Warnings from Blumhouse and Morrissey

Blumhouse Production’s box-office blockbuster Five Nights at Freddy’s grossed $80 million when it opened, just days after the American broadcast debut of Morrissey’s legitimately terrifying new song “Sure Enough, the Telephone Rings.” Morrissey’s taunt, “You should tell little kids / They’re living in hell now” calls out the unserious Blumhouse agenda and our current political nightmare.

The relentless, video-game-style paranoia of Five Nights at Freddy’s updates teenage scary-lore: Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) can’t get over the memory of witnessing his baby brother’s abduction and, after his parents die, becomes the guardian of his autistic kid sister, Abby (Piper Rubio), Mike compulsively relives his trauma, believing in dream theory, according to which “he walks through memory as if experiencing it for the first time anew, no longer a passenger but an active participant.”

That Nightmare on Elm Street steal exposes Blumhouse’s juvenile shtick, yet Mike’s recognizable fears — encompassing unemployment, sex trafficking, parental abandonment, institutional distrust — evoke something real. In his first five night-shift stints as watchman at a disused ’80s amusement park/arcade mall — Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza Place — Mike stares glaze-eyed at security monitors, then drifts into violent 3-D incidents, His circumstance incarnates the hell that Morrissey sings about.

But Morrissey zeroes in on present-tense shell shock. The song comes from his album Bonfire of Teenagers memorializing victims of the 2017 Islamic terrorist bombing of the Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena. Capitol Records still refuses to release the album. This censorship contrasts with Blumhouse exploitation movies (the Purge film series, Get Out, Us, M3GAN, Insidious), which contrive our acceptance of horror, keeping consumers in a state of anxiety — and without catharsis, same as the fake-news media do.

Morrissey’s puckish perspective always scares pop-music traditionalists by exploring previously unspoken depths. “Sure Enough, the Telephone Rings” raises fears afloat in the culture — whether unwanted telemarketers (“Who wants my money now?”) or the daily evidence of political evil and vengeance that cannot be hidden from children. His complaint chugs along, its bridge recalling The Smiths’ “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby.” These social vexations work as cultural criticism, pinpointing Mike’s terror — the panic of exasperated people going through hell, not dream theory.

As a left-leaning, social-activist studio, Blumhouse manipulates political paranoia, selling it as inevitable. (Imagine Britain’s Hammer horror films but with less craft.) Only the most fanatical horror-movie devotees can ignore the shallow exploitation of Blumhouse products. So the coincidental release of Morrissey’s song acts as a counterweight to the half-baked ideas in Five Nights at Freddy’s. Otherwise, it’s another grab-bag of pop-paranoia clichés. Freddy’s place combines the arcade repository of National Treasure with the Safdie brothers’ Good Time. Mike protects Abby from the arcade’s oversized animatronic creatures — grisly embodiments of lost and dead children whose ghosts make the cartoon-figure robots move. Director Emma Tammi imitates how the Stranger Things kids similarly relive ’80s pop culture, with a little Saw-franchise torture-porn thrown in.

One unexpected pleasure is seeing Mike disable the mutant bots, as if exacting revenge on Pixar and woke Disney and woke Sesame Street. We need our fears expiated, yet Hutcherson’s boyish face, a distressed child actor’s face, makes Mike’s adventures unsatisfying; he slips into solipsism. And an unfinessed subplot about a female cop (Elizabeth Lail) retaliating against her abusive father never attains the genius sympathy of the parental martyr’s punishment in De Palma’s Carrie.

Consider the cultural concurrence of Blumhouse’s latest hit meeting Morrissey’s political humor and seriousness: one a threat, the other a warning. If we don’t tell children that lawfare is wrong, then you’re letting them think that political prisoners and irrational hatred and censorship are all excusable and good. We are living in hell now when our institutions, media, and politicians oppose our common interests. Morrissey’s counterpoint to Five Nights at Freddy’s tells us there are few childhood or adult amusements free from sexual grooming and political lies.