At first glance, you will likely not mistake Five Nights at Freddy’s to be the work of an arthouse auteur. Designed by Scott Cawthon, a reclusive programmer from Texas who hasn’t conducted an interview in years, its rudiments are famously brainless. The first entry in the series — released in 2014, long before the brand was big enough to receive a film adaptation — is a horror game stripped to its loudest, dumbest essentials. You’re working the night shift at a haunted children’s pizzeria in the Chuck E. Cheese mold where the rickety animatronic band comes to life after dark and hunts for prey. The player sits at a computer and monitors an array of security cameras while attempting to stymie the approach of the bloodthirsty mascots. Fail and you’ll be met with a terrible, mind-piercing jump scare: a demonic facsimile of Helen Henny or Mr. Munch crashing through your screen with murder burning in their cold, dead eyes.
So Five Nights at Freddy’s is pulp. It’s camp. It’s proudly low-culture and far removed from the work of an Aster or an Eggers, who imbue their ghost stories with high-concept psychedelic dread — motifs stacked upon motifs — of familial abuse, toxic masculinity, oedipal psychodrama, and so on. However, if you dig below the surface, as millions of fans have, an alternative truth begins to reveal itself. Because Five Nights at Freddy’s is also one of the most complex horror stories ever written, though much of its narrative is etched in unseen places: furtive cutscenes, recursive symbols, keystone clues slotted into hidden alcoves. Taken all together, Five Nights at Freddy’s is capable of generating the sort of hallucinatory fan theories you’d expect from the biggest Severance diehards, or that friend you have from college who still swears that The Shining is a metaphor for a faked moon landing. If you stumble across the rabbit hole, there’s a good chance you’ll tumble down, too.
“You could play through one of the early games of Five Nights at Freddy’s in about three hours. But as you do it, you’d fixate on these small details. The number of buttons on an animatronic, or a background detail shifting based on your camera angle, things like that,†said Matthew Patrick, better known by his YouTube alias MatPat, who is the foremost Five Nights at Freddy’s thinker in the world. “It’s all told through atmospheric storytelling. It had never been done before. In a lot of other games, if a character has extra toes or whatever, you’d just assume that the developer forgot, or that it’s a bug or whatever. But in Five Nights at Freddy’s, there are no coincidences. It felt like each of those details was an intentional choice leading you to a different part of the story.â€
Patrick describes his Five Nights at Freddy’s coverage as a full-time job. His YouTube channel, The Game Theorists, has published dozens of different videos — meted out in 30-ish-minute episodes — deciphering the many cryptic tendrils of the series’ lore, all of which routinely achieve millions of views. I have no chance of effectively distilling the whole scope of the franchise’s narrative; there is simply too much of it, and the specifics will always be shrouded in constant fan debate. (The 18th game in the franchise is scheduled for release later this year.) But basically: Five Nights at Freddy’s tells the story of a serial killer, and his degenerate family, who prowled through a chain of family pizza restaurants — the Freddy’s in question — in the 1980s. The killer was named William Afton, and his modus operandi was to abduct a child and hide their bodies in the fursuits of the animatronic performers. Afton was never caught, and the spirits of those victims melded with the Freddy’s cast — which is why they seek vengeance in the fiction.
That’s the tip of the iceberg, but believe me when I say the cryptology of Five Nights at Freddy’s is capable of some buckling twists. One of the astonishing early revelations, from the first game of the series, was that the player controls Michael Afton — son of the dreaded William. No wonder the animatronics want you dead.
But frankly, the plotty elements of Five Nights at Freddy’s story are less relevant to fans of the series than how they’re discovered and disseminated. Cawthon leaves bread crumbs in the unlikeliest of places, which pretty much forces anyone interested in these games to become amateur detectives. For instance, some of the most important tidbits of lore in Five Nights at Freddy’s history were found in a children’s activity book called the Survival Logbook, which was released, innocuously, into bookstores throughout the United States in 2017. (Alongside a bevy of word searches and quizzes, the Logbook subtly clarified, you know, the origin mythos of the entire franchise.) Cawthon is also famous for burying clues in the source code of his personal website, forcing diehards to comb over reams and reams of ASCII gibberish in order to gain the slightest foothold on the mystery. In one of my favorite moments of obsessive gamer reverse-engineering, the community identified a review Cawthon left on Voices.com — a repository of contract voice actors — which allowed them to confirm that a ghostly voice that echoes from the background in one of the games did indeed belong to a hugely important character named Charlotte Emily.
“It’s this giant puzzle with countless pieces across all forms of media that comes together to create a single story, which causes the community to constantly bounce ideas off of each other and work together as a team to figure out the truth,†said Joab Simpson, another popular YouTuber who primarily covers Five Nights at Freddy’s. “I think most newcomers to the story get hooked quickly because they just thought that it’s a story about haunted spooky robots, but they quickly learn there’s a lot more to it than that — a lot more.â€
Patrick tells me that the majority of the people who watch his videos about Five Nights at Freddy’s don’t even play the games themselves. Instead, his viewers — who might be a little squeamish about horror — enjoy the ride vicariously by savoring all of the blood, sweat, and tears expended by this global team of investigators. It’s a content strategy, argues Patrick, that has been replicated over and over again by Easter egg–laden Marvel trailers or subtext-heavy Taylor Swift liner notes that are immediately examined with frame-by-frame precision — before comprehensive interpretations of every nuance that are pumped out through the social airwaves by an army of teenage gumshoes. Five Nights at Freddy’s mystery is eternally unsolvable; no airtight solution exists, and the game evokes a reaction that’s not dissimilar to a classroom full of literary students arguing about the end of Moby-Dick for period after period. That’s exactly why it’s so beloved.
“The smarter developers have figured out that the Five Nights at Freddy’s model gives their IP a lot of earned media. People are excited about the new game, but they’re also excited about the metagame,†Patrick says. “You’re giving them intrinsic stuff to make content about.†From that perspective, you can understand how Five Nights at Freddy’s could sustain a Hollywood release.
It is also, of course, evidence of a strange parasocial relationship between fans of the series and its creator. During the first few years of Five Nights at Freddy’s — when it was still very much an indie project — there was constant communication between Cawthon and those who were trying to decipher his riddles. He’d leave comments on YouTube videos, weigh in on Reddit threads, and post arcane updates to his blog, slyly confirming or denying if his fans were on the right track with their detective work. “He knew we were trying to piece this thing together,†remembers Patrick. “He was willing to have this back and forth.â€
This was a brand-new way to interact with a video game. Cawthon was a programmer, sure, but like a Game Master in Dungeons & Dragons, the man powering the fantasy was directly accessible to the people playing Five Nights at Freddy’s. It’s a strikingly intimate strain of fandom, and one that’s made Cawthon an object of fascination — in ways that inevitably became disastrous. Consider the summer of 2021, when an enterprising Twitter user dug up Cawthon’s political-donation record, which showed that he offered more than $40,000 to a litany of MAGA-ish politicians (Trump, McConnell, Ben Carson, and — hilariously — Tulsi Gabbard). Fans of Five Nights at Freddy’s, many of them queer, were apoplectic, and it moved Cawthon to announce that he was stepping away from the development of Freddy’s for a period of time. (How involved he is with the franchise currently remains unclear.) To Patrick, this was art imitating life. Cawthon trained a community to scour the most extreme edges of his games to find the truth. Now they were turning those same instincts on him.
“When a franchise like this is willing to hide hints in source code … there are moments in Five Nights at Freddy’s where you have to literally brighten the game files to find story clues,†Patrick says. “It feels like anything is fair game, but when anything is fair game, you might not like what you find.â€
For now, though, Five Nights at Freddy’s is ready for its closeup. The film adaptation is in theaters — and nursing a better-than-expected 29 percent on Metacritic — in what is undoubtedly the first time a dinky point-and-click horror game has been wreathed with a $20 million production budget. Patrick tells me he expects the community to treat the movie more like a celebration of the canon than an arena for more eldritch worldbuilding. (After all, movies don’t have source code.) But he’s already gearing up for the next game in the series, which will surely be rich with a new suite of clandestine implications. Patrick has been scouring the nooks and crannies of this haunted pizzeria for nearly a decade now, and there’s still so much more left to see.