After eight years (eight long, long years…) of little to no news and little to no updates, what was once a seemingly-empty promise built only on baseless rumors is now becoming very much a reality. The hitherto-untitledFive Nights At Freddy’s moviefinally has a title.And a release date. And Universal Pictures has just shared the first, officialteaser trailer.
It’s just 47 seconds in length yet bursting at its springlock seams with enough detail to keep a devout FNAF theory crafter occupied for months. This teaser, you guys, thisteaser —it encompasses everything I love about theFive Nights At Freddy’sfranchise and I could not be more excited for the feature film yet to come. Whatever enthusiasm I lost to those eight long years of eventless waiting for FNAF The Movie has since surged back into me, and I can say it with neon-bright confidence now: my most anticipated movie of 2023 is, without a doubt, Five Nights At Freddy’s. (Yes, that is the title. No, it’s not as bad as’Bad Cupcake'.)
ALSO READ:Games Need To Stop With The All Ghostly Flashbacks
The official teaser for Five Nights At Freddy’s begins with tracking lines and static, as if it’s playing not via YouTube but rather via some old VCR fished dustily out of the family attic: a relic from the ’80s, back when training cassettes were all the rage (aerobics videos, home workouts, and Jane Fonda all say hello). The video tape shown in the trailer actuallyisa training cassette, as it turns out. With a smile on their face and a perm in their hair, a friendly spokesperson-slash-referee takes center stage and welcomes new recruits to Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, “where fantasy and fun come to life!”
There’s an unspoken tradition for recorded instructions in the Five Nights At Freddy’s video games; several FNAF titles all begin with phone calls recorded on tape, which play instructions to the security guard player character at the start of each in-game night. So too does the teaser trailer for the Five Nights At Freddy’s movie begin with an instructional tape recording, yes but — fitting in with the fact that this is a film — these tapes have been adapted quite literally for the screen as not audio but rathervideotapes.
ALSO READ:Nine Years On, Hearthstone is Crumbling Under Its Own Weight
It soon becomes apparent that this instructional videotape, though very clearly filmed several decades ago, is still being used in the present day. When the newest security guard — one Mike Schmidt, played by Josh Hutcherson — arrives atthe site of the restaurant, he finds it all run down in this current era, nothing like it appears in the video. At the sight, the sound, the pitch-perfect juxtaposition of the worn-out training tape and Hutcherson’s Mike Schmidt shining his flashlight over the severely broken-down pizzeria interior — I got chills. This, this right here,thisis how you adapt a video game for the cinematic medium.
I had to pause and rewatch this part of the trailer, honestly, to really take in all the little Easter eggs and prizes the set designer had thrown in for us chronically-analytical FNAF fans to pore over, as we’re famously wont to do. The drawings pinned to the wall, the booth dividers featuring stained-glass portraits of Bonnie The Bunny and Chica The Chick. The sign above the button reading SHOWTIME (perhaps a nod to Pizza Showtime, often believed to be one of the real-world inspirations behind the FNAF series?), the big Let’s Eat badge pinned to the red vest of the employee trainer’s uniform, the cupcake in Chica’s animatronic grasp.
ALSO READ:This Random Enemy In Halo CE Has A Ton Of Secret Lore
Speaking of which — can we please just take a moment to talk about and fully appreciate the animatronics? They were built specially for this movie by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop (yes,thatJim Henson’s Creature Shop! …although last I checked, there is only one…) and they are huge things, fuzzy and worn, tangible andreal. When Hutchinson’s Mike Schmidt turns slowly around only to see the Freddy Fazbear standing silently behind him, his silence is palpable because Freddy Fazbear himself is palpablythere, not posing some CGI threat, but a very real one indeed.
A few folks have voiced their disdain for the sinister red eyes given to the animatronics in the trailer, and… look. While I’m sure there’s an argument to be made that ‘red eye robot = evil’ is a tad cliché at this point, I think the luminous red of the eyes — and the way it contrasts against the otherwise shadow-enshrouded pizzeria interior — kinda matches the neon-in-darkness aesthetic that the movie seems to be generally going for.
All throughout the trailer, and even in the movie’s poster, every instance of darkness is met with an equally fluorescent light: a neon Prizes sign glows yellow in the dim here, an electric blue light illuminates the screens of CRT TVs there. When Mike Schmidt powers on the old restaurant sign, even this glows into a restored orange neon against a firmament of pitch black darkness.
ALSO READ:The Outlast Trials Shows That Co-op Horror Can Be Just As Thrilling
The tail-end of the trailer breaks away from the pizzeria to give us more of a glimpse of the general narrative that’s going on. There are hints of a tug-of-war between the present day and past incidents: children run helter-skelter through a forest, only for Schmidt to find himself lying on the floor of that same forest several moments later.Matthew Lillard’s William Aftonappears for one intriguingly brief moment, hands clasped plotfully and eyes narrowed as though he’s reflecting on something.
As if to confirm my suspicions that there might just be some interswitching of past and present going on here, the trailer concludes with one of the human characters hiding in a ball pit — echoing Into The Pit, a story from the Five Nights At Freddy’s series of novels which concerns, wouldn’t you know it, a ball pit with the power to transport its occupants back to the past.
It’s going to be a few more months before the Five Nights At Freddy’s film finally graces silver screens and home cinemas everywhere, but it’s so going to be worth the wait, if its official teaser is anything to go by. On tape and all in under a minute, the teaser trailer captures everything that I and all my fellow FNAF fans love about Five Nights At Freddy’s series. The ambiance, the anachronistic clash of dated and modern, past and present, the animatronics, the piles uponpilesof lore-ridden details, the fun, the fear, and Fazbear himself in the flocked velvet flesh. I’ll see you in cinemas on October 27th.
