The Five Nights at Freddy’s movie is a dizzying mashup of decades of culture

polygon.com:

At first glance, Five Nights at Freddy’s seems like an odd property to become a pop culture phenomenon. A robust display at Hot Topic, sure. A video game about a security guard attempting to survive multiple nights at an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese-style restaurant beset with possessed animatronics has the requisite goth-kitsch merch inspiration.

But Freddy’s has expanded into so much unexpected pop culture real estate — a full game series, indie game imitators, books and graphic novels, toys and collectibles, an energetic movie rip-off — that the new feature film version feels long overdue, even though the first game only dates back to 2014. Taken by itself, the movie shouldn’t be able to withstand the level of hype fans have brought to it. And yet it might stand up to expectations — not because of its merits as a kid-accessible PG-13 horror movie, but because of the way it unexpectedly converges decades’ worth of popular culture into a single feature.

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Before the story even gets going, Five Nights at Freddy’s sets up a nostalgic hall of mirrors. The titular pizza-and-games establishment is modeled on ’80s entertainment centers like Chuck E. Cheese and ShowBiz Pizza. But the movie isn’t set in the 1980s, or even in 2014, when the first game launched. According to a flash of security footage, it appears to be set in the year 2000. Though that might seem like an arbitrary play to avoid cell phones and widespread use of Google, the setting becomes increasingly appropriate as the movie goes on.

Mike (Josh Hutcherson) doesn’t have time for childhood nostalgia, though. He takes the job at Freddy’s out of desperation. He’s acting guardian to his much younger sister, Abby (Piper Rubio), and though he’s loath to work