On August 8th, 2014 the first Five Nights at Freddy’s game was released and it was an insane success. Everyone was playing the game and because of its popularity, the creator of the game, Scott Cawthon, made a sequel. Then he made another sequel, then another sequel. As of now, there are 9 games in the franchise – each of them scarier than the last while also adding to the mysterious lore. Because of the massive success of the games, many people wanted to see them adapted into a big-screen film.

In of April 2015, Warner Bros. Pictures announced that it had obtained the film rights. In 2017 the rights were given to Blumhouse, the studio behind several fantastic horror movies such as Megan, Get Out, and The Purge. On May 16, 2023, we got the first trailer for the highly anticipated movie and finally, on October 27th we got the adaptation we’ve wanted for almost a decade – and it was really good.

The main cast did a phenomenal job portraying their characters. But of course, Matthew Lillard, playing William Afton/Springtrap (the antagonist of the games), absolutely stole the show. He isn’t even in the movie very much but when he is, he’s the best part of it. In the beginning, he was just as funny as he was as Shaggy in the Scooby-Doo movies. In the end, he is just as intimidating of a killer as he was as Stu Macher in the original Scream. He even does the iconic knife wipe from Scream as a little homage to his most famous role.

With the source materials plot hidden mostly behind Easter eggs, it was unclear how the filmmakers would write a cohesive plot. Thankfully, the incredibly talented people at Blumhouse managed to pull it off. The movie follows Mike (played by Josh Hutcherson) as he attends his new job as a nightguard of an abandoned pizzeria that shut down due to five children going missing inside. As the week progresses things get weirder and weirder eventually leading to him discovering that the animatronics are possessed by the ghosts of those missing kids. At the climax of the movie the kids’ killer is revealed and they get revenge on the man who trapped them in their animatronic prisons.

The movie didn’t do very well with critics, with a Rotten Tomatoes critic score of only 30%, and I think I know why. It’s because it wasn’t made for them, it was made for the fans of the games. With no context of the source materials of course the critics didn’t like it. There are a lot of things that you would need some prior knowledge of the series to understand, like why are there two rabbit suits and why is one yellow. Why is there a random yellow Freddy who can seemingly teleport? Why is the cupcake such a freaking menace? The last one is purely for comedic effect in the movie, but the rest are only explained in the games.

While I may think the movie was really good, many people had problems with certain scenes. There is a scene in which the animatronics help Abby (played by Piper Rubio) build a big fort, and a lot of people find the scene to be too goofy and out of place for a horror movie. While I can agree it is goofy, it does make sense. The robots are possessed by the ghosts of children, of course, they’re going to act like children.

Another big complaint about the movie is that isn’t really scary or gory enough. This I can agree with, but I understand why the movie is the way it is. The movie being PG-13 holds it back from being amazing. With the PG-13 rating, they could have almost no gore so some of the kills seem more goofy than actually scary. A way they could have compensated for this would be with more jump scares. Typically jump scares are a cheap trick horror movies use to scare people without actually being scary, but for Five Nights at Freddy’s, it would have been perfect considering that’s the main form of horror in the games.

Overall, I enjoyed the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie. Was it worth the wait? Definitely! It absolutely could have been better but it wasn’t bad by any means. I would give it a 7 out of 10.