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5 Wild Facts We Learned from the Five Nights at Freddy's Night Shift Edition
Five Nights at Freddy's, the biggest theatrical horror hit of 2023, is now available on the 4K and Blu-ray Night Shift Edition. What's inside?
As the box office horror champ of 2023, Five Nights at Freddy's is clanking its way ominously into our homes, as the special Night Shift Edition is now available on 4K UHD, Blu-ray™ and DVD from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment. A great holiday gift idea for those in your friends and family circle who played the video games, or for your tween and teens giftees looking to get into horror.
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The home video edition comes with a digital version of the movie to download or stream, but it also boasts three exclusive behind-the-scenes featurettes about the making of the game's iconic animatronic characters: Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy and Cupcake. Featuring interviews from director Emma Tammi, actors Josh Hutcherson and Matthew Lillard, and the creators and puppeteers at The Jim Henson Creature Shop, we mined the material for some tasty tidbits that you may not have known about the movie.
5 Things We Learned from the Five Nights at Freddy's Night Shift Edition
There were special guests on the Five Nights at Freddy's set
The Five Nights at Freddy's video games have been an international sensation almost since creator Scott Cawthon introduced the first game in 2014. Since then, Cawthon has released nine main titles in the Freddy's series and a whole ecosystem has grown around the gamers who play the installments online with whole communities who backseat game with them. To celebrate those streamers and community members, the featurette, Killer Animatronics, reveals that four major YouTubers — Rhys Williams, Ryan Bushell, Lweis Dawkins and Ryan — were invited on the set during production to check out the production for themselves. They also appear in a very special Easter Egg revealed in the featurette, Five Nights in Three Dimensions.
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It takes a lot of people to make an animatronic walk
In the Killer Animatronics featurette, The Jim Henson Creature Shop designers, fabricators, puppeteers, and stunt performers reveal how complex it was to bring to life the animatronics as practical incarnations of the video game characters. Director Emma Tammi says that she wanted the characters to be present in the sequences with the human actors to amp up the horror. Each character was then hand-crafted. To be functional on the set, it would take six performers to make one character, like Foxy, walk in a scene. A stunt actor is inside with no view ports, balancing a 16-pound head, while five others would perform the face movements, the puppeteering elements, the rig for ease of movement and a lighting operator.
They basically built a real-life pizza place for the movie
The Five Nights in Three Dimensions featurette reveals that Five Nights at Freddy's production designer Marc Fisichella and cinematographer Lyn Moncrief worked together to make sure that the pizzeria never felt like it was on a soundstage. In fact, Fisichella specifically constructed the set as one continuous space which was all connected like a real restaurant. Everything is accessible from the entrance to the basement, which allowed the ambience to feel maze-like and disconcerting for everyone but the animatronics.
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Easter Eggs with a side of pizza
If you watched the movie and think you caught some Easter Eggs planted within the movie, you're right. In Five Nights in Three Dimensions, production designer Marc Fisichella and director Emma Tammi fess up that there's a ton of video game-to-movie Easter eggs planted in every part of the film. From the obvious in the security guard's office to some obscure ones even outside of the pizzeria, this extra reveals a lot of what they planted.
The animatronics were a first for Hutcherson and Lillard
Despite the long resumes between Josh Hutcherson and Matthew Lillard, Five Nights at Freddy's represented a first for both actors in working with, or in, practical animatronic suits. In the Killer Animatronics featurette, both actors admit being nervous about how comfortable they would be acting against the big machines. Hutcherson admits as soon as he got on set with them, it felt so real that it caught him off guard. Lillard had to get inside a suit and he said it was a true flying blind experience to craft a performance that reads when you can see nothing outside.
For these and many more anecdotes about the filming of Five Nights at Freddy's, grab the Night Shift Edition 4K or Blu-ray out now. The film is also streaming on Peacock.
