Five Nights at Freddy’s movie gets a behind-the-scenes featurette, director discusses PG-13 rating

The long-awaited horror video game adaptation Five Nights at Freddy’s will be receiving a theatrical and Peacock streaming service release this Friday, October 27th – and to help promote the release, a new featurette has arrived online to give fans a peek behind the scenes. You can check it out in the embed above. The film’s director Emma Tammi talks about the film in that featurette, and also recently sat down for an interview with the folks at Inverse, where she discussed how it was to work with homicidal animatronics while also going for a PG-13 rating.

Tammi told Inverse, “We were trying to push it as far as we could while still retaining that PG-13 rating. That meant the kills needed to be executed in a certain way. And while it is so fun in many slasher films to see all the guts and the gore, it is also really fun to figure out creative ways to show these moments without showing all the details. In some cases, we leaned into shadows and silhouettes and sound design to really feel the moment in an impactful way without showing any gore. So that is something that I had a lot of fun doing, and actually really appreciated that we were taking the PG-13 approach for this because there’s such a younger audience for FNAF, and we didn’t want to exclude them.“

Five Nights at Freddy’s stars Matthew Lillard (Scream), Josh Hutcherson (The Hunger Game), Mary Stuart Masterson (Benny & Joon), Elizabeth Lail (You), Piper Rubio (Holly & Ivy), and Kat Conner Sterling (A Week Away). The film follows a troubled security guard as he begins working at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. While spending his first night on the job, he realizes the night shift at Freddy’s won’t be so easy to make it through.

Stunt performers Kevin Foster (WandaVision), Jade Kindar-Martin (Interview with the Vampire), and Jess Weiss (Mayfair Witches) play the animatronics Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie, and Chica.

The video game takes place in Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a darker version of Chuck-E-Cheese, where an animatronic animal band performs kiddy songs by day, and goes on murderous rampages by night. The goal of the game is survive a night locked inside, knowing that a furry death machine might jump out of the dark at any moment.

This adaptation was originally set up at Warner Bros., where Gil Kenan (Monster House) was going to direct the film from a screenplay he was writing with Tyler Burton Smith (the Child’s Play remake). Then the project moved over to Blumhouse, where Chris Columbus (Home Alone) was attached to direct it for several years. But now it has gone into production with Emma Tammi – director of The Wind, Into the Dark: Delivered, and Into the Dark: Blood Moon – at the helm, working from a screenplay she wrote with Seth Cuddeback (Mateo) and video game creator Scott Cawthon. Tragedy Girls writers Tyler MacIntyre and Chris Lee Hill share story credit with Cawthon.

Five Nights at Freddy’s is being produced by Blumhouse, in association with Striker Entertainment. Cawthon is a producer alongside Blumhouse founder Jason Blum. Russell Binder is executive producing. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop is handling the special effects that help bring the homicidal animatronic animals to life on the screen.

The film has been rated PG-13 for “strong violent content, bloody images and language.”

Are you looking forward to Five Nights at Freddy’s? What did you think of the featurette, and the decision to go for a PG-13 rating? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.