"If the first Five Nights at Freddy's played like a clunky attempt to introduce youngish kids to the cadences of horror, then its sequelplays like a clunky attempt to introduce now slightly olderish kids to the clichés of horror. And so, to the endless list of modern genre films about trauma, we must now add Five Nights at Freddy's 2. It makes some kind of demented sense: Isn't the point of these films to imitate all the other scary movies out there?"
"Still, these Five Nights at Freddy's films, based as they are on the extremely popular video-game series, present a true tonal challenge. You can't go all gonzo-savage horror with them, but you can't get too lighthearted or goofy either; their stone-faced seriousness is part of the adulting ritual that defines these pictures. Yes, they're movies about giant animatronic animals in an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese-style pizza parlor coming to life,"
"This one starts with the grisly stabbing murder of a young girl in 1982 at the original Freddy Fazbear's Pizza franchise, a different and far more extravagant outlet than the one the first movie was about. The film then flashes forward 20 years to pick up our heroes from the previous entry: young Abby Schmidt (Piper Rubio) and her grown-up older brother, Mike (Josh Hutcherson), who, along with Vanessa Shelly (Elizabeth Lail), are still trying to deal with the horrific events of the last film."
Five Nights at Freddy's 2 emphasizes trauma and familiar horror clichés while maintaining a grim, adulting seriousness around animatronic terror. The film opens with a 1982 stabbing at the original Freddy Fazbear's Pizza and then jumps twenty years forward to revisit Abby Schmidt, her brother Mike, and Vanessa Shelly as they continue to cope with past horrors. Vanessa experiences visions of her dead serial-killer father William Afton, and Abby longs for her formerly possessed animatronic companions. The setting features abandoned pizza parlors, pervasive darkness, and a tightened, stripped-down cast focused on lingering dread.
Read at Vulture
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]