BY CARRINGTON DAVIS
The American Dream Mall in New Jersey is set to open a real pizzeria inspired by the hit 2010s horror game “Five Nights at Freddy’s.” As exciting as that is amongst fans, there’s also the lingering worry that someone could recreate the lore.
There are 10 games, 20 books and two movies that were made warning people why something like this wouldn’t be a great idea. Yet, as announced in mid-August, a real location is set to open at the American Dream Mall of East Rutherford New Jersey in 2027.
As excited as I was at first, I still felt a little concern for something genuinely bad happening at a place like this. Growing up in fandom spaces, I’ve seen people get too into the media they like, and that can lead to great harm. A prime example is the Slenderman stabbing of 2014. In this case, the 12 year olds Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier lured their classmate, Payton Leutner, into the woods in false hopes of playing a game of hide-and-seek, only to then stab the victim nearly 20 times and leave her in the woods as an offering to Slenderman – who, mind you, is a fictional supernatural character that originated as a creepypasta internet meme in June of 2009. That’s who those two girls tried to kill for.
This isn’t a preach to shut the whole thing down, far from it, actually. Scott Cawthon himself has only voiced paperwork problems when it comes to opening a restaurant like this.
“I’ve actually been asked this a lot, but the answer is simple: I do NOT want to be in the food service industry! There is a lot more involved with restaurant management than just putting together a few killer robots,” said a statement made on Scott Cawthon’s steam page back in 2016.
While this restaurant isn’t a cause of concern from him, especially since one is about to open in the near future, this should still be a slight one for fans. For a long time there were people who thought that FNAF was based on a true killing that took place at a Chuck E. Cheese. Taken from The Digital Fix website, it covers the incident of 1993. On Dec. 14 of the year mentioned, a disgruntled ex-employee returned to the establishment and shot five people, leaving four of them to ultimately succumb to their injuries. This was an event that happened vaguely during the time period the games are set in, with the same number of victims, and this was just an angry man at the time. Imagine how much damage an over zealous fan could do?
For every joke on the internet about wanting to recreate the lore, whether that be killing five children, or just one, by putting their head in Freddy’s mouth, there’s one person who’s more serious than the rest. But don’t take all of this as me trying to say that we need to ban scary media because one person could take it too far. I am firmly against censorship like that. There just needs to be a lot of security when it opens, and for the first couple of weeks people with young children should be more cautious than usual.
