It’s probably not that hard to make the animatronic animal bands, featured at kiddie-themed restaurants like Chuck E. Cheese, look creepy.

After all, the giant, dead-eyed, keyboard-playing robot mice, like the aforementioned Mr. Cheese, have been haunting our nightmares for decades. But now Blumhouse is upping the ante on these eldritch horrors by having Jim Henson’s Creature Shop create the mechanical menaces for Five Nights at Freddy’s, opening in October.

The film is based on the popular video game franchise, first launched in 2014 and featuring eight main releases, included the most recent, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach.

Five Nights follows a Josh Hutcherson as a troubled security guard who begins watching over the seemingly abandoned Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza place, which seems like an easy gig – at first. It seems so safe his little sister (Piper Rubio) tags along with him each night. It’s not long before the little girl becomes the target of the possessed animatronic animals.

Elizabeth Lail plays a cop who checks in on the Hutcherson’s character on his first night, and tells him that the eatery closed some time ago. “In the ’80s, kids went missing,” she says. “The police searched Freddy’s top to bottom, they never found them. That’s why the place shut down.” It seems the kid’s spirits stuck around to haunt the joint with help from Freddy’s animatronic mascots. As Hutcherson’s character says, “there are ghost children possessing giant robots.”

If the premise sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In 2019, the furry and good-natured Hanna-Barbera mascots The Banana Splits played against type in an eponymously titled slasher that was allegedly repurposed from a rejected script that was based on the Five Nights video game from when Warner Brothers originally had the movie rights. Then in 2021, Nicolas Cage battled a new batch of demonic animatronics without saying a word in Willy’s Wonderland.

In addition to Hutcherson and Lail, the movie stars Kat Conner Sterling (We Have A Ghost, 9-1-1), Mary Stuart Masterson (Blindspot, Fried Green Tomatoes) and Matthew Lillard (Good Girls, Scream). 

Five Nights at Freddy’s is directed by Emma Tammi (The Wind, Blood Moon) and is written by Scott Cawthon, who created the video game franchise, Emma Tammi and Seth Cuddeback, and was produced by Jason Blum and Cawthon.

Five Nights at Freddy’s will be released both theatrically and on Peacock on October 27th, as were previous Blumhouse features Halloween Kills, Halloween Ends, and Firestarter.