I was a little off base about the first Five Nights At Freddy’s movie when it came out. I watched it, didn’t really care for it, and gave it a bad review. Then I watched it again with a bit of a different lens. I watched it as if it wasn’t made for a seasoned horror movie veteran like myself. I watched it as if it was similar to those gateway horror movies of our youth. You know the ones, the ones that bring you into the genre that might not be as gross out as Cannibal Holocaust or brutally violent. The ones that scare you, but really pique your interest in what else the horror genre could offer. Through that lens, I enjoyed the movie more.

Now we’re up on the sequel with Five Nights At Freddy’s 2. The sequel goes bigger, badder, and even ups the body count a bit. It’s still not your normal bloodbath and it might go over my head a bit with the lore, but the movie itself serves the same purpose. This time, we’re going to introduce our pre-teen to teenage audience to what a sequel looks like. Returning for this film are Josh Hutcherson as Mike, Piper Rubio as Abby, Elizabeth Lail as Vanessa, and Matthew Lillard as William Afton. Joining them are Freddy Carter as Michael, Wayne Knight as Mr. Berg, and Mckenna Grace as Lisa.

The story follows Abby, Mike, and Vanessa as they try to rebuild their lives after the events of the first one. Vanessa is still marred by visions of her father, Mike is trying his best to be a good brother to Abby, and Abby is trying to get back to her animatronic friends. It’s fairly well set up, with each of the characters showing that emotional wound, but each dealing with it in various ways. This all leads back to the original Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza that Lisa and her crew on a ghost-hunting show find. The backstory brings us back to 1982 with a little girl who witnesses the horrors that Afton was perpetrating.

We’re introduced to a new animatronic, the Marionette, who’s badder, faster, and more cunning than the others. All in all, its a terrifying new introduction that adds a lot to the scares on display. There are far more scares sprinkled throughout the movie that are all pretty good variations on the classic jump scare. So like I was saying before, if you’re one of the types that exclaims how they laugh at The Exorcist, you might not be as frightened as the 13-year-old watching the movie in the theater with you.

The performances throughout the film range from serviceable to good, with Piper Rubio as a particular highlight, balancing the new life for Abby and wanting that old life with the animatronic/kid spirits. Wayne Knight be a bit too good at his job as the obnoxious and soul-crushing science teacher, so when he gets his just desserts, I was kind of rooting for the demonic animatronics.

The different animatronics in the film all look great. They come from the Jim Henson lab once again. They’re the real highlight of the film, and there are a LOT of them in Five Nights At Freddy’s 2. There’s a scene towards the end of the film that might end up as the pre-teen version of the Avengers: Endgame portal scene.

As for some of the lowlights, the film leans into trauma and how we deal with it, but ends up doing some character work with Vanessa and Mike that gets lost in the shuffle. Mike, in particular, feels like he was changed up a bit in the scriptwriting process, but not consistently. A story with Mike meeting a fellow parent of a victim of Afton’s is also mainly set up as a fetch quest instead of something that comes full circle.

Through the lens of a gateway horror sequel though, seeing Five Nights At Freddy’s animatronics go around in the human world outside the confines of Fazbear’s PIzza is just as cool as it sounds. It might not be for everyone, but Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 performs admirably as a sequel and sets up the franchise for plenty more to come. It’s got scares aplenty, demonic animatronics, and might just get more fans into the genre. What more can you ask for?

Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 releases in theaters on December 5th.

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