Blumfest: Five Nights At Freddy's Promises Easter Eggs For Fans And More [NYCC]

"Our goal is scary and original," Jason Blum said of Blumhouse at New York Comic Con 2023. "Even when we're doing IP or sequels, we always try to do something new."

Blum is a curator of the bloodcurdling, often with a dash of comedic rib-cracking. After all, he told his fans that "comedy and horror are cousins in many ways." The timing of a scare is linked to the timing of a joke. His producing credits include the likes of "M3GAN" and the "Halloween" trilogy. With that in mind, a house of horror-heads gathered at New York Comic Con's "Blumfest" to splash into more Blum-produced films, from the time travel hijinks of "Totally Killer," an evil swimming pool in "Night Swim," and the highly anticipated video game adaptation "Five Nights at Freddy's." The respective directors for each of these films joined Blum on the stage, with each of them having something to say about their films' nostalgic premises.

Directed by Nahnatchka Khan ("Always Be My Maybe"), the Fantastic Fest-released "Totally Killer" is a movie where a teen, Jaime (Kiernan Shipka), flees from a masked killer and time travels back into the late 1980s where she encounters a younger version of her mom (Olivia Holt). In this time period, Jaime carries crucial future information that she could use to prevent past murders.

At Blumfest, Khan shared, "You have the ['80s] nostalgia aspect, but we're bringing the Gen Z lens into that world" as an access point. A big reason why Khan directed the film seemed to be Blum showing off his six-year-old daughter on his lap on their Zoom meeting. "We had a Zoom and you brought your six-year-old daughter, so I couldn't say no," Khan said to Blum.

Khan also shared a little about the film's gravitron sequence. "That's just an '80s ride. It's lawless. There's no harness ... That's a real gravitron we found in Vancouver," she said. The gravitron wasn't actually moving though. "But the lighting rig makes it look like it's moving," she explained. "Totally Killer" can be streamed on Amazon Prime.

In "Night Swim" (produced by James Wan and Blum), a suburban dream of owning a pool dissolves into a nightmare for a family. Having just moved into a new neighborhood, a young woman (Amélie Hoeferle) discovers that the hard way when an innocent night game of Marco Polo turns grisly. And that's just going off the trailer. The synopsis contains a more dramatic factor: The father (Wyatt Russell) is dealing with a degenerative disease that cut his baseball career short, so the pool was supposed to be his therapy pool.

"Why pools?" The moderator asked director Bryce McGuire, who directed the short film the feature is based on. McGuire revealed that, yes, pools are scary for him, thanks to "Jaws." "For me, 'Jaws' didn't just ruin the oceans; It ruined the pools too!" As a nine-year-old, "Jaws" planted the idea that a shark would rise from the bottom and chomp him. "I know rationally this pool is nine feet deep ... but when the lights go off, I can't see the ground. If I can't see the bottom of a pool, it's not there. That's just science."

It obviously wouldn't be a great white shark, but the "shape" of the pool entity remains a mystery. McGuire's mission is to twist commonplace childhood pool memories, such as the "don't run" rule, a hand going through the drain flap, or hair getting stuck in the drain. Regarding the trailer, McGuire teased "a whole other dimension to what's going on here, which I won't speak about." 

"Night Swim" will play in theaters on January 5, 2024.

Speaking of twisting innocuous childhood memories into a sea of nightmares, I remember being dragged into Chuck E. Cheese, trying to focus on my pizza, and willing myself not to stare at those stiff animatronics. Although I never played the "Five Nights at Freddy's" horror video game created by Scott Cawthon, the video game's premise does evoke the nostalgic terrors of animatronics.

Eight years in the making, the film adaptation of "Five Nights at Freddy's" follows Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), hired as a night watchman at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. However, he makes a ghastly discovery that murdered ghost children may be possessing and puppeteering the animatronics. Once director Emma Tammi (who co-wrote the film with Seth Cuddeback and Cawthon) learned to play the video game in prep for the movie, she reported, "Oh my god ... the nostalgia that was triggering for me, seeing creepy animatronics as a kid."

Blum talked a bit about the film's delay, linking it to the pressures of finding a new audience (perhaps glossing over the departure of Chris Columbus). But he and the team decided that "Five Nights at Freddy's" would be ideal as a movie "made for the fans," so they would not sweat the obligation of reeling in a new audience. "If anyone else [outside of the lore] comes, that's great too, but [we] try not to please them too."

Jim Henson's Creature Shop crafted the macabre animatronics (making them distant relatives of Kermit of Frog and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Blum shared. "Emma and Scott set out to do it practically and it made a huge difference," he added, noting how difficult it is for a studio to take up practical effects. "I can't stand CGI. It throws me out of the movies."

As a person who wanders outside the lore, I can't speak specifically about anticipation or theories. But Tammi promised that they have planted Easter eggs and a surprise character (not in any trailer or teaser). The panel concluded with a clip of the watchman, Mike, slipping in a VHS training video. Churning through creepy static, the tape skips over the animatronics' performance as if to hide a sinister missing scene, with a high probability of a payoff in the movie.

"Five Nights at Freddy's" will arrive in theaters and on Peacock beginning October 27, 2023.