One Of Five Nights At Freddy's Animatronics Caught Fire While Filming

Spoilers for "Five Nights at Freddy's" follow.

The old Hollywood adage, "Pain is temporary, film is forever," is normally reserved for the on-set hardships endured while filming swords-and-sandals epics like "Gladiator" or the sprawling "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Now, it seems that turn of phrase could also apply to this year's highest-grossing horror film, "Five Nights at Freddy's."

Based on the immensely popular video game series created by Scott Cawthon, "FNaF" (for short) became an online phenomenon mostly due to viral videos of YouTube influencers playing the liminal horror game that's carefully designed to produce as many jump scares as humanly possible. Set in the fictional kids restaurant Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, "FNaF" harkens back to a time when full-size animatronic bands like Showbiz Pizza's Rock-afire Explosion entertained (and slightly terrified) children of all ages. 

To recreate the baked-in tactile terror of these supposedly amiable monstrosities, "Five Nights at Freddy's" manages to avoid any CGI pitfalls that would have taken away from the very real threat of having five furry machines come to life in the middle of the night. That decision not only made the characters appear more dangerous onscreen, it also added a little unpredictability during filming. Fortunately, no one was harmed when one of the towering animatronics decided to go a little haywire on set. 

All the lovable characters consisting of Freddy, Bonnie, Chica & The Cupcake, Foxy, and Golden Freddy seem so harmless at first. As the story unfolds in "Five Nights at Freddy's," they all become slightly more menacing. The trick is to stay calm around them to survive, and that's exactly what the cast and crew did when one of the characters suddenly ignited during filming. 

Speaking with IGN, director Emma Tammi recalled the unfortunate mishap:

"There was one day where we were rolling and I heard someone quietly and calmly say Foxy's arm is on fire. And I looked over and one of the servos had been going for quite some time and it overheated which happens sometimes. But this was actually the only time it happened on set and it just started smoking and we, everyone calmly like walked away. We put it out and switched out the arm."

Possessed by a dead kid named Fritz in the story, Foxy happens to have a lot of screen time in the finished film which probably contributed to the robotic puppet overheating. Although there's slightly more risk of having large animatronics with so many moving parts on set, Tammi and Cawthon talked with Blumhouse a great deal about using as little CGI as possible. Tammi told IGN:

"The film is set in the year 2000 and we're flashing back to '80s and '90s eras and I think we wanted to, I particularly, and Scott wanted to pay homage to those time periods and the way that movies were made back then."

Of course, the decision to avoid CGI becomes a lot easier when you're working with the artists responsible for creating The Muppets. "If you're going to work with Jim Henson's puppeteers and their animatronics, you're going to want to use as much practically as possible," explained Tammi. 

The inevitable sequel to "FNatF" should keep that practical tradition alive, but maybe they should consider putting up a "We Have Worked This Many Days Without Accident" sign for morale.