“Five Nights at Freddy’s” director says animatronic mascots moved by themselves during shoot

In the horror film Five Nights at Freddy’s (out Oct. 27) Josh Hutcherson plays a security guard named Mike who battles animatronic mascots at an abandoned theme restaurant. Director Emma Tammi (The Wind) tells EW that her experience with the production’s animatronic props eerily echoed this tale of giant robots moving of their own accord.

Five Nights at Freddy’s

Patti Perret/Universal Pictures ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’

“They did have a life of their own at times,” she says. “Each of the different [moving parts] on the animatronic was puppeteered by a different person. You had the eyes controlled by someone, the arms controlled by someone else, the ears and jaws controlled by a different puppeteer. I remember standing next to one of the puppeteers with a remote control in their hand and the animatronic all of a sudden twitched its eye. I looked at the puppeteer and I was like, ‘Did you do that?’ And she said, ‘No.’ [Laughs] It just needed to let us know it was alive. I kid, but they are imperfect, and wonderfully so, and definitely we embraced the quirks when they would do stuff that we didn’t necessarily command them to do exactly. We sometimes thought it was gold and used it, so it was super fun in that way, it felt like a real live element.”

Five Nights at Freddy’s

Universal Pictures Josh Hutcherson in ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’

The animatronic characters featured in the Blumhouse-produced video game adaptation were built by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, the visual effects company whose many previous credits include 2009’s Where the Wild Things Are and Netflix’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance TV show. Tammi says the animatronics “needed to be both scary at times and friendly and communicative with our 10-year-old character Abby (played by Piper Rubio) at other times. They needed to be everything all in one and no one was better to bring that vision to life than Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.”

Tammi reveals she would happily dive back into the world of fictional (and maybe real-life) sentient animatronics if Five Nights at Freddy’s proves successful enough to warrant a sequel.

“I would definitely be interested in pursuing it,” she says. “We’ll see how it resonates with audiences and then, fingers crossed, hopefully be able to do more.”

The cast of Five Nights at Freddy’s also includes Matthew Lillard and Elizabeth Vail. The film premieres Oct. 27 in theaters and on Peacock.

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