Five Night’s at Freddy’s is a representation of a fear, common yet one not too spoken about, and that is about mascots, animatronics, creepy personified children’s creations. We all love reading and hugging our teddy bears and stuffed animals that are made to be soft, cute, round, and fluffy. However when you put that toy in a humanized statue complete with moving parts the beauty becomes creepy. Creepy is easily defined as something that looks off where it shouldn’t. For example that same teddy bear that we all love has a set of human teeth; it is not supposed to have pearly whites or smile in such a full way that comes off as menacing. This reference was taken from the VSauce Youtube episode on “Why are things creepy?”
Yet creepy is also uncanny as Freud mentions. His reasoning for the Uncanny is to mash aesthetics with psychoanalysis. So the teddybear made to life in robotic parts is uncanny for it messes with the natural use of the cute, tiny, nonmoving bed companion to become your talking moving, eye following entertainment. This is why Five Night’s at Freddy’s is so successful. Scott Cawthon, the creator, had our famous ChuckECheese in mind of how terrifying and supremely weird the animatronics looked in the said pizzeria video game restaurant designed for kids. The beauty of a thing such as a child’s teddybear becomes monstrous to us because of the simply fact that it grew teeth, blinking eyes, and a voice. This is indeed creepy and the way they look in FNAF isn’t cute but crude and unnatural.
What Freud says about the Uncanny is that the Uncanny as the class of frightening things that, leads us back to what is known and familiar. So what’s familiar to us and especially a child is made doubly unfamiliar when it’s made into a robot of unreasoned proportion.
In each of these games we are submerged in that sense where in video games aesthetics are key and in this one the aesthetics were made to horrify and creep out. The sound and the movements are small but bold with no calming music but in short bursts from time to time. This creates the tension, the unsettling atmosphere, where the sublime becomes less enrapturing and instead full of awe.
Freud also mentions that the uncanny is uncomfortable, unfamiliar. Watching the teddybear come to life that is big, heavy, and humanized, is unsettling especially when given a voice to serenade children. This idea is taken and so completely turned to horror when it involves children and the robots infused together from murder and then to murder. In the games that’s what happens. Robots come to life filled with vengeful ghosts of murdered children that come to kill us, you, the player. This is unsettling because a children’s safe place for fun and food has been turned into gore and panic at the hands of a psychotic killer. This leads to the theory of psychoanalysis on why we the player stay around for all five games. I will delve into much more detail in the slides for each game but here I will summarize.
Each game deals with us the character returning every night after escaping death from these possessed animatronics. Why do we keep returning? One way to look at it is simply the guilt of a killer’s conscious and the fear the mind hallucinates to us if we are afraid of children or childhood. These easily fall into place with Freud because childhood is all about sexual repression and damage that we carry into adult life in actions we can’t fully explain like say murder. If the killer or us the players or employees in the game have a fear of children or don’t understand our damaged psyche or even have a fetish for children themselves can explain a lot in why we stick around or commit what we seemingly commit.
The Uncanny is brought to us for the reason of a disruption in a beautiful thing made ugly. A psychological game of horror makes our brain tell us to think awfully which in turn causes the fear of that thing. This is why these games are so popular even if you look at them from this perspective or not. Having a child murderer and a beloved franchise we all hold close actually act out our most absurd nightmares on screen keeps us and the player coming back for more.
I do not in anyway own these ideas this website holds or the pictures that I infused within. These are all theories done by people with too much time on their hands and by lovely artists on which I found on Google.
FNAF Psychology 