NEW YORK – Five Nights At Freddy’s, which sees animatronic animals at an abandoned restaurant come to life and turn homicidal, is the surprise horror hit of 2023.

Since opening in cinemas worldwide – including in Singapore – last week, it has earned more than US$149 million (S$203.4 million) globally to become the biggest horror opening of the year so far.

This despite the film getting scathing reviews from professional critics, having a production budget of just US$20 million and not being a sequel.

But Five Nights At Freddy’s – based on the video game franchise of the same name – took eight long years to develop and, speaking at a fan event in New York earlier in 2023, American producer Jason Blum explains why.

“Hollywood sometimes makes the mistake, when adapting a super popular book or game, of trying to make a movie that will not only satisfy fans of the book or game, but bring in a larger audience – because there’s always that pressure to do that,” says Blum, 54.

And the founder of Blumhouse, the production company behind horror hits such as the Oscar-winning Get Out (2017), M3GAN (2022) and Halloween (2018), admits this is how they initially approached this film adaptation too.

“But what we finally figured out is we should make a movie that works for fans of the video games, and if anyone else comes, that’s great, but not to try and please them too.”

Also critical was finding the right actor to play Mike, a troubled young man who takes a job as a night-time security guard at the now-derelict Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria.

But he later learns the restaurant was closed in the 1980s after five children were murdered there, and strange things start happening while he is on duty.

Josh Hutcherson, the 31-year-old American actor best known for The Hunger Games science-fiction film franchise (2012 to 2015), was committed to perfecting the character, says director Emma Tammi, 53.

“Josh is in almost every scene and this movie hangs on him, and we knew that the character Mike was going to be make-or-break for this film.

“So we needed someone who felt as deeply invested in finding the authenticity of that character as we were in bringing the authenticity of the video game to the movie,” says the American film-maker, who co-wrote the screenplay with the game’s creator Scott Cawthon.

“And he was just diving deep every day.”

The central relationship in the film is between Mike and his 10-year-old sister Abby (Piper Rubio), whom he is fighting to keep custody of when he is fired from his old job, forcing him to take this undesirable new one at the pizzeria.

Hutcherson formed an instant bond with Rubio, an American child actress.

Tammi says: “She is 10 now, but she was nine when we were shooting, and that’s about the time that Josh started acting.

“And their bond was so immediate and really resonated on screen, so that was super special.”

Another thing that makes Five Nights At Freddy’s different is the fact that most of the special effects were done practically instead of using computer-generated imagery.

The film also sought to recreate the creepy nostalgia of the video game, which has been a massive hit globally since it was released in 2014.

When she started working on the script, Tammi – who directed the horror drama The Wind (2018) – began playing the game and immediately understood why it came to be so popular.

“It was the atmosphere of this world, and the nostalgia it was triggering for me with the creepy animatronics that I had seen as a kid.

“I was like, ‘This is a no-brainer for a horror film. This is a cinematic feast.’”

The movie is also packed with goodies for fans of the game. “We tried to pull in elements of the video game lore, which is vast, so we couldn’t include everything,” Tammi says.

“But we were looking for opportunities to make it authentic to the game – little Easter eggs and details that we knew were going to make it rich.

“And hopefully every frame of this film has things for viewers to unpack and savour throughout.”

• Five Nights At Freddy’s is showing in cinemas.