Five Night’s At Freddy’s 2 is on the way, and will feature a re-union of two well-known alumni from the Scream franchise, Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lilliard. Following on the success of 2023’s video game adaptation Five Nights At Freddy’s, the sequel entered principal photography in late 2024, and is scheduled to be released on December 5th. Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 will also reportedly use the eponymous second game in the Five Nights At Freddy’s series as its basis.
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Skeet Ulrich is set to appear in Five Nights At Freddy’s as Henry Emily, the co-founder of the Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza establishment in which the first film takes place. Matthew Lilliard will also reprise his role from the first Five Night’s At Freddy’s of psychotic killer William Afton, who is also the father of Elizabeth Lail’s protagonist Vanessa (Lail also reprising her role from the first movie). Naturally, Ulrich’s and Lilliard’s place in the Scream franchise’s horror movie legacy makes their re-union an exciting one for horror fans.
Based upon the popular video game franchise, Five Night’s At Freddy‘s centers upon Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), who gets a job as a night security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. However, the establishment’s animal animatronics inexplicably start coming to life and killings burglars and other unfortunate individuals. Eventually, Mike learns from local police officer Vanessa (Lail) that the pizza parlor had originally closed in the ’80s after the unexplained disappearance of several children (revealed to have been killed by William Afton), and it soon becomes clear that the vengeful children have possessed the animatronic animals of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza.
In Wes Craven’s 1996 horror hit Scream, the quiet California community of Woodsboro finds itself in the midst of a murder spree being committed by a mysterious killer clad in a dime store Halloween costume, and who eventually comes to be known as “Ghostface“. Scream‘s third act twist reveals that Ghostface is actually two killers, one of them Billy Loomis (Ulrich), a troubled high school student still haunted by his parent’s divorce. The other half of the (first) Ghostface duo is Stu Macher (Lilliard), another high schooler assisting Billy in the killings, with Scream 3 later revealing that Billy recruited Stu to “have a partner to sell out in case you get caught.”
Despite the bloody defeat of Billy and Stu by Scream‘s long-standing heroine and Billy’s former girlfriend Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), the duo’s killing rampage kickstarts a series of copy-cat killers adopting the Ghostface persona through the Scream franchise. Billy in particular has also left a haunting presence in the subsequent Scream franchise, with Billy’s mother Nancy Loomis (Laurie Metcalf) taking on the Ghostface mantle to avenge her son in Scream 2. Ulrich also later returned as Billy in 2022’s Scream and 2023’s Scream VI, portraying Billy as a ghostly phantom presence, while Lilliard will also reportedly return in the upcoming Scream 7, presumably in a similar capacity after Stu’s death in the original Scream.
In the near three decades since the two first wore the mask of Ghostface, Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lilliard have appeared in a wide variety of other projects, but their chilling performances as Billy Loomis and Stu Macher has also made both forever linked with the horror genre. It isn’t immediately clear whether Ulrich’s role in Five Night’s At Freddy’s 2 will see him as either protagonist or antagonist, compared to the psychotic killer Lilliard’s Ashton already embodies. Nonetheless, horror fans and Scream aficionados will surely delight in the long-awaited reunion of two horror icons in Ulrich and Lilliard appearing on-screen together again in Five Nights At Freddy’s 2.
Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 will be released in theaters on December 5th.
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Image courtesy of Marvel Studios. -
Image courtesy of Lucasfilm.
