With Eyes East

Here’s what’s gonna happen: I will watch a horror movie made for children, and not write about it because there’s no use. Nobody cares if this movie is “good” or “bad,” or even “recommended.” It simply is. Other horror titles, like The Banana Splits Movie and Willy’s Wonderland, were produced to capitalize on the market this intellectual property created (most likely). And at the end of it, the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie proved a box office success in a wild year of ups and downs.

But this is not why film criticism is sometimes dead. It’s because, in the case of Five Nights at Freddy’s, the problem is the script. It’s always the script, and I don’t know how many more times I can say that. It isn’t interesting criticism! Recently, the problem was the script with Doona!, Killers of the Flower Moon, Ahsoka, and the only reason I didn’t post this on The Battle Beyond Planet X is because I already have a post entitled “The Problem with Alien 3 was Always the Script”!

For the first third of Five Nights at Freddy’s, I thought, “This isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.” It’s atmospheric – both colorful and shadowy – and the sound is really good. In a close-up, J-Hutch leans back in his chair, and the creak tells you how far; it’s an appropriately tactile world. And then, you know, they demystify the monsters too quickly and it’s convoluted and anticlimactic. The point is, a Hollywood movie will never have cinematography or lighting or sound design as deficient as a screenplay. It’s on purpose that the threshold for quality in the screenwriting department is comparatively lower.

There are three credited writers on Five Nights at Freddy’s, including the original game creator, and that means rewrites under the direction of producers. A committee – even of creatives – assembled the plot movements and the dialogue, page by page, line by line. The film came into being as a project in search of a story, rather than something that needed to be told. And none of this is new.

Five Nights at Freddy’s isn’t a bad movie because it’s a video game adaptation or a bloodless gateway horror movie. You can locate its badness within the intricacies – character motivation, character dynamics undercut by the need for reveals, confused and underwhelming villains, a terribly underwhelming final villain, thematic emptiness, a lack of fun – and none of it spells doom for the greater industry or the art of film. Movies like this happen sometimes, and it’s nothing to complain about. Good thing I didn’t!