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Fridge / Five Nights at Freddy's 4

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As this is a Fridge page, spoilers will be left unmarked. You Have Been Warned!


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    Fridge Brilliance 
  • Why are the Nightmare Animatronics so terrifying in comparison to the older models, including Springtrap? They're literally nightmares — entities within a dream, where things are terrifying and unrealistic.
  • Why doesn't the Scottgames logo glow after the purple hat teaser? Because none of the new teaser's eyes glow, so neither does the logo.
    • The logo stopped glowing with Nightmare Foxy.
  • Why does the Scottgames logo turn from a dark purple to a brighter purple when the sixth teaser was released? Because Fredbear has come from the shadows, and has (partially) shown himself.
  • Why is the scream a mix of the three previous screams? Beacuse it was supposed to be the end, and Scott wanted to give honor to every game.
  • Plushtrap's teaser may have been implying other small, terrible things in the game as well… the protagonist himself and his friends.
  • Plushtrap's name, hidden in the code of the site for the "Terrible things come in small packages" teaser, is concealed in the letters "Cyh gvh gpe". Also hidden in the code are the numbers "13, 12, 11". The letter triplets are coded with a Caesar cipher, also called a ROTation cipher. Thus, the first three letters are ROT-13: Plu. The next three are ROT-12: sht. The last three, of course, are ROT-11: rap. May also double as Fridge Humor — Springtrap has been left to ROT, after all.
  • To some, the game's an Artifact Title now due to not taking place in an establishment linked to Freddy at all, really. But after beating the game and realizing the animatronics are essentially literal dreams, it begins to make sense; even if Fredbear is technically the real leader this time, you're essentially spending five nights of nightmares fueled and ultimately dominated by Freddy. For the protagonist, you never left Freddy's.
  • The protagonist's room having two doors in gameplay but only one in the minigames, the unlimited battery in the flashlight, and the protagonist not keeping all the doors shut and locked make complete sense taking into consideration the heavy implications that it's All Just a Dream (well, nightmare).
    • He has more than one door to his room because it's a dream interpretation of his room, not his actual room, and part of his nightmare means there's more than one opening for the monsters to get him from, increasing his terror.
    • The doors don't stay shut against the monsters when the protagonist runs off because it's a nightmare, so they keep opening.
    • The doors don't lock because in this nightmare they don't have locks (or possibly they don't work, or the protagonist is stuck in the nightmare and can't change anything about how it's going).
    • Except, well, it isn't a nightmare. The room simply doesn't have any locks. And considering who the father of the child is, it makes sense.
    • Except that the Protagonist's brother literally locks him in his room in the first minigame. And he couldn't have simply barricaded the door, because the doors open into the Protagonist's room.
  • The design of the room itself is brilliance on Scott's part to ramp up the fear factor. Think about it. Your starting location is in the middle of the room facing the closet, and each possible point of attack — the bed, the closet, and the hallways — has to be moved to in order to be interacted with. Moving to intercept one animatronic exposes your back to the other three, whether you realize it or not. If you didn't feel vulnerable enough in past Five Nights games, you probably do now. This becomes even worse by Night 5 because Nightmare Fredbear can use any of those approaches to attack you, and he's much faster than the other Nightmare animatronics.
    • Also, remember Phone Guy's line from the first night of the first game: "If I spent twenty years singing the same stupid songs". FNAF1 is set in 1993. The Fazbear Four have been around for twenty years, and for at least a decade were side-by-side with Fredbear and Spring Bonnie. That explains why we see the plushies and masks of them as well as them on the TV show with Fredbear. So the child also knows what they look like in person, and also explains why the Nightmare versions are most heavily based on their Withered/pre-2 versions.
  • Foxy, Freddy, Chica, and Bonnie all have five fingers on each hand. Which is strange, of course, until you get the post-Night 5 minigame. The protagonist and his friends were each wearing a mask representing the animatronics, and each of them lifted the little child up into Fredbear's mouth. Of course, with the Nightmare Animatronics being literally Nightmares, it's easy to see Nightmare Foxy, Freddy, Chica, and Bonnie as representations of the big brother's friends and himself. May double as Fridge Horror and Tearjerker as the protagonist will always remember himself as a monster who killed his own brother.
    • Of course, the above brilliance becomes even more brilliant when you pay close attention to where Nightmare Foxy, Freddy, Chica, and Bonnie attack you from and the positions that the protagonist and his friends were in when they lifted the child into Fredbear's mouth.
  • After someone found an audio clip of some ambience in the game and pitched it up, it was revealed to be Phone Guy's message from the first night of the first game. Why this clip specifically? Because it was the only message in the series to mention a Bite incident! While this game isn't about The Bite of '87, it does foreshadow that a similar event is going to happen later in the week.
    • This also is one of the many reasons why the older brother is Mike Schmidt himself, having the nightmares after Phone Guy reminded him of the time he killed his brother. The names are barely different, so that also didn't help.
  • Out of the four nightmare animatronics, Foxy is the fastest, so he has no problem slipping in the bedroom when you aren't looking and hiding in the closet. Freddy can divide itself into mini-Freddies, which are considerably agile and can sneak on the bed undetected. Then there's the cupcake, and then Bonnie. Chica is so big, she doesn't even try to sneak inside the bedroom, which is why she sends the cupcake instead.
  • Golden Freddy is yellow with a black tie and hat. This is the inverse of Nightmare's colors!
  • Plushtrap is referred to as a "finger trap", and its jumpscare consists of wild biting and a leap. Evidently, the doll contains some sort of spring-loaded jaw mechanism to make it "talk", but, like his larger counterpart, it was too strong.
    • Can't say if the reference is intentional, but there have been actual toys that could pretend to eat — the Cabbage Patch Snacktime Kids, which had rotors in the mouth. Alas, if they caught something, they wouldn't let go — hair, fingers, name it. They were recalled.
  • In the first 3 FNAFs, players could turn down the volume so they won't hear the screech. The fourth one uses sounds since there's no camera. Turning down the volume dooms you to failure. Scott was very smart about that one.
  • If what Scott wrote down during his website's homepage transition was true in any way, then it brings one previous animation to mind. When Foxy comes barreling down the hallway and gives off that particularly Narm-y position and expression when he jumpscares Mike (and, as many people had pointed out, looks like he's just checking up on him or popping in to mess with him), it could just as easily be read as the child dreaming about his brother doing the same thing thanks to the new interpretation.
    • However, the theory was Jossed.
  • The "Fredbear And Friends! 1983" easter egg might not be a television show at all. It may be a video game! Take for instance the F&F 1983 screen. It was quite common for Atari 2600 games to feature the dates in which they were made. Also, the shots with the gang? THE FIRST VIDEO GAME CUTSCENES.

    Fridge Horror 
  • The trailer shows the player character searching throughout the house, hallways, bedrooms, in the closet… but it didn't show what monsters might be under the bed.
    • When the trailer showed the Mini-Freddies, they were on top of the bed, which could mean their boss is somewhere very close by…
  • During the Night 3 minigame, you encounter five children on your way home. Each of which love Freddy's. How many victims were in the first game? Five.
    • The kid with the balloon asks you if you're going to the party since everyone else is, only to laugh because it's your party. Let me emphasize that: He asks if you are going to the party since everyone else is. None of them are present at the party in the Night 5 minigame.
    • However, it's implied the Murderer killed the five children before the child died. The fact that they are implied to be his friends isn't helping.
  • Throughout the nights, if you look closely, sometimes a medical IV bag, a vase of flowers, or a pill bottle may appear on the nightstand next to the bed. These are early hints to the medical condition of the protagonist's brother, but it also makes you wonder just how long he remembered the Bite for him to still remember the IV bag.
  • When it's three days before the party, the sentence "Don't you remember what you saw?" shows up, which implies that this poor kid knows EXACTLY what goes on at night at Freddy's. Why he does is possibly just as traumatic as the bite was for him…
    • What happens during the night at Freddy's seems to be a well-known rumor, since one of the children you meet two days before the party tells the Child about the animatronics coming to life at night and hiding your body where no one will find it.
    • Since the animatronics are aggresive, some should realise what already happened…
  • The Foxy doll is missing his head and the asshole brother (the protagonist) wears a Foxy mask. The poor little kid cut the doll's head off because he was too scared of Foxy's face!
    • Or the protagonist might have cut off the doll's head and somehow turned it into the Foxy mask he uses to scare his brother with. Your choice which possibility is worse.
    • Could also be heartwarming if you consider that, despite the protagonist completely ruining the character for him, he still considers Foxy his friend.
  • Also counts as fridge sadness. Listen closely to the sound at the end of the 6th night. The kid could have just died, and seeing how he fades away, he most likely did.
  • One particularly unpleasant bit of fridge horror rears its ugly mug when you realize that Fredbear doesn't simply bite through the kid's head. He stalls for a couple of seconds. Notice how the mouth was opening and closing normally up until the kid's placed inside. Fredbear stalled because his jaw was trying to close, but couldn't, finally accumulating in one final "bite" before breaking. Think about this from the perspective of the victim: you are placed into a closed space that you are already terrified of, and immediately, you feel a horrible pressure on your head. Too shocked to scream in pain, you can only hear bone cracking and gears grinding, time seeming to slow down as your mind races for a way out, before a final explosion of pain grants you the mercy of unconsciousness, your body going limp. And, keep in mind, during all this, four cruel, stupid teenagers are laughing, failing to understand the severity of what they have done until it is too late to prevent it. The protagonist's nightmares are nothing compared to the living, waking nightmare that he had to deal with until he forgot or got over it, only to be reminded again.
    • According to this video, the horrifying appearance could symbolically mean Nightmare is Death itself. He only appears during the end of the seventh and eighth nights of the game, after the end of the sixth night ends with the sound of a flatline, indicating the Child's possible death. During his jump scare scene, it only shows an up-close picture of his face as an electronic gargling sound plays over it, which is significantly different from the other animatronics. Only time will tell if the current theory of Nightmare being Shadow Freddy is true...
    • That makes sense, given the twin theories regarding who's having the nightmares. Whether you're the child thrown into the mouth of an animatronic or the brother who didn't know what a "crush point" was until now, an exposed brain and red eyes — like eyes which have had all the blood vessels ruptured by trauma — will definitely be foremost in your thoughts.
  • If you believe in the "Child = Golden Freddy" theory, consider this. Nightmare's killscreen? Not just a reference. It comes only after the child flatlines in the night 6 mini-game. It represents the unending, mind-shattering horror of his new existence as Golden Freddy. A ghost in the machine.
  • Considering the fact that the Nightmares are Exactly What It Says on the Tin, Scott was essentially giving others Nightmare Fuel by showing someone else's nightmares. What if they spread, haunting others?
  • Imagine one day you go to look at Scott's website and see that the endo skeletons have been changed to adorable versions of themselves, awww. Then to go back the next day and see what appears to be a cuter version of Golden Freddy, AND HE'S THE SAME HEIGHT AS A CHILD.
  • The Don't Wake the Baby teaser features a small Freddy plush sitting on a bed. Aw, how cute! And then you brighten it, and the plushie turns golden. And that's not the only thing you can find when brightening the image.
  • The Night 3 Easter Egg implies that Purple Guy/William Afton framed somebody for the murders and that's who got convicted. Leaving that aside, that means Afton got away with it scot-free until he accidentally got himself killed, but it means somebody out there is either serving a very long sentence for five counts of felony kidnapping that they didn't commit, or they died in prison.
    • And, naturally, seeing how badly almost all prisoners will react to child murderers...
  • The events of this game get so much worse after taking into account later installments. It's heavily implied that William Afton is the two's father, who is not only a Serial Killer, but is shown to mistreat their sister Elizabeth in Five Nights at Freddy's: The Fourth Closet. There's also the possibility that he purposely sent Michael down to Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rental in his place knowing that the animatronics would mistake him for his father, and that he might have used reverse psychology to get Elizabeth killed. With all that plus the way the older brother (implicitly Michael) reacts to Crying Child's injury in mind, it becomes likely that he's not a Jerkass for the hell of it, but instead because he's legitimately troubled and acts out in the only way he knows how, possibly taking inspiration from his father's own cruelty. Which begs the question, what did William do to him?
  • One of the many sounds you can hear during the nights is a dog barking. Because it's just a background detail, you never learn what it was barking at, but the fact that the title screen shows the animatronics outside the house really doesn't help.

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