While Five Nights at Freddy’s does feature a handful of memorable death scenes, the video game adaptation fumbles one of the biggest kills offscreen. Director Emma Tammi’s long-awaited adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s impressed fans of the franchise judging by its audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, but the PG-13 horror movie left many critics unmoved. Five Nights at Freddy’s tells the story of Mike, a luckless security guard traumatized by his brother’s kidnapping. He takes a job working nights at an abandoned restaurant to support himself and his sister Abby. His amoral aunt Jane hopes to get custody of Abby by proving that Mike is an unfit guardian.
While Five Nights at Freddy’s ending features a few gruesome demises, the majority of the adaptation is fairly tame. One would-be robber who breaks into the arcade ends up torn in half by a haunted animatronic mascot, but the rest of the movie’s deaths are limited to blood splatters and ominous shadows. Only one or two of Five Nights at Freddy’s death scenes are scary or in any way memorable, and this saps the villainous animatronic mascots of their fear factor. Although the quartet of sentient mascots is somewhat sympathetic, they’re still intended to be scary but aren’t at all, and Five Nights at Freddy’s worst death highlights this issue.
Five Nights At Freddy’s Aunt Jane Death Is A Letdown
One of Five Nights at Freddy’s most odious villains inexplicably dies offscreen, a decision that badly hurts its effectiveness as a horror movie. Mary Stuart Masterson plays Aunt Jane with hysterical zeal, making the scheming abusive relative an utterly irredeemable figure. However, although she tries to steal the hero’s sister and indirectly — but unrepentantly — sends four other characters to their deaths, viewers don’t even know if she’s definitely dead by the movie’s ending. William Afton’s Five Nights at Freddy’s fate is similarly ambiguous, but it at least serves a function for the franchise’s upcoming sequels.
Matthew Lillard’s hammy villain can appear again since viewers aren’t sure whether the spring-loaded animatronic suit Afton wore killed him. Indeed, Lillard is contracted to appear in two more movies in the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise, which makes the unclear nature of his character’s fate easy to excuse. However, there is no such reasoning to justify Aunt Jane’s bizarrely demure demise. The sneering character is briefly seen ignoring her niece while ostensibly babysitting her, only for Freddy’s massive frame to appear behind her. The next time viewers see her, she is lying on the floor with everything above her knees conveniently out of view.
Jane’s Death Makes Five Nights At Freddy’s R-Rated Cut More Disappointing
According to director Emma Tammi, Five Nights at Freddy’s is unlikely to release an R-rated cut. That means Aunt Jane’s dispiriting death scene is the only fate viewers will ever see. This seems bizarre when the adaptation went out of its way to establish her cartoonish villainy. While the box office success of Five Nights at Freddy’s ensures that sequels will almost definitely happen, the disappointing death of Aunt Jane proves that the franchise isn’t as focused on horror elements as it could be. While the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie was better than expected, it’s still plagued by missed opportunities.
