05-11-23 | Greetings my friends! Halloween has come and gone. And so has Five Nights at Freddy’s. October is traditionally the time of year when major Hollywood studios compete over whose horror flick gets to be the big Halloween hit of the year. This year Universal put all their money on their lean, mean, fighting machine Five Nights at Freddy’s.
I say ‘this year’ but Five Nights at Freddy’s has actually been in development since … wait for it … 2015! Why does this shock me so much? Because it confirms to me that corporations like Universal, Warner Bros. and Paramount are completely inept at following current trends. The studio got hold of a major name in horror, at a time when said name was at the hight of its powers. Then the studio calmly waited for its fruits to lose their freshness and only then did they proceed with making the damn movie.
Allow me to back up. Five Nights at Freddy’s is a deceptively simple video game independently developed by Scott Cawthon. Its premise is that you, the player, are a nightwatchman at a pizza parlour filled with sinister animatronics. These cute yet creepy robots come to life at night to claim your life. The objective is simply to survive. Inspired by the robotic entertainment of Chuck E. Cheese and ShowBiz Pizza Place, this plucky little game became a cult hit overnight when YouTubers started streaming their attempts at surviving the onslaught.
Five Nights at Freddy’s was bursting with jumps cares, making it perfect fodder for comedic gaming channels. But in the online world trends fade fast. The game was released in 2014, the rights were acquired by Universal in 2015 and then the waiting started. It took the geniuses in Hollywood almost a full decade to come up with a film version. To me that’s selling Christmas trees in February. Get with the program, Universal!
Remember good old Roger Corman? The King of the Drive-In movies produced scores of science fiction, action and horror movies in the 1950s, most of them in a matter of days. When Russia launched the first ever satellite to orbit the planet, the iconic Sputnik, Corman wsted no time and rushed War of the Satellites into production. It took him six months to catch up with the Russkies, but back then there weren’t any crazy TikTok challenges to distract audiences. So Sputnik would still have been a hot commodity by the time the film was released.
Uncle Roger also knew when to cut his losses. When The Search for Bridey Murphy popularized reincarnation in 1956, Corman started working on The Trance of Diana Love. By 1958 the fad had, well … faded. The resulting film was released as The Undead instead and became a hit regardless. Compare this with Sony’s Slender Man, the 2018 films that cashed in on a character that was popular briefly in 2009. Too little, too late.
With our current high grade digital technology in the palm of our hand it is not impossible to forge a feature film within the span of two months. I recall the supposed Nazi gold train of Walbrzych hitting headlines in 2015. While the train was never found (nor confirmed to have ever existed) it captured the popular imagination and would have made a great movie. It offers countless opportunities for intrigue and adventure.
Even back then an enterprising young filmmaker would have been capable of rushing a 60 minute heist movie into production, if only to plonk it on YouTube. But for some reason a multibillion-dollar concern like Universal cannot decide what to do with the current hit of the day. This might be a good moment to mention I haven’t actually seen Five Nights at Freddy’s yet, so I cannot comment on whether the film is competent or not. But I promise you I’ll write a relevant and honest review of this film in a decade or so.