FNAF Spoils Its Real Villain Super Early - But You Likely Missed It

In Scott Cawthon's "Five Nights at Freddy's" not-so-indie video game franchise, William Afton is the big bad. For those less versed in fictional lore, he's a serial child killer who dresses up as one of the many animal mascots that his restaurant features. It almost begs the question, did this freakazoid build Freddy Fazzbear's Pizza solely for toddler-cide? Who knows. The point is that Afton is an important figure in the story. When Blumhouse Productions started revealing casting decisions for the film adaptation, along with cast members' respective roles, fans noticed a distinct lack of Golden Bonnie, aka Afton, on IMDb.

Truth be told, it was all but confirmed early on that Matthew Lillard's role, Steve Raglan, was not-so-secretly Afton using the world's most boring alias. Apparently, even Blumhouse couldn't be bothered to hide its big reveal because "FNAF" spoils its own twist almost immediately. Right after the first security guard gets ganked, the pixelated opening credits play. It's a cool sequence that references the metric ton of 16-bit minigames that Cawthon hides in his work, but it also mirrors how the minigames deliver vital plot information. The pixelated sequence depicts Golden Bonnie kidnapping children from the Pizzeria. The literal second that the screen zooms in on a shadowy face as the Golden Bonnie mask slides into place, Lillard's name appears in big red letters that shift to purple.

Lillard's name is the only name that gets a notable color change, and Afton is famously purple in all the 16-bit minigames. Blumhouse might as well have tattooed the words "BAD GUY" in neon purple on Lillard's forehead, for all the subtlety they displayed in the final stretch.

It's fun to tease Blumhouse Productions for giving up the ghost on its big reveal, but we also have to be honest with ourselves because no version of this story sees the studio getting away with hiding William Afton behind a fake name. The fanbase for "Five Nights at Freddy's" is, well, let's say, dedicated to discovery. Consider this: The "FNAF" video game franchise owes no small portion of its fame to YouTube, where let's-play channels, like Markiplier, and lore/theory channels, like The Game Theorists, brought Scott Cawthon's creation into the spotlight for millions upon millions of gamers.

Matthew Patrick, aka MatPat of The Game Theorists, is a solid reference point for how most "FNAF" fans approach the series. On his channel, the standard practice is to dissect every frame of footage and every line of dialogue, read every ancillary book, and play every ancillary game for clues about the larger narrative. He's not the only one who does this for a massive following, but he is one of the most prominent to do so, and he's one of the only YouTubers who landed a cameo in the film, so he's the one who gets mentioned here. 

Now, imagine legions of fans, all pouring through the trailers, all picking apart the cast and crew members' social media posts, all scouring the internet for accidental information. How was Blumhouse ever going to compete with that? They weren't, and they couldn't, and at some point, they must have accepted it. Otherwise, why let such an obvious spoiler make it into the final cut of the opening credits?