Over the past decade, Five Nights At Freddy’s has quietly grown in stature, impacting the world of film and TV as well as videogames. We look at its surprising cultural impact.
One of the most influential horror games of the past decade owes its existence to a beaver nobody liked. In 2013, indie developer Scott Cawthon made a free-to-play game called Chipper & Sons Lumber Co, a family-friendly experience that involved gathering wood, construction, and completing minigames. Reviews, it’s fair to say, were less than kind.
What happened next quickly became the stuff of legend – dismayed by criticisms that his game’s anthropomorphic beavers looked unintentionally creepy, Cawthon started thinking about making a horror game.
“People said that the main character [in Chipper & Sons] looked like a scary animatronic animal,” Cawthon recalled in an interview with Indie Game Magazine. “I was heartbroken and was ready to give up on game-making. Then one night something just snapped in me, and I thought to myself – I bet I can make something a lot scarier than that.”
The result was, of course, Five Nights At Freddy’s – an altogether darker and weirder experience than the wholesome, Christian-themed games Cawthon had made up to that point. He’d taken his heartbreak and disillusionment, it seemed, and bundled it into a simple yet darkly effective point-and-click horror game. It cast the player as a security guard named Mike, tasked with spending the night in a closed pizzeria – Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza – and avoiding the murderous attention of four rampaging, animatronic animals.
Developed in a matter of months using a piece of software called Clickteam Fusion, Five Nights might have passed under the public’s radar were it not for streamers on YouTube, whose theatrical reactions to the game’s jump-scares helped sell the experience to a generation of younger players less acquainted with the survival horror genre.
The success of Five Nights was such that it sparked an entire franchise of sequels and spin-offs that is still going almost a decade later; for a while, it even looked as though the series would outlive Cawthon’s own career in game development, with the creator announcing in 2021 his attention to step away from the public eye when his political leanings (he’s pro-life and pro-Trump) came to light.
None of this slowed the franchise’s momentum. In 2023 alone, we saw the release of spin-off games, several books and graphic novels, and most obviously, the long-in-production Five Nights At Freddy’s movie, directed by Emma Tammi and produced by Blumhouse. Cawthon was credited as both co-writer and co-producer, and no doubt increased his already considerable wealth when the film made over 10 times its meagre $20m budget. (It’s reckoned that Cawthorn might be worth somewhere north of $70m at the time of writing.)
It’s remarkable, really, just what a sizable ripple effect Five Nights has had on pop culture. Away from the games and associated media – Blumhouse has a film sequel fast-tracked for release this year – there’s the knock-on effect it’s had elsewhere.
Warner Bros originally snapped up the rights to make a Five Nights film in 2015, after which it spent several years in something approaching development hell – several directors, including Chris Columbus, were involved at various stages, only for the project to be hit by repeated delays and script rewrites.
In the interim, screenwriter GO Parsons wrote his own horror script, initially called Wally’s Wonderland, which was very similar to Five Nights, right down to its restaurant setting and army of cast of villainous, animatronic killers. Incredibly, the script was seized on by Nicolas Cage, and the resulting film, now called Willy’s Wonderland, emerged in 2021 – beating the official Five Nights screen adaptation by two years. Not that Cage’s presence helped the film all that much; although made for $5m – even less than the official Five Nights – it largely came and went. Even the addition of gore and violence – far more than can be found in Blumhouse’s later film – failed to help endear it to audiences still reeling from the global pandemic.
It’s worth pausing here to mention one of the pivotal influences on Five Nights At Freddy’s itself – the Chuck E Cheese chain of restaurants founded by Nolan Bushnell, better known internationally as the co-founder of Atari. Originally called Chuck E Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre when the chain first opened in 1977, the restaurants featured some anthropomorphic, animatronic animals as their central attraction, with visitors entertained by somewhat jerky (and sinister) performing animals as they tucked into their pizza and fizzy drinks.
Five Nights At Freddy’s therefore took something nostalgic – a family restaurant no doubt remembered by millions of Americans – and twisted it into something disturbing. Perhaps inspired by the games, the concept of weaponised nostalgia spread into cinema long before Five Nights or even Willy’s Wonderland had even been shot.
Low-budget horror The Banana Splits Movie, based on the 1960s and 70s TV series of the same name, arguably does the same thing: like Five Nights, The Banana Splits takes the furry, anthropomorphic characters of the children’s TV series and sets them off on a murderous spree full of gore and dismemberment.
It’s a trend that has continued with Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey, which took the just-out-of-copyright bear created by AA Milne and turned him into a slasher killer in 2023. Made for just $100,000, it took in over $5m at the box office, and more films are on their way as a result. These include Bambi: The Reckoning, Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare and Pinoccho: Unstrung, as well as a Blood And Honey 2.
Also on the way is Mickey’s Mouse Trap, a slasher horror which features a killer – who resembles a Steamboat Willie-era Mickey Mouse – stalking a bunch of photogenic victims. The trailer made its debut on 1st January 2024 – the very day the copyright lapsed on Disney’s Steamboat Willie.
And in case you’re thinking the connection between Mickey’s Mouse Trap and Five Nights is a bit tenuous, consider the former’s plot and setting: it’s about a group of friends who sneak into an after-hours amusement arcade and are stalked by a killer that looks like a particularly famous cartoon rodent.
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Like the proverbial snake eating its tail, it seems as though the success of Five Nights has even helped Chuck E Cheese find its way to the small screen. On 17th January, it was announced that the producers of reality TV hits like Top Chef are to turn the old restaurant franchise – which has gone bankrupt more than once over the years – into a game show.
“The format will feature stand-alone comedic physical challenges where duos of ‘big kids’ (aka adults) will compete over supersized arcade games,” reads an official description. “The top ticket earning duo will get the chance to exchange their tickets for prizes off the massive version of the iconic Chuck E Cheese prize wall.”
Admittedly, there’s no evidence of the horror overtones found in Five Nights, but The Hollywood Reporter still noted the timing of the announcement: “The potential series marks CEC Entertainment’s first entry into unscripted content,” the outlet wrote, “and arrives months after Peacock’s surprise movie hit Five Nights At Freddy’s, a horror take on a Chuck E Cheese-like restaurant.”
Whatever you make of the various films that have directly or indirectly resulted from Five Nights’ success – it’s hard to say that any of them are classics, let’s face it – it looks as though the franchise’s impact will continue to be felt for years to come. Not bad going for a series that owes its existence to a shunned beaver.
