Review: Five Nights at Freddy’s movie and phenomenon
Example of a triumph of decentralized power, and a vibrant GenZ Community
This past Halloween weekend, a film came out that was incredibly successful. It blew out expectations, making over $100 million on its first weekend on a $20 million budget, which makes it one of the most successful films of its kind — and in a year that the overall box office has not recovered from pre-pandemic levels.
You might be forgiven for missing it. Our dear editor needed to Google the movie title, “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” when I pitched this story to him before he could respond. The demos on the movie are young; it’s rightly called a “GenZ box-office juggernaut”, and from its inception in 2014, there is an entire community of young people who thrive on the video games, books, and now movies that are produced in its eco-system.
And that is the whole point: from its humble beginnings to a virtual media empire, “Five Nights at Freddy’s” (FNAF) is an example of how a lone artist entrepreneur, without the benefit of a centralized media power complex, reached out and built an entire community of young people. Looking at FNAF as a community engagement case study, we in the liberty movement can learn a lot from it.
Incidentally, the artist, Scott Cawthon, who created this GenZ phenomenon and produced and wrote the script for the movie, is not who comes to mind of when I think of a GenZ influencer. A pro-life Christian, Scott was doxed and “canceled” when it was revealed he donated almost exclusively to Republican candidates a few years back.
Horror of horrors, I know.
Well, it didn’t work. This film shows that Scott is here to stay — the perks of a free market and meritocracy.
A bit more about the film (I’ll try not to spoil anything):
When it starts out, we see a security guard getting murdered at an abandoned pizza parlor— a Chuck E. Cheese knockoff type of place. The viewers cannot see who is behind it. We then meet the main character, a loser-type of mall security guard, Mike. He wasn’t always so aimless. His little brother was abducted when Mike was a child, and he has felt responsible ever since. Now he sees abductions happening all over. Because of that, he gets fired from this security guard job. We are told that this isn’t the first time this has happened (law enforcement is probably not the best career decision).
He lives in a shack and can’t even afford that. He’s behind on his rent. He’s got a little sister who won’t talk to him but for whom he must care for as his parents are no longer around. It seems like responsibility is crushing down on this young man, and he has no way of holding up against it. In desperation, he takes this terrible job working as the lone night watch at the very same abandoned pizza parlor from the first scene, Freddy Fazbear’s.
Unfortunately, his little sister’s sitter mysteriously vanishes, so he no longer has someone to watch his sister at night and opts to bring the sister with him to work. Of course, that is before they realize that this ersatz pizza parlor is inhabited by a group of possessed animatronics that are all driven by an urge to kill.
And that’s the movie. They need to survive Freddy’s, and he needs to learn how to bear the responsibility of his brother’s abduction and caring for his little sister.
The story is simple but compelling, with a through-line that we see in the culture a lot right now: the tragedy of a stolen innocence. Many of us seem to be thinking about it now–that there’s a childish innocence that is in grave danger. We are expressing it through music, movies, TV shows, and video games, all conveying that sense of something that has been taken from us. Perhaps it was a sense of peace or a sense of belonging that Mike felt with his family before it was ripped away. More than anything else, this story beat truly marks the film as a work of art from a Christian, even though it is decidedly not Christian art.
The production company behind the film, Blumhouse, is not an example of decentralized power, and Blumhouse is definitely not above propagating woke propaganda. However, the whole “Five Nights at Freddy’s” phenomenon is way more interesting than the surface level – that is – a bunch of possessed animatronics.
The man who created the video games that started this phenom, Scott Cawthon, is an animator by training, but he wanted to make video games. Before releasing the first FNAF in 2014, he was making what he called “sweeping epics.” For example, he made a Pilgrim’s Progress video game where the player battles against demonic forces of evil.
In other words, his work was overtly Christian, and he was falling at every turn. One of his last pre-FNAF failures was a video game about a friendly beaver, which the critics said looked like a demented animatronic. Deeply hurt by this negative feedback, he decides to think small on his next try. At this point, he’s thinking about how he might possibly make a little game that might earn him $40/month.
Yes, you heard that right, the movie that just returned more than 5x its investment in its first weekend was conceived by a man who hoped to make $40/month on the idea so he could feed his kids a bit better. Putting that into context, the “Barbie” movie is just now hitting that rate of return in its fifth month of release.
And this is really where the story of the little guy pulling himself up by his bootstraps, the iconic American story, comes into focus. Scott builds the game, voices all the roles himself, and self-publishes it. Most importantly, he incorporated the negative comments about animatronics and used them to his advantage. You might have guessed that the game is called “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” and it puts players into the role of a pizza parlor security guard needing to survive five nights in the place where possessed animatronics are roaming the halls. It’s legitimately scary. Kids begin to rave about it.
FNAF begins a reciprocal relationship between Scott and a growing audience of young people. Given the nature of its inception, this relationship freed the artist from compulsive listening to the dictates of some larger production company so as to be able to listen directly to the dictates of his audience, almost like a politician in the best sense of the word.
A story like Scott’s is a refreshing reminder that we are not yet living in a totalitarian government with tightly controlled means of communication.
In the political world, it is easy to focus on America’s decline. A story like Scott’s is a refreshing reminder that we are not yet living in a totalitarian government with tightly controlled means of communication. We can still find these stories of the little guy winning the day and capturing the ears of society writ large. In the case of FNAF, these games have created communities of young people who testify to how their imaginations have become enriched and their childhoods made more fun through coming together to play and talk about these games.
And by the way, there are many people, people like you and me, who can make a difference in our community, similar to what Scott Cawthon achieved with his artistic endeavors. Our means of connecting will probably not look like a video game or a movie about a demented, mechanical bear, but perhaps, if we listen, our impact might be as great.
James Pinedo is marketing manager at State Policy Network.
