I Have Never Played The Games, And Five Nights At Freddy's 2 Left Me Baffled Beyond Belief

I haven't ever played any of the "Five Nights at Freddy's" video games. Everything I know about the games, I have learned through general pop culture osmosis and from Emma Tammi's two "Five Nights at Freddy's" film adaptations, the most recent of which opened on Friday, December 5, 2025. I can certainly wrap my head around the basic premise: You, as a player, are trapped inside a disused kiddie pizza parlor, akin to Showbiz Pizza or Chuck E. Cheese's. The parlor has been outfitted with an animatronic band of anthropomorphic animals, led by the titular Freddy Fazbear. At night, the animatronics come to life and stalk you through the hallways. 

This is an easy premise to accept, as those Showbiz Pizza animatronics — performing as a band called the Rock-afire Explosion – were a little creepy. They fell into the uncanny valley with their semi-realistic robotic movements, and gave nightmares to a generation of kids. Turning that into a horror movie seems like a simple transition. 

But the "Five Nights at Freddy's" movies, and especially "Five Nights at Freddy's 2," don't abide by that simple premise. Instead, they get lost in over a decade's worth of lore and mythology lifted directly from the many, many, many "Freddy's" video games. There are 11 "main" games in the "Freddy's" series to date, and at least eight more spin-off games, meaning the lore has been building and getting more and more complex for years. The makers of the "Five Nights at Freddy's" movies clearly wanted to appease fans of the games by including as much of that lore as possible. 

But for a newb like me, none of it makes any sense. Nothing is succinctly explained. These movies are baffling.

The first "Freddy's" was already baffling enough. It's explained that Freddy Fazbear and the other animatronics came to life because they were possessed by the ghosts of dead children. The children had been killed by the vicious serial killer William Afton (Matthew Lillard), so their souls were not at peace. It's never explained by what supernatural means the children decided to possess the robots, although it might be connected to the fact that Afton designed them himself. Also, the Freddy's animatronics seem to fluctuate in personality. Sometimes they are friendly, like the kids possessing them, and sometimes they are vengeful slasher villains.

Oh yes, and the dead bodies of the children are also stuffed inside the animatronics (!) like pilots inside some kind of grim mech suit. And the film's protagonist, a down-on-his-luck night watchman named Mike (Josh Hutcherson), has premonition dreams about William Afton's killings, because one of his victims was Mike's little brother. Dreams are a big part of "Freddy's" lore, which seems like it's one toke over the line in a film about killer animatronics. (The Romantics' "Talking in Your Sleep" is the film's theme song.)

"Freddy's 2" makes even less sense as the lore thickens. In the sequel, the killer animatronics are back, but they are now trifurcated into three distinct forms. There is a new set of Freddy Fazbear creatures, only updated to look smoother and more toy-like. These new animatronics are being controlled by a malevolent force, but also seem to be self-sustaining terminator robots; these do not have dead children inside of them. 

It only gets more complicated from there.

The terminator robots in "Freddy's 2" are overseen by an evil animatronic called the Marionette, a scary puppet that is itself possessed by the ghost of a young girl. The Marionette controls the new, shiny Fazbear crew, and can possess many of them at once. But, at the same time, the robots are said to operate via a Wi-Fi signal, and cannot leave their Freddy Fazbear's location unless that signal is manually shut off via computer. So are they ghosts, or are they robots? 

The dream element is still at play, and a character named Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) has visions of William Afton planning out his dark schemes. (William was her father, and she has to live with his dark legacy.) But it's still unclear as to how Afton turned his animatronic creations into ghost-animated monsters in the first place. He doesn't seem to have any spell books or magical amulets. His mere proximity to animatronics seem to attract ghostly possession. What are the animatronics' motives? The Marionette has a motive of revenge, but it doesn't really take to the streets to slay those who wronged it. Instead, it seems to muck around with the young Abby (Piper Rubio) and her family. If the Marionette is possessing the Toy Fazbear crew, why are they friends with Abby? The Marionette has no connection to Abby. 

And why does the Marionette ghost sometimes take possession of people? It's not always in a robot body. Sometimes it demonically takes over a young woman and transforms her into a monster/human hybrid. Is that a child's ghost? Is it a demon?

Players of the game might understand all this. But as a movie viewer, I don't.