Weird-As-Hell Horror Game Five Nights At Freddy's Is Going to Be a Movie

What if you were a security guard at a Chuck E. Cheese—only you had to do it overnight, with no one around, and the robot animals were all haunted? That's the premise of Five Nights at Freddy's, a cult-hit horror game series that began in 2014 and has spawned five sequels and a handful of spinoffs. It's also going to be a movie, written and directed by Goonies writer and Harry Potter director Chris Columbus.

According to Deadline, the Five Nights at Freddy's movie is coming to us via Blumhouse, the production company behind Get Out and a big part of why we're in a golden age of horror movies. While Columbus himself isn't exactly on a hot streak—his last movie was Pixels—the very premise of Five Nights at Freddy's is a fun and spooky as hell subversion of the sort of family-friendly romps Columbus has spent his career directing. And as M. Night Shyamalan's Split showed, Blumhouse is a great studio for filmmakers looking to reinvent themselves.

What makes the Five Nights at Freddy's games a hit with a rabid fanbase is, largely, the stuff not in the games. They play right into the Internet's creepypasta-filled corners, where fan theories and forum posts reign supreme. The games are non-linear and obtuse in how they tell their stories, letting players piece them together—and scare—themselves. Adapting Five Nights at Freddy's into a movie would probably have to compensate for not having the games' more obscure approach, but not much: Animatronic kids' show teddy bears out to eat you are just naturally scary shit, man.