Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 Review: Gateway Horror That’s Unapologetically for Kids

The Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise is uniquely suited to one of horror’s most consistent tropes. Whether it’s Steve McQueen and Aneta Corsaut warning their townspeople about ravenous slime in The Blob, Heather Langenkamp confronting her mother about Freddy Krueger, or the distracted parents of Derry, Maine, horror fiction is filled with kids who get it and parents who just don’t understand.

Based on an enormously popular video game series with winding and (to the outsider) impenetrable lore, both 2023’s Five Nights at Freddy’s and now its new sequel split moviegoing audiences into two groups. There’s the superfans who understand the world created by indie game designer Scott Cawthon—the folks who can discern the difference between Toy Chica, Nightmare Chica, and regular ol’ Chica—and then there’s everybody else. Those of us who come to the movie hoping for a few decent scares and hoping not to get too confused by the backstory. The former group will certainly get more from this sequel, but the grown-ups won’t be totally lost by Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, precisely because it rewards ignorance, sometimes to its own detriment.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 begins in the aftermath of the first film with the principal characters trying and failing to move on from their deadly encounter with animatronics possessed by murdered children. Of the principals, Mike (Josh Hutcherson) seems to be coping best, devoting his time to renovating his run-down house and caring for his young sister Abby (Piper Rubio). But Abby misses those spectral kids she befriended, especially since her technical wizardry and devotion to ghost stories alienates her from everyone at school, including her science teacher (Wayne Knight). Worse still is Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), a grown woman still haunted by her father, the child murderer and creator of the animatronics at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, William Afton (Matthew Lillard).

As troubled as the Freddy’s experience has left our principals, lurid Freddy Fazbear mania has overtaken the town, attracting true crime enthusiasts to host a convention celebrating the animatronics and its lore. That attention draws a trio of ghost hunters, led by Lisa (Mckenna Grace) and her co-hosts (David Andrew Calvillo and Teo Briones), who are invited to the long-shuttered original location by a mysterious figure called Michael (Freddy Carter). As you might guess the investigation goes… poorly. In fact, it unleashes a whole new monster called the Marionette, and all the deadly animatronic nonsense that comes with it.

If that summary sounds overwhelming to the uninitiated, rest assured that director Emma Tammi and screenwriter Cawthon, this time without the co-writers attached to the first movie, keep everything legible. Characters plainly state their feelings and motivations. They declare plot points and explain relationships to one another. And anything not explicitly explained, such as the cameos by YouTube celebrities, or some random toy or object on which the camera lingers, passes by without disrupting the plot.

While this approach strips the film of any emotional resonance, it leaves plenty of space for scares. And the scares also require no foreknowledge. In fact, they work better for it.

Apropos of an adaptation of a game in which characters jump toward the screen, nearly every scare in Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is a jump scare. A little boy turns around to find Freddy standing in front of him. A mom closes the refrigerator door to reveal Bonnie waiting. Foxy’s hand smashes through a car window. How did those characters get into those places to jump out? Where do they stand in relation to Mike, Abby, and Vanessa? The movie doesn’t know and doesn’t care. At no point does Tammi take the time to lay out the spacial geography of her movie, even when Mike stares at a literal map with blinking lights to indicate the animatronics’ positions. The monsters are always already behind you, just waiting for a loud music cue before they attack.

The one exception to this rule is the Marionette. Like the other characters, she has a backstory that involves a murdered child (Audrey Lynn-Marie) and a connection to the pizza parlor’s past (plus a cameo portrayed by Lillard’s Scream co-conspirator, Skeet Ulrich, giving the adults something that the kids don’t get). Although the Marionette has her moments of striking at the audience out of nowhere, Tammi’s camera at least takes some time to admire her genuinely creepy design, yellow glowing eyes peering out of a pale face covered by blond hair, her tear stains blending with her smile.

In fact, all of the main monsters look pretty good whenever the camera stops to admire them. The plot allows for several iterations of the main animatronics, which will thrill fans who want to see their favorite version but also keeps things visually interesting. The addition of Megan Fox as the voice of Toy Chica, the bird figure who seems to befriend Abby, does nothing for those who don’t recognize her name in the credits, but it’s still creepy to hear her chipper cadence coming from a massive puppet.

Does all of this make Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 a good movie? Not quite. Even those who can turn off their brain and enjoy the jump scares will get annoyed that Tammi and Cawthon don’t take full advantage of their own premise. The movie never really gets much mileage out of setting the animatronics loose on the town and seems disinterested with the fact that there’s a convention of superfans happening at the same time.

But of course Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 isn’t really about consistent plotting or creating tension. It’s about giving fans the references they want and giving everyone else enough jump scares to pass the time. It’s a movie for kids just getting into horror, and if they understand something that eludes their parents then, well, the kids have already learned one of the genre’s most important lessons.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 opens in theaters nationwide on Dec. 5, 2025.