My Daughter Is Only Seven Years Old, But We Watched the Five Nights at Freddy’s Movie
She’s been looking forward to this moment for the past year, but it almost didn’t happen.
All October, an important countdown was ticking away all month: how many days until my oldest daughter could watch the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie, which was released recently in theaters and, thankfully, also streaming at home via Peacock. Depending on the hour, in-between imitating M3GAN by running along the floor, my oldest daughter wavered between unimaginable anticipation at seeing some children get murdered by evil animatronics or deciding it would be a terrible idea.
(No, she hasn’t seen M3GAN. But she does love watching the dance on TikTok.)
To some, Five Nights at Freddy’s is little more than a jump score game riffing on Chuck E. Cheese aesthetics. But if you stopped paying attention after the game exploded in 2014, or only tuned in when its creator was dragged for giving money to Trump and other Republicans, you missed out on the series generating one of gaming’s most sprawling mythologies and inspiring countless copycats. I wrote about the phenomenon last week, talking with several parents about how they were handling it.
We did eventually watch Five Nights at Freddy’s…but not before we turned it off.
It, like many things with a child, was a process.
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