Trauma. They made it all about trauma. Even more than it was the last time. If the first Five Nights at Freddy’s played like a clunky attempt to introduce youngish kids to the cadences of horror, then its sequel plays like a clunky attempt to introduce now slightly olderish kids to the clichés of horror. And so, to the endless list of modern genre films about trauma , we must now add Five Nights at Freddy’s 2. It makes some kind of demented sense: Isn’t the point of these films to imitate all the other scary movies out there?

Still, these Five Nights at Freddy’s films, based as they are on the extremely popular video-game series, present a true tonal challenge. You can’t go all gonzo-savage horror with them, but you can’t get too lighthearted or goofy either; their stone-faced

See Full Page