My monstrous Muppets-inspired prediction for the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie
I reimagined the five nights at freddy's (FNaF) franchise as a Muppets movie — skipping dinner to do so — and half of my friends are worried about me. Starving and spiraling after staring at Microsoft (MS) Paint for hours, all I had to show for my effort was a madman’s monstrous PNG. How did I get here?
It started as a typo and evolved into a tirade. On a Monday night in January meant for productivity, I sent a nonsensical series of images to one of my closest friends from high school. It was a series of parodying representations of Freddy Fazbear, the mascot of the Chuck E. Cheese-esque horror series, and he responded with a Spoonerism. “Fozzy fredbear,” the message said, and I felt a chill run down my spine. I pulled up Google Images, not for the last time that night, and grabbed an image of Fozzie Bear from The Muppets for my reply.
“FOZZY,” I announce. “fnaf muppets remake where fnaf is freddy,” I continue, not realizing my typo before I received his reply, which had a mistake of its own: “what if fnaf was freddt” (sic). “hold on,” I shoot back while pulling up MS Paint, “i need to set this up.” The crucial part of that message was “need.” Looking back, that chill was something I’d felt countless times over, some cold hand of Creation that would grip my psyche and not let go until I’d brought it into reality. Every creation I’ve ever conceived came from this same feeling.
That night I began cobbling together my connections board. The Living Tombstone blared in the background as I pulled up game models and character collages — cropping and cutting and pasting as needed, casting the beloved Muppets as the characters of children, animatronics and serial killers. When the work was finally done, it needed to be shared — distributed among some of my friends who I knew would appreciate the magnitude of what I’d made.
That’s not exactly how the night went, as much like the horror franchise I had created a fan retelling of, there’s quite a bit more beneath the surface. The Five Nights at Freddy’s series is infamous for a host of reasons: its noisy jump scares, its quietly horrifying premise and its deeply convoluted backstory, among others. This article is not meant to inform you about that backstory either, but the bare minimum of context might be needed. You could learn as I did, watching Markiplier play through the games and Game Theory’s MatPat theorize about them, but a saner option would be to find a summary. I was never actually able to play the games, as I was too broke to buy them in middle school, then too anxious in high school. However, there’s a certain entertainment factor to watching these content creators’ descents into insanity as the games and their lore twist themselves further and further.
The franchise is split into its original series and its succeeding storyline (and eventually an actual movie adaptation by Blumhouse?). The original series — containing “Five Nights at Freddy’s” one through five — was developed primarily by the creator Scott Cawthon, while the sequel series was developed by Cawthon and Steel Wool Studios. The original games follow the story of a pizzeria entertainment franchise being haunted by both its murderous possessed animatronics and the dark history of child serial killings that took place there. While being enraptured by such a dark premise might make my therapist worry, my real obsession is with how the story is uncovered. Certain details of the stories have taken years to discover: the timeline of the franchise’s events, the true identities of certain character sprites, the in-universe mechanics of how spirit possession and advanced technology can even function, even the relationships between the characters and their names. The instruments to uncover these mysteries are even more inane: from counting the toes of in-game models, to deciphering literal novels based on the game’s universe and even cryptography being used to decode a children’s activity book. The work done to traverse the game and its mysteries is done by its fervent fanbase.
That’s perhaps the most fascinating thing about this series: the fans. FNaF by itself is largely just a point-and-click horror series with some creepy Easter eggs, but its fanbase has transformed it into something so much more. The franchise’s purposeful vagueness and obfuscation create a work that is endlessly interpretable, and the fans eat it up. The sheer mass of fan content that spirals from this series borders on Lovecraftian — my friend even wondered if Cawthon sometimes feels like Steve Buscemi’s God in “Spy Kids 2.” The fan creations are endless: fanfiction, fanart, fan-films, fan music and of course — reflecting the original medium — fangames. A titular example of these fanworks is The Joy of Creation series, which tells the story of Cawthon himself besieged by his fictional monsters tearing their way into reality to wreak havoc on their creator and his family. Even though this fan-created series features horrors inflicted on himself and his loved ones, it amazingly has Cawthon’s full approval and funding under the Fazbear FanVerse project — an initiative to foster Five Nights at Freddy’s symbiotic relationship with the internet culture that launched it into the stratosphere, and to keep it soaring.
It started as a typo and evolved into a tirade. On a Monday night in January meant for productivity, I sent a nonsensical series of images to one of my closest friends from high school. It was a series of parodying representations of Freddy Fazbear, the mascot of the Chuck E. Cheese-esque horror series, and he responded with a Spoonerism. “Fozzy fredbear,” the message said, and I felt a chill run down my spine. I pulled up Google Images, not for the last time that night, and grabbed an image of Fozzie Bear from The Muppets for my reply.
“FOZZY,” I announce. “fnaf muppets remake where fnaf is freddy,” I continue, not realizing my typo before I received his reply, which had a mistake of its own: “what if fnaf was freddt” (sic). “hold on,” I shoot back while pulling up MS Paint, “i need to set this up.” The crucial part of that message was “need.” Looking back, that chill was something I’d felt countless times over, some cold hand of Creation that would grip my psyche and not let go until I’d brought it into reality. Every creation I’ve ever conceived came from this same feeling.
That night I began cobbling together my connections board. The Living Tombstone blared in the background as I pulled up game models and character collages — cropping and cutting and pasting as needed, casting the beloved Muppets as the characters of children, animatronics and serial killers. When the work was finally done, it needed to be shared — distributed among some of my friends who I knew would appreciate the magnitude of what I’d made.
That’s not exactly how the night went, as much like the horror franchise I had created a fan retelling of, there’s quite a bit more beneath the surface. The Five Nights at Freddy’s series is infamous for a host of reasons: its noisy jump scares, its quietly horrifying premise and its deeply convoluted backstory, among others. This article is not meant to inform you about that backstory either, but the bare minimum of context might be needed. You could learn as I did, watching Markiplier play through the games and Game Theory’s MatPat theorize about them, but a saner option would be to find a summary. I was never actually able to play the games, as I was too broke to buy them in middle school, then too anxious in high school. However, there’s a certain entertainment factor to watching these content creators’ descents into insanity as the games and their lore twist themselves further and further.
The franchise is split into its original series and its succeeding storyline (and eventually an actual movie adaptation by Blumhouse?). The original series — containing “Five Nights at Freddy’s” one through five — was developed primarily by the creator Scott Cawthon, while the sequel series was developed by Cawthon and Steel Wool Studios. The original games follow the story of a pizzeria entertainment franchise being haunted by both its murderous possessed animatronics and the dark history of child serial killings that took place there. While being enraptured by such a dark premise might make my therapist worry, my real obsession is with how the story is uncovered. Certain details of the stories have taken years to discover: the timeline of the franchise’s events, the true identities of certain character sprites, the in-universe mechanics of how spirit possession and advanced technology can even function, even the relationships between the characters and their names. The instruments to uncover these mysteries are even more inane: from counting the toes of in-game models, to deciphering literal novels based on the game’s universe and even cryptography being used to decode a children’s activity book. The work done to traverse the game and its mysteries is done by its fervent fanbase.
That’s perhaps the most fascinating thing about this series: the fans. FNaF by itself is largely just a point-and-click horror series with some creepy Easter eggs, but its fanbase has transformed it into something so much more. The franchise’s purposeful vagueness and obfuscation create a work that is endlessly interpretable, and the fans eat it up. The sheer mass of fan content that spirals from this series borders on Lovecraftian — my friend even wondered if Cawthon sometimes feels like Steve Buscemi’s God in “Spy Kids 2.” The fan creations are endless: fanfiction, fanart, fan-films, fan music and of course — reflecting the original medium — fangames. A titular example of these fanworks is The Joy of Creation series, which tells the story of Cawthon himself besieged by his fictional monsters tearing their way into reality to wreak havoc on their creator and his family. Even though this fan-created series features horrors inflicted on himself and his loved ones, it amazingly has Cawthon’s full approval and funding under the Fazbear FanVerse project — an initiative to foster Five Nights at Freddy’s symbiotic relationship with the internet culture that launched it into the stratosphere, and to keep it soaring.
コメントを書く...
Comments