Going “eek!” at Chuck E. Cheese: Five Nights at Freddy’s

While I mostly find the Five Nights at Freddy’s series desperately sullen in a mall goth sort of way, when I was a kid, I couldn’t fall asleep in my bedroom because family members kept gifting me porcelain dolls. When I turned off my light, I imagined their impassive glass eyes blinking alive.

I could never watch Chucky, and even thinking about that doll’s squashed tomato head now gives me the shivers. Animatronics and clowns tried to appeal to me at birthday parties, but like dolls, they felt like a perversion of my childhood. I knew I was supposed to enjoy them, but I think I sensed that their performative youth was unnatural.

Five Nights at Freddy’s, a game about surviving a work week as a security guard in a restaurant where animatronics crawl down vents and want to eat you, is explicit about exploiting these kinds of childhood fears. That, occasionally, reads to me as a basic and easy route to horror, but, then again, I still don’t like looking a Raggedy Ann in the eyes.