Summary
- The director of the Five Nights At Freddy's movie, Emma Tammi, discusses the importance of maintaining the game's creepy atmosphere while developing fully fleshed-out characters with their own arcs.
- Tammi emphasizes that while the scary factor is crucial, a full feature-length film requires dimensional characters that viewers can connect with and invest in.
- By exploring the personal lives and past traumas of the lead characters, the movie delves deeper into the story, offering a more visceral and intense experience for audiences.
Five Nights At Freddy's director Emma Tammi discusses the balance between capturing the game's atmosphere while creating fully fleshed-out arcs for the new protagonists. Five Nights At Freddy's follows Mike Schmidt, who, out of desperation, agrees to take the night shift guard duty of the abandoned Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. As he grapples with his own past traumas while raising his sister, he discovers horrifying secrets about his new job and the animatronics that make this establishment so infamous.
During an interview with Screen Rant at New York City Comic Con for Five Nights At Freddy's, Tammi discussed fleshing out the original story. She assured fans that the creepy atmosphere the game creates is a major piece of the movie, but that the movie needed to move beyond that. Tammi explained how, for the movie to work, they needed to flesh out the two lead characters beyond what is in the original game. Check out Tammi's full quote below:
Emma Tammi: Yeah, I mean, the DNA of the game is so important in that adaptation. We knew we needed to land the scares, and really recreate the atmosphere that FNAF so effectively creates in the game which is this creepy factor that is really rich, and always unsettling. But it's hard to watch a full feature-length film without real characters to hang your hat on and fully dimensional people with arcs, so we knew that was equally important to achieve as well. We're really hoping to deal with Mike and Abby.
Honoring The Five Nights At Freddy's While Moving Beyond It
The original Five Nights At Freddy's game captured audiences with its tension-filled narrative and terrifying jump scares, putting the player at the heart of the terror. The movie takes a different approach to portraying this, instead fleshing out the personal life of the security guard at the heart of the game. Mike Schmidt in the movie is struggling with trauma from his past and raising his younger sister on his own.
He takes the job at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza out of desperation. Adding this deeper understanding of what makes him desperate to keep this job can also explain why he took it, given how notorious this place must be. The Abby character can also add two new layers to the film. She becomes the person Mike needs to protect as things go wrong at his new job. It is not just a story of survival, but of saving his family.
The atmosphere of Five Nights At Freddy's is integral to the story. The abandoned pizzeria brings an eerie creepiness that lends itself to the iconic jump scares, but it also shows a loss of innocence because of what the place used to represent. The movie needs to lean into this, but the atmosphere alone can't be the central idea of the story. Fleshing out the characters and expanding their arcs makes the horror of what could happen to them even more visceral in Five Nights At Freddy's.
