Five Nights At Freddy's Director Was Frightened By Freddy In A Very Real Way On Set
It's a wonder that horror filmmakers don't scare themselves senseless all the time. Whenever I see creepy set pieces like the freaky clowns from "Hell House LLC" or monster designs like the one brought to life by Bonnie Aarons in "The Nun," I imagine I'd be running for the hills after spending too much time on set — like Bill Hader sprinting away from Bill Skarsgard's Pennywise on the set of "It: Chapter 2." It's no wonder, then, that the life-sized animatronic puppets and costumes used on the set of the new "Five Nights at Freddy's" movie gave some of the cast and crew the willies.
In a Reddit AMA ahead of the film's release this week, director Emma Tammi said she was unnerved the first time she came face to face with the titular killer bear. After Reddit user AnimeLonk asked if any part of the production scared her, Tammi responded, "The first time Freddy walked towards me [at] Jim Henson's Creature shop, he got a little tooooo close — ha!" Tammi admits she "Lost [her] breath for a moment, but in the best sense." The puppets for the movie were designed by the same studio that brought audiences wonderful and occasionally terrifying works like "Labyrinth," "Return to Oz," and, of course, assorted Muppets movies and shows.
Freddy Fazbear and friends had a mind of their own on set
According to an interview Tammi did with Entertainment Weekly, the animatronics also had a creepy tendency to make movements of their own volition. "They did have a life of their own at times," the filmmaker told EW, explaining that "Each of the different [moving parts] on the animatronic was puppeteered by a different person." Tammi said eyes, arms, ears, and jaws were each controlled by a different puppeteer, plus in-suit actors are also credited in the movie. With so many people making the monsters come to life, there were bound to be some moments in which they started to seem a little too real.
"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," Tammi told the outlet. "I looked at the puppeteer and I was like, 'Did you do that?' And she said, 'No.'" With a laugh, the filmmaker joked that the puppet "just needed to let us know it was alive." Seems chill and not at all like a situation that would haunt my nightmares! Of course, Tammi's kidding about the puppets being alive, but she says that with a movie like this one, the crew took puppet-related mishaps in stride. After all, a puppet with a creepy sentient eye is more a feature than a bug when it comes to "Five Nights at Freddy's." "They are imperfect, and wonderfully so, and definitely we embraced the quirks when they would do stuff that we didn't necessarily command them to do exactly," she told EW.
"Five Nights at Freddy's" is now in theaters, but it's also streaming on Peacock if you prefer to watch at home.