Reviews
‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ Review – Cuddly Gateway Horror Goes Light on Scares
Nearly a decade ago, Scott Cawthon’s point-and-click survival game Five Nights at Freddy’s was released into the world and became an instant hit, thanks to its effective jump scare delivery system via killer animatronics and engaging lore. The concept practically begged for a feature adaptation, and so did the video game series’ loyal fanbase. It’s finally here, with Cawthon producing and sharing co-writing duties with Seth Cuddeback and director Emma Tammi to ensure a faithful adaptation. While seeing this world and its killer characters on screen might be enough to appease the fanbase, don’t expect the same level of visceral scares.
Mike (Josh Hutcherson) bears the weight of the world on his shoulders. He can’t hold a job, struggles to care for his 10-year-old sister Abby (Piper Rubio), and is still haunted by his younger brother’s disappearance over a decade ago. That’s before his icy aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson) attempts to derail his life further through greed. With Mike’s chances to turn things around quickly circling the drain, his career counselor (Matthew Lillard) offers him a job with the highest turnover rate: the night security shift at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria. Mike quickly realizes something’s off about the place, and through an encounter with local cop Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), he finds himself drawn into a strange supernatural mystery that he may not survive.
(from left) Vanessa Shelly (Elizabeth Lali) and Mike (Josh Hutcherson) in Five Nights at Freddy’s, directed by Emma Tammi.
While great care is put into recreating the video game’s world and characters, gone is the sense of urgency that comes with the game’s ticking clock conceit. Tammi bides her time establishing the characters and their conflicts before gently layering in the horror. Things may be deeply amiss at the dilapidated and long-defunct pizzeria, but Mike has a relatively gentle acclimation period as his personal motivation and traumatic past take precedence. That means that the frequent jump scares associated with the games are also mostly gone here.
In its place is an adorable gateway horror movie that showcases the animatronics’ soft, cuddly side, particularly once Abby gets brought more fully into the fold. It’s difficult not to be charmed by Freddy, Foxy, Chica, and Bonnie when they’re in playful mode, and Jim Henson’s Creature Shop did an impressive job bringing these beloved characters to life on screen. So much so that it’s easy to forget these animatronics are supposed to be scary, even when they do kill.
(from left) Cupcake and Chica in Five Nights at Freddy’s, directed by Emma Tammi.
While the production design and the animatronics may be the most significant assets here, the cast also endears. Hutcherson makes for a winsome lead, bolstered by the adorable Rubio and the sibling bond shared. Lillard makes the absolute most of his limited screen time, and it also highlights the film’s effective blend of comedy and horror. The lore behind FNAF can be grim, but Tammi injects the right among of lightness to balance it.
The simplicity of the story and the emphasis on the human characters’ conflicts means that the pacing is prone to lulls in the nearly two-hour runtime, unhelped by the lack of tension or suspense. There’s no real sense of danger, either, save for the more obvious fodder. That’s largely by design; Five Nights at Freddy’s is meant as gateway horror for younger audiences or the devout fans that’ll appreciate the treasure trove of Easter eggs and references to the game. It’s the type of handsomely made, charming creature feature that’ll play well at slumber parties or rowdy theaters full of obsessed fans, which is precisely its target audience. Five Nights at Freddy’s won’t scare the pants off of seasoned horror fans; the animatronic denizens of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria will likely make you want to hug them instead.
Five Nights at Freddy’s releases in theaters and on Peacock on October 27, 2023.
Daniel Kraus is the 2026 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction thanks to the epic highwire act of his World War I fantasy/horror novel Angel Down. This means that Kraus, an author beloved by genre fans for years, now has more eyes on his work than ever before, particularly from readers who might not typically pick up a novel that veers so heavily into hard genre spaces.
This is why I’m thrilled that, by chance, Kraus’ first post-Pulitzer novel is The Sixth Nik, a spacefaring adventure full of horrifying imagination and brimming over with imagination. Like all of his books, it’s an elegantly written, narratively complex piece full of memorable characters given depth and shade, but as with Angel Down, it’s also an effort by Kraus to stretch his wings, work out some prose muscles that he doesn’t use as much in his straight-ahead horror work. If you’re coming to Kraus for the second time after reading Angel Down, you’re going to get something completely different and yet distinctly Kraus-ian, a space odyssey that’ll make your brain tingle even as your stomach is doing cartwheels.
In the future, when humanity has colonized Mars, Europa, and other nearby habitable worlds to varying degrees, Earth is the site of a secluded sect that has made Greenland their home. This sect is responsible for nurturing the Niffakoq, a kind of messianic child warrior whose legacy is passed down in a way similar to the Dalai Lama. The Niffakoq are trained from birth for their “Chore,” a task they must complete that will radically improve some aspect of life in the cosmos, and given brain implants known as “Niks” to enhance their innate empathic abilities. They also, due to the danger of their chores, rarely live beyond the age of 11.
Nine-year-old Sisilla is the latest of these Niffakoq, and she’s just been given her Chore, involving a faraway colonial outpost on a remote planet that’s rarely in touch with the rest of humanity anymore. To achieve her Chore, Sisilla boards The Sickness, an AI-designed, organic ship that looks like a flying tumor, and meets her crew, including everyone from a bodyguard known only as “Murder 005” to a bodacious engineer who revels in changing her appearance through futuristic procedures to a drug-addicted, reconstructed ship’s medic who offers her a chance to try peyote.
Sisilla is not here to make friends. She’s here to do her Chore, fulfill her purpose in the universe, and pass on to make room for the next Niffakoq. But life on The Sickness determines to surprise her, from an entire room that seems to be made of placenta to a glitching robot that seems to know something of her past. Worst of all, though, it seems that something or someone on board is out to harm the whole crew, and the Chore Sisilla’s spent her whole life preparing for is wrapped around a terrible, paradigm-shifting secret that will make her rethink everything about her life, her purpose, and her place among the stars.
This is a lot of groundwork to lay for one story, in typical epic science fiction fashion, and it’s only scratching the surface of what The Sixth Nik has to offer, from ship’s quarters hidden behind curtains of impossibly long human hair to an encounter with worms that left even my strong stomach churning a bit. To pull off something this grand, this multi-tonal and big, Kraus has to lay everything out elegantly, using Sisilla as the viewpoint character and narrator while keeping her in the dark about each key revelation until exactly the right time. It’s not the kind of book I associate with Kraus and his imagination, but he rises to the challenge with a novel that offers something surprising on each new page, a kind of prose sensory overload that almost tips off into being overstuffed. But not quite.
More than the worldbuilding and vibrant cast of characters, though, what makes The Sixth Nik stand out is Kraus’s layered, often cognitively dissonant view of humanity’s future. Technological advances render some troubles obsolete, only to create entirely new problems. Humans morph and shift themselves in so many ways that they sometimes seem to be walking Ships of Theseus. Building ships from organic matter seems more efficient and elegant, yet it fills each voyage with a parade of grotesqueries.
It is a solar system filled with wonders and horrors in equal measure, and it says something deeply relatable and rewarding about the world we’re in now, this mesh of terrors and triumphs, breakthroughs and brokenness. Kraus managed to capture our own fractured view of the present and catapult it several centuries ahead without losing any of his sci-fi bombast or character-driven sense of wonder. That’s a hard trick to pull off, but it makes The Sixth Nik a hell of a read, and a great new primer for the vast imagination of Daniel Kraus.
The Sixth Nik is available in bookstores now.
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