I’ve been watching horror movies since I was about seven years old. Because of that, I consider myself a horror veteran and thus, I don’t get spooked very easily. That is until I watched Five Nights at Freddy’s last night and was reminded about a nightmarish Chuck E. Cheese experience I thought I had forgotten.
Picture it: Connecticut, 2003. A child’s birthday party is taking place at a local Chuck E. Cheese — a notable establishment where kids can frolic across the eye-abusing carpet towards a wondrous world of eerie animatronics that sing and dance and a plethora of arcade games. At the time, I was only about eight years old when my mother took me to a birthday party for one of my third-grade classmates.
Now, Chuck E. Cheese has never been full of fond memories for me. One time, I was in the ball pit when another kid in there actually peed his pants, and employees quickly had to gather all the kids and get them out of the ball pit. Try and imagine two Chuck E. Cheese employees trying to force a handful of kids out of a fun-filled ball pit. You’d probably be tearing your hair out if you were them, too.
Nevertheless, this particular Chuck E. Cheese experience immediately re-entered my brain as I was watching FNAF last night. As the captivating lore goes, the lively animatronics at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza are possessed by the ghosts of children who were kidnapped and murdered by the owner of the pizza establishment, William Afton. And, as the story goes, the actual mummified-esque bodies of the children are located inside of the animatronics, with Afton having hidden their bodies inside when police were investigating the kidnappings.
As I was watching Five Nights at Freddy’s while they were revealing the information about the children inside the animatronics, I immediately remembered that time during my classmate’s birthday party when I first realized there were people inside the animatronics at Chuck E. Cheese. Just before employees served pizza to me and my classmates, I hurried off to the bathroom before all the slices were gone.
Now, for some reason, the bathroom at this particular Chuck E. Cheese establishment featured a long-ish hallway on the way. As I wandered down the hallway, there was another room just before the bathroom and the door to the room was already open. As I walked by, I peeked into the room and saw Chuck E. Cheese remove his animatronic head and place it beside him, immediately realizing that there was an actual MAN inside of Chuck E. Cheese.
Terrified, I screamed aloud and ran as fast as I could back to the birthday party. My mother obviously noticed my hysterics and ran up to me and asked me what happened, to which I simply replied: “Chuck E. is alive!” My mother sought to comfort me, but I eventually got over it the minute they brought the pizza out and the birthday song started playing. Oh, well. Chalk it up to childhood naivety, I guess.
I still went to Chuck E. Cheese numerous times after that encounter, of course, but I’ll never forget being completely distraught when I saw Chuck E. Cheese take off his huge animatronic head and place it on a chair next to him. Now, imagine if I had caught him on a smoke break. Yikes.