Freddy Fazbear fans rejoice. Blumhouse has announced that after six years of development Hell, Five Nights at Freddy’s, the indie horror video game sensation, is entering production in spring of 2021 for the film adaptation. Video games, particularly horror-based video games, are notoriously difficult to transpose from gameplay to screenplay. But, thanks to Black Mirror, there’s an option that may suit FNAF better than any other previous attempt.
Five Nights at Freddy’s, created by Scott Cawthorn, is a first-person “jumpscare” video game independently released in 2014. The premise, in which the player plays as a security guard tasked with overseeing Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria and its murderous animatronic occupants overnight, served as the perfect game for the then-growing trend of streaming gameplay online. Countless videos of streamers screaming into their mics and flailing from their desk chairs have been uploaded and viewed firmly establishing FNAF into the online world. The fanaticism would lead to ten game entries, three spin-offs, a novel trilogy and a written anthology series, as well as merchandising, and a rich world of fan fiction. A film adaptation was inevitable and in 2015 Warner Bros bought the rights and hired Scott Cawthorn himself to oversee the script.
Unfortunately, due to creative differences, by 2017 no script had been settled on and Warner Bros subsequently dropped the film which was picked up by, of course, horror streaming giant Blumhouse. Still, while Cawthorn attests he’s had an easier time coming to an agreement on the tone and feel of the Five Nights at Freddy’s film adaptation (he was kind enough to share in a reddit post excerpts of rejected scripts) it’s only now in 2021 that production has allegedly begun. While FNAF undoubtedly popularized the concept, in seven years imitators and creations of parallel thinking were bound to cut in. Short films, fan concepts, and Willy’s Wonderland (the feature film produced by and starring Nic Cage), which all share the theme of “evil animatronics killing in a themed restaurant”, limiting the number of directions Scott Cawthorn and Blumhouse can take the Five Nights at Freddy's film and remain relevant.
Enter Black Mirror’s 2018 Choose Your Own Adventure “episode”, or Interactive Film, “Bandersnatch”. The Choose Your Own Adventure format has been attempted for screen a few times to less than stellar results, falling through on the User Interface of it all. “Bandersnatch” nailed that hurdle to positive reviews.
While the story (in which a young programmer starts to question reality while adapting a mad writer's novel into a video game) received a mixed response in its characterizations, across the board the technical design has been lauded. Opening with a tutorial on decision-making specific to the viewer's device, not unlike a video game, with the decision points interwoven with the scene. No pauses and no breaks in the rhythm. It worked but perhaps didn’t work for the expectations of a Black Mirror episode which, by and large, carry an expectation of an unexpected dark twist which is hard to land in a plot with ten to twelve possible outcomes.
Which would make an Interactive Film the perfect vehicle for a horror video game to screen translation. While Five Nights at Freddy’s does boast extended lore, that lore is tied directly to the fans wherein when the fans posited a theory on the backstory of specific haunted animatronics in FNAF, Cawthorn would come through and add it to the already established story. One of the challenges of adapting a video game to film is in story development.
Oftentimes when the gameplay is eliminated, the story is thin and basic. But efforts to expand that story to script, resulting in characters getting extra traits or background to fill out the plot, end up alienating fans by too far away from the original concept. Harder still, there’s no true central character for Five Nights at Freddy’s. The player IS the protagonist meaning developing a character to fill the role of the general audience proxy in the film is tricky.
Maybe the ultimate next step in horror is the audience as the protagonist and Five Nights at Freddy's the perfect launching ground, making choices in the film that lead them deeper and deeper into the expansive FNAF lore. The film could even go one better by pulling a page from the 2015 Sci-Fi/Action film Hardcore Henry and shoot the whole thing first-person and interactive. Black Mirror’s “Bandersnatch” finessed the tech of it all, maybe FNAF is the film that could make it all work? At the very least, it’s pretty awesome that the Five Nights at Freddy's film is finally on its way, delayed not for lack of interest, but out a killer desire to get it right.