Macabre Monday: Movie Review: Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023)

Ignore all the pithy reviews everyone rushed to Letterboxd to make. This movie is dark, and might bring up some unresolved family business. (It did for me—Mary Stuart Masterton, ouch.) 

This is how you create horror—starting with something innocuous, even fun, like the holidays, or Chuck E. Cheese, and exploring unresolved childhood trauma, sexuality issues, toxic family dynamics, or why Johnny has no friends. Looking at you, Halloween. 
I feel weird and uncomfortable now in the best way. I hope I don’t ever come across Chuck E. Cheese tokens or tickets in my random keepsakes, ever. I’ll spook myself. I was the skeeball queen, but I never went near the stage. That mouse was off.

What darkness may lie in a dumbass arcade, you might ask? Here there lie spoilers, but you might want to know, because it goes there:

PTSD

Survivor’s guilt

Child abduction

Child rape

Child murder

Suggested parental abandonment or suicide

Child collusion in adult crimes

Child neglect

Child inter-family custody battling

…set to a snappy 80’s soundtrack! Dark enough for you?

This was written and directed by Emma Tammlin, the director of the deeply unsettling prairie historical horror The Wind (2018), and she did a marvelous job. Nothing explores trauma, especially unresolved trauma, like horror.

Wanna play a game? Happy Mischief Night.

(Also, there is an evil animatronic cupcake 🧁 in this, and holy hell is it both cute and horrifying. Someone find me a replica, please…that I can lock in a cupboard at night. You understand.)