Has Five Nights at Freddy's Affected Children's Psychological and Mental Health? Let's Talk About It.

     Five Nights at Freddy's is a very popular horror-themed video game that came out in 2014 and was made by a man named Scott Cawthon. Since the game's release, as well as practically a dozen more games after the first one, Cawthon retired in 2021. Five Nights at Freddy's originally was about a security guard who was hired to watch over animatronics from 12 am to 6 am. The voice recording giving you instructions on how the game works mentioned that the animatronics get a bit "quirky at night". I was about eight-years-old when the game released, and I watched YouTubers play it until I eventually got it myself. On the surface, the game seems like just a regular ol' horror game about surviving the night while these animatronics are trying to kill you. Pretty standard. What isn't standard is the lore in the series. One of the most basic parts of the lore, something you learn at the very beginning, is that the animatronics aren't just robots. The animatronic suits are stuffed with dead children and their spirits haunt them. 

    Another basic piece of lore you learn through being a member of the fandom is Spring Trap. In the series, a man named William Afton is the creator of these animatronics and he is also the man who killed the children that haunt them. It's believed that one day, he stepped into one of the suits he made to scare the children's spirits. Then, because of his frantic movements, the springlocks inside of the suits became loose and when a drop of water fell into one of them, and the springlocks broke loose. They killed William Afton instantly and the suit closed around him. He's known as the "purple guy" due to the color of his body after it had rotted inside of the suit. This is just the basics of the lore of the game, and even this is enough to potentially traumatize a young audience.

    Now this bares the question: has Five Nights at Freddy's affected children's mental health? Firstly, let's talk about a survey conducted by Reddit user MisterMat24. They did a survey of a sample size of 133. This survey was done in 2022, with the first question asking "how old are you?". The average age in this survey was 17, and lowest age recorded was 10 and the oldest being 24. This means that when the game first game out, this 10 year old would have been two years old. Granted, I don't believe that the child actually consumed FNaF content at two years old, but who knows when this child was introduced to the game? 

   Another user by the name of Conscious_Implement8 made a post in the r/fivenightsatfreddys sub-Reddit. The post was titled "How FNAF is ruining my life & mental health." The name of this user is Iris, so I'll call her that throughout this post. Iris had discussed how she is currently 19, but when she was 11, she was introduced to FNaF by a friend, Axel, who told her a lot about the lore, so she became quickly informed. The next night, she said she had a nightmare where she "was just heading out of [her] room for some reason and found [herself] facing our friend Freddy". Later in the dream, she "eventually got chased by all the classic animatronics until Freddy got [her] and killed [her] with a knife." She mentions how she cried so loudly that her friend could hear her from their room, which was pretty far from her room. 

    She then writes this: "You know what usually happens when you get killed during a nightmare, right? You just wake up in your bed or wherever you were sleeping and that's all, right? Well, forget about it. Because it didn't happen... for now. Instead, I woke up in some kind of infinite, empty, and entirely white room, with only blue stained glass windows. I looked at the ground at first and saw a reflection of myself with a different gender in it. I then looked in front of me and saw a mountain of corpses, most of which were those of my friends or relatives. The Puppet was lying against them, and it was deactivated. Not for long, though, because it suddenly awakened and started chasing after me. I had nowhere to run, and the Puppet was way faster than me, so I "instinctively" threw myself out of one of the windows, painfully landing a few meters downwards as the Puppet was looking at me from the window, clearly upset with what I had just done. Then I woke up, for real this time."

    After this, she began having frequent nightmares and they never stopped. These nightmares began to make her paranoid and anxious, even in public spaces when she wasn't alone. She even began having night terrors, which are "intense episodes of fear or panic that occur during non-REM sleep, often causing a person to wake up in a state of terror. During a night terror, individuals may sit up, thrash around, scream, and appear confused." 

    According to jentaylorplaytherapy.com, she writes in her blog as well what she has heard about how children respond to FNaF. She mentions how she heard of "children developing extreme sleep anxiety.  They are afraid to go to bed because they have been practicing staying up all night and constantly scanning the environment for danger. Or, they are having nightmares that wake them up or make them afraid to go back to bed." 

    Another person on Quora posting anonymously wrote "I sometimes have nightmares about Five Night's At Freddy's even though I'm 16. I played it when I was like 10 or 11. Is it a sort of childhood trauma?" 

    While none of these implicate explicit evidence to suggest that Five Nights at Freddy's is an awful horror game and that no child should play it, there are still risks to consuming such deeply disturbing media at such a young age. According to safterschoolsni.co.uk, they mention that consuming horror media as a child can potentially result in "added anxiety and stress, intrusive or unsettling thoughts, and developing new fears... They might suddenly be terrified of something that had never been a worry before." 

    So, should children play Five Nights at Freddy's or consume content of it? I don't think so, but at the end of the day, it's the parent's choice. I don't think FNaF content has negatively affected my mental health, but that doesn't mean it hasn't affected anyone's.

    What do you think? Is it okay for kids to consume horror-themed media like Five Nights at Freddy's? Furthermore, do you think it negatively impacts children's mental health? 

Works Cited

“I surveyed the FNaF fandom in 2022.....here are the results!” Reddit.com, 2022, www.reddit.com/r/fivenightsatfreddys/comments/vvakru/i_surveyed_the_fnaf_fandom_in_2022here_are_the/?rdt=37242 .Accessed 13 Apr. 2025.

‌ “I Sometimes Have Nightmares about Five Night’s at Freddy’s Even Though I’m 16. I Played It When I Was like 10 or 11. Is It a Sort of Chil...” Quora, 2015, www.quora.com/I-sometimes-have-nightmares-about-Five-Nights-At-Freddys-even-though-Im-16-I-played-it-when-I-was-like-10-or-11-Is-it-a-sort-of-childhood-trauma. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.

“How FNAF is ruining my life & mental health.” Reddit.com, 2025, www.reddit.com/r/fivenightsatfreddys/comments/1f3sfke/how_fnaf_is_ruining_my_life_mental_health/. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.

“Does Your Child Have Anxiety from Playing 5 Nights at Freddy’s?” Jen Taylor, 19 Oct. 2017, jentaylorplaytherapy.com/does-your-child-have-anxiety-from-playing-the-video-game-5-nights-at-freddys/. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.

Admin, and Admin. “Handle with Scare – What You Need to Know about the Horror Genre.” Safer Schools NI, 22 Oct. 2024, saferschoolsni.co.uk/horror-genre-digital-age/. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025

    For context, this blog post is being made for a college class assignment.