What Is Five Nights At Freddy's: Everything Parents Need To Know Before The Movie
Like any subgenre, survival horror can start to feel a bit by the numbers when no fresh ideas are coming in to spice things up. That's what helped the first-person video game "Five Nights at Freddy's" stand out when it was first released nearly a decade ago. While your average survival horror video game from the time period either had you mowing down the undead or hiding from monsters, Scott Cawthon's game took a different approach.
Instead, you're stuck in a security booth at a kid's pizzeria where you must observe the monitors strategically in order to survive the night. In "Five Nights at Freddy's," the cheap animatronics are more than they appear, as they come to life at night, and there's only one person in the building who they're coming to see: you. Furthermore, in a typically unsettling feature, they only move when you're not looking at them.
Though the premise might sound terrifying, the good news for parents is that there's no overt gore in the "Five Nights at Freddy's" franchise. Though it's suggested that the animatronics kill you if they reach you, each Game Over is done through a first-person perspective and ends on a jump scare before cutting away.
Meanwhile, as the trailer indicates, the movie adaptation will shift to a third-person perspective. However, since it seems to follow a single character through the titular "Five Nights at Freddy's," it's unlikely to be too violent, as the security guard's increasingly alarming experiences over the five nights are kind of the point.
Five Nights at Freddy's will likely be rated PG-13
Though an official rating for "Five Nights at Freddy's" hasn't been released to the public yet, the film is rumored to be aiming for a PG-13 market. Being that the film is coming from Blumhouse Productions, this would make a lot of sense, as the company recently cut some violence down for the theatrical cut of "M3GAN" so that younger viewers could see it.
Since teens are one of the central target audiences for "Five Nights at Freddy's" and the games contain no overt gore, it seems feasible that an adaptation could easily maintain the oppressive atmosphere and jump scares that make the game series tick as a general rule. After all, even the popular fanmade version from 2019 was rated PG-13.
Aside from the creepiness and scare factor, these games are otherwise pretty much empty of objectionable material, so the movie will likely follow suit so that its audience and appeal will be as broad as possible. This makes even more sense when you consider how many "Five Nights at Freddy's" style games already permeate popular children's games like "Roblox." In any case, if you want to see the games in action to judge for yourself, there are thousands of videos of streamers playing the games online to offer an indication of what parents are getting themselves into.