The Creepy Thing That Happened On The Five Nights At Freddy's Set
One of the best decisions the creatives behind Blumhouse's "Five Nights at Freddy's" film adaptation (read /Film's review) made was hiring Jim Henson's Creature Shop to manufacture its merrily murderous mascot animatronics as real-life puppets and not CGI creations. Both the movie and the original video games take place at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, a Chuck E. Cheese-style family entertainment center populated by giant animatronics who like to sneak around and murder people under the cover of night. It would be one thing if Mr. Fazbear and his friends (Chica, Bonnie, and Foxy) were obviously computer-animated in the film. But the fact they're as tactile as the flesh-and-blood humans they're stalking makes the horror of the situation that much more immediate and perceptible.
Puppet horror, in general, thrives on practical effects for similar reasons. Part of what makes the ventriloquist dummies work in films like "Magic" and "Dead Silence" — besides their creepily uncanny human-like appearances — is that nagging question that sticks in the back of your mind when you're looking at them: What if it's not just the person who's controlling them? What if this very real thing is actually alive in some way? Luckily, when you're at home, you can remind yourself it's just a movie and nothing's going to leap out of the screen to get you (unless it turns out you secretly exist in "The Ring" universe, in which case, best of luck to you). Of course, things were a little different for director Emma Tammi and her crew on the "Five Nights at Freddy's" set.
'Did you do that?'
As terrifying as the "Five Nights at Freddy's" murder bots are onscreen, it appears that the film's cast and crew had a grand ol' time working with them in person. Youngster Piper Rubio, who plays Abby in the film, even went so far as to hug her homicidal co-stars goodbye whenever she left the set after a day of shooting. However, when interviewed by Entertainment Weekly, Tammi admitted there was one time that she found herself giving one of the animatronics a double look when it seemingly moved of its own accord. In her own words:
"They did have a life of their own at times. Each of the different [moving parts] on the animatronic was puppeteered by a different person. You had the eyes controlled by someone, the arms controlled by someone else, the ears and jaws controlled by a different puppeteer. I remember standing next to one of the puppeteers with a remote control in their hand and the animatronic all of a sudden twitched its eye. I looked at the puppeteer and I was like, 'Did you do that?' And she said, 'No.' [Laughs] It just needed to let us know it was alive."
Lest anyone take her too seriously, Tammi quickly clarified she was joking, chalking the moment up to the inherently "imperfect" nature of any machine made by humans. Far from creating a problem, she added that she and her production team "embraced the quirks when they [the animatronics] would do stuff that we didn't necessarily command them to do exactly. We sometimes thought it was gold and used it, so it was super fun in that way, it felt like a real live element."
The magic (and terror) of animatronics
Like Tammi, the late Jim Henson not only appreciated the power of animatronics, but he also recognized they could serve a myriad of purposes. Sometimes they would be frightening, like the ghastly Skeksis in Henson's cult classic fantasy film "The Dark Crystal." At other times, they could be adorable, as was the case with the various googly-eyed characters Henson and his fellow puppeteers came up with for the series "Sesame Street" and "Fraggle Rock." They could even be a little bit of both, like the jolly, singing Fireys who try to pull teenage Jennifer Connelly's head off in Henson's cult hit "Labyrinth."
Jim Henson's Creature Shop has only continued that tradition in the decades since its founder's death, crafting intimidating yet lovable giant practical critters like the Wild Things from Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are." When it came to "Five Nights at Freddy's," Tammi told EW she knew Freddy and his gang needed to be "scary at times" while also being "friendly and communicative" to work with, especially when it came to Rubio. "They needed to be everything all in one and no one was better to bring that vision to life than Jim Henson's Creature Shop," she added. It's good to know Freddy, Chica, Bonnie, and Foxy were far better co-workers in the real world than they were for the characters in the film.
"Five Nights at Freddy's" is now playing in theaters and streaming on Peacock.