment universe (sequels, books, games, souvenirs), the film is likely to be the opening piece in a franchise, as is Blumhouse’s practice.

(Five Nights at Freddy’s – domestic release: 2 November 2023)

Source: UIP