There was another demonic doll who commanded the horror screen before Annabelle. After seeing Chucky slaughter everyone around him in Child’s Play, how many of us got rid of our dolls? Despite the fact that Chucky is not the first evil doll to frighten children, he is by far the most popular.
While Annabelle’s terror is based on jump scares and possessions, Chucky’s fun is based on campy elements. Imagine what might have happened if the zodiac killer had proceeded to murder people while in possession of a doll. Before being shot by a detective, Charles Lee Ray had a similar thought and transferred his soul to a good guy doll. He is continued to murder others in six sequels since then, and he is set to continue his horror on television.
Charles Lee Ray represents the dark nature of three of the most prominent murders, Charles Manson, Lee Harvey Oswald, and James Earl Ray while following in their footsteps. Today, we will take a look back at his beginnings and explore the Child’s Play series.
Chucky’s Origin
Be it the Sons of Sam, or Charles Manson, many serial killers have a history of satanic worship or involvement with a cult. Charles Lee Ray was no different, he worshipped Damballa and practiced voodoo. Before he ended up as Andy’s new best friend, he was known as the Lakeshore Strangler.
He had killed 22 people before getting shot in the toy store by Detective Mike Norris. His body count as a human was slightly higher than Jeffrey Dahmer’s who has killed 17 people and is known as the Milwaukee Cannibal. Our Chucky might not be a necrophiliac cannibal but that doesn’t make him any less dangerous. Not wanting to die, he used a chant praying to Damballa and transferred his soul inside a red-haired, blue-eyed, freckled doll as the detective closed in.
Usually, serial killers get caught after a survivor manages to escape and reports it to the police. Similarly, Sarah Pierce was the one to turn him in. Before we had Joe from You, stalking women he is obsessed with until he ends up killing them, Charles Lee Ray did the same. He was so obsessed with Sarah Pierce that he ended up killing her husband and stabbing her while she was pregnant. And that is how he met Detective Mike Norris.
Chucky has different origin before the movie
Can you imagine a version of Child’s Play where the creepy doll was brought to life by six-year-old Andy’s murderous rage? It is a bit hard to imagine poor and adorable Andy as a troubled child, isn’t it? Fortunately, David Kirschner scrapped the idea and hired writers to present us with the backstory of a serial killer dabbling in voodoo magic.
The original title for Child’s Play was Blood Buddies and it doesn’t sound like a movie anyone would want to watch unless they were dared to do so. Don Mancini was inspired by the dolls his sister used to play with.
Those dolls would function like humans, they not only talk but also peed like human kids and their hair would grow with time. Mancini thought it would be a good idea to make a horror movie with a similar doll that bleeds. The loneliness from not having his parents around was supposed to drive him crazy and the murders wouldn’t begin until Andy makes a blood pact with the bleeding doll after cutting off his thumb. Kirschner sensed that no parents or humans in their right minds would want to buy a doll that bleeds. Just imagine a group of six-year-olds playing with a doll and constantly cutting it to see it bleed. He brought the rights to the script after seeing its potential and thanks to Damballa it got upgraded from a weird version of Fight Club to a doll possessed by the spirit of a serial killer.
Chucky is actually based on a “haunted” real-life doll
There’s one thing that horror movies have taught us and it’s that not all toys are going to be as friendly as the ones we saw in Toy Story. It’s not only Annabelle whose origins lie in a true story, Chucky too was allegedly inspired by a real-life haunted doll.
Similar to how the witches in fairy tales would put a curse on the princess, there once lived a maid who sought revenge for the abuse she had endured while working for the Otto family. What made her so dangerous was how far she was willing to go. She was a practitioner of voodoo magic, and on one happy occasion, she gifted a cursed doll to Robert Eugene Otto in 1903.
It was the only one of its kind, a giant doll dressed in a sailor costume. The doll appeared non-threatening at first, and that made Robert fall in love with the new toy instantly. Just like any other kid with a shiny new gift, Robert would carry his toy with him all the time and drag him everywhere.
People say that Robert loved the doll so much that he named it after himself. Given the number of kings who named their successors after themselves, it wouldn’t be considered an uncommon practice. It wasn’t until later that Robert found out his toy was alive. His parents would often hear an unfamiliar voice and the sound of someone giggling coming from his room.
To add to their horror, the footsteps of someone running around the house could be heard at night. These are some of the things we have seen Chucky do as well. Do you remember how Andy used to get blamed for the things Chucky did?
Similarly, Robert’s parents would often walk into his room to find him hiding under the bed, while all the furniture used to be scattered around. When confronted, the child would often say that it was Robert the doll who did that.
Someone in their right minds would have performed an exorcism and given the doll away but Robert never stopped loving his toy. Even after his marriage, he built a separate room for his doll after he inherited the house. After his death, the doll was locked away and put in the attic.
Like the plot of most horror movies, when a new family moved into the house, their ten-year-old daughter found the doll and grew fond of it. And once again, the circle of horror repeated itself.
Robert the doll is now on display at the Key West Museum, and we can only hope that he is better protected than Annabelle was at Warren’s house. If you visit the museum you might feel tempted to click a photo of the haunted doll, but that’s something he absolutely despises. Those who have clicked pictures of him without asking for permission have faced his wrath as misfortune followed them soon after. Many of them have sent apology letters to him hoping for the horror to stop. If Annabelle and Robert were ever to end up at the same museum, all hell would break loose.
He wants YOU for a new best friend – ‘Child’s Play’ (1988)
The tale of Chucky begins the night Lakeshore Strangler was getting chased down by Detective Mike Norris. Both of them fire guns at each other while running and Charles Lee Ray finds temporary shelter in a toy store. As Detective Norris closes in, Charles gets more desperate to live.
He swears he’ll find a way to return to kill the cops chasing after him. Before appearing as a cop in Child’s Play, Chris Sarandon had played villainous characters in Fright Night and Princess Bride.
In a deleted scene, Norris had donned the attire of a woman to chase after Charles Lee Ray. In fact, he can be seen throwing away a dress at the beginning of the chasing sequence. In his last moments, he chants a prayer to Damballa and thunder strikes the store.
Thinking Charles is dead, Detective Norris leaves the burnt store. When Charles Lee Ray died, a pyramid of Good Guy dolls fell upon him and he ended up possessing one of them. On another side of the town at the Barclay residence, Andy tries to fix breakfast for his mother by spilling cereal and milk all over the counter and bringing her burnt toast. Seeing an ad for the Good Guy dolls on TV, Andy wishes to get a new best friend for his birthday.
As his father had passed away and his mother was working most of the time to support them, Andy found himself alone most of the time and was looking forward to having a talking doll. Karen noticed his disappointment while opening the gifts and felt bad for not being able to give her son what he wants. When she heard a peddler was selling Good Guy dolls for cheap, she couldn’t resist the opportunity to surprise her son.
The good guy dolls were based on the buddy dolls, and Chucky was referred to as Buddy in the original script. It’s never a good idea to buy a toy from a homeless person or pick it up from the streets, as you might end up with a haunted doll, but Karen wasn’t aware of it at that moment.
That night she gets held back at work to cover for a coworker when she should rather be spending that evening with her son as it was his birthday. Her friend Maggie agrees to look after Andy until she returns.
Andy was ecstatic to finally have gotten his good guy doll and his new best friend had introduced himself as Chucky. At times, Chucky would whisper into Andy’s ears and the two would share a laugh. While seeing the news cover the event of his death, Chucky wanted to watch the 9 o’clock news but it was past Andy’s bedtime. When Maggie sends them both to his room, Chucky begins to hold a grudge against her.
After a while, Chucky had left the room on and stationed himself at the couch near the TV, and turned on the news. It angered Maggie as she thought Andy was playing a prank on her. It is never a good idea to piss off a haunted doll, but Maggie learned that too late. At first, Chucky spooked her by running around the house and she blamed it on the imagination for being alone at night. In that scene, it was Alex Vincent’s younger sister who was acting as Chucky. But Chucky appeared in front of her with a hammer and attacked her, causing her to jump out from the window. Karen returns to a crime scene only to find her apartment filled with police and yellow tapes.
The real trouble begins when the police begin to suspect Andy as the culprit behind Maggie’s death because of the footsteps on the counter. And Chucky takes advantage of the situation and continues to frame Andy for his crimes.
Back in the late eighties, special effects weren’t as evolved as they are today, but thankfully Chucky didn’t have to rely too much on CGI. Chucky was created as a robotic doll that could be remote-controlled, and at the scenes where he needed to appear more human, kid actors and body doubles would take over.
The premise of Chucky makes it appear as a borderline horror-comedy, with a doll speaking cuss words and going around killing people but it still manages to strike fear. The lesson we can take away from the first Child’s Play is to not buy toys because you don’t know which ones are haunted.
Katherine Hicks who played the character of Karen met the creator of Chucky, Kevin Yagher on the sets, and they ended up getting married to each other. The original title for the film was “Batteries not included” but it was dropped as Steven Spielberg was working on a film with the same title.
It’s Playtime… Again! – Child’s Play 2 (1990)
Dismembering a haunted doll with gunshots and burning it in the fireplace wasn’t enough to kill the soul of the serial killer possessing it. A couple of years had passed since Chucky tried to take Andy’s soul. People were skeptical of Barcley’s claims about a doll possessed by the soul of a serial killer who went around killing people and this caused Karen to get psych evaluation and Andy ended up in an orphanage.
The opening scene originally included a court scene with Karen about the hearing of the events, but it was deleted. Their claims of having a killer Good Guy Doll were causing trouble for the manufacturers of the toy.
They were desperate to prove there was no fault in the manufacturing of the dolls, and in an attempt to do so Mattson found the charred doll and had it restored at the factory. The moment Chucky’s eyes were installed, he killed one of the workers by electrocuting him. If only corporations got the memo for not resurrecting dolls possessed by serial killers, the accident could have been prevented. Chucky’s eyes were also reused in a puppet from Tales of the Crypt, and that’s why the eyes look so familiar.
The Simpsons were a simple family and had a teenage foster daughter, they were the new guardians of Andy and his foster family. He was still suffering from nightmares about Chucky coming to claim his soul and his psychiatrist thought his stories about the live doll was nothing more than a bad dream.
The Simpsons had a Good Guy doll named Tommy, and it reminded Andy of the bad memories he had with Chucky. The good guy doll was named Tommy to honor Tom Holland, the director of the original movie. Meanwhile, the devilish doll was riding in the backseat of Mattson’s car and when left alone, made a phone call to Andy’s social worker to track down his location. Chucky being Chucky, had to threaten and kill Mattson once his purpose was served. After arriving at the Simpsons, he buried Tommy underground and took his identity.
He still wanted to leave his current vessel and transfer his soul into Andy. The child’s PTSD makes the Simpsons wonder if they are emotionally equipped to care for him, but it’s something they should have thought of before bringing the kid in.
As Andy wasn’t prepared to be reshuffled into another foster house, he started playing with Tommy whenever the Simpsons were around to convince them that his condition is getting better. Chucky, no longer wanting to live as a doll, once again tried to transfer his soul into Andy by tying him up in his bed.
This time his attempts are interrupted by a sneaky teenager, as Kyle returned home way past her curfew. This time Kyle got blamed for Chucky’s actions and once again no one believed the boy when he warned them of Chucky’s return. It wasn’t enough for Chucky to torment Andy while he was home, so he followed him to school. He not only got him in trouble but ended up killing his teacher.
Chucky continues to kill everyone around Andy and the kid ends up back at the orphanage and Chucky follows him there. In a span of only four days, Chucky managed to uproot Andy’s life once again and kill almost everyone around him.
Chucky gets more screen time and sass here than in the original movie. Karen and Detective Norris don’t return for the sequel but their characters have good reasons to be absent from the scene.
Even though Catherine Hick’s character was no longer in the movie, she was present in the sets to see her husband at work. And Chucky continues to be obsessed with taking over Andy, only to realize it’s too late and he’s permanently stuck in his pint-sized doll form. The foul-mouthed serial killer delivers one-liners before killing his victims, be it Ms. Kettlewell or while threatening Kyle to lead him to the orphanage. The sequel had opened number one at the box office.
One of the most glorious deaths in the movie was that of the social worker Ms. Grace Pool, who was stabbed to death and ended up falling face over a copy machine as it continued to print out pages of her lifeless corpse. Before Grace Zabriskie was cast, Mary Steenburgen and Karen Black were considered for her role.
Grace Pool was named after a character from Jane Eyre. Andy and Kyle do manage to do some serious damage to Chucky and kill him, but going by the number of sequels you can guess that it isn’t as easy to kill a demonic doll. The adventures of the slasher doll were novelized by Mathew J Costello as a tie-in with the franchise.
Look who’s stalking! – Child’s Play 3 (1991)
Eight years had passed since Chucky got Andy kicked out of his foster home and tormented him in the orphanage. After getting crushed to pieces in the Good Guy doll factory, Chucky resurrects once again just like other killers in slasher movies.
This was the last movie in the franchise to have Child’s play in the title. Similar to how they fixate on the one person they didn’t manage to kill in all the sequels, Chucky once again wonders how Andy is doing these days. He grew up to be a troubled teenager who couldn’t forget about the things Chucky had done. Don Mancini was asked to write a script for this even before the release of the first sequel and it’s his least favorite movie in the franchise. Brad Dourif, the voice behind Chucky shared the same sentiment. The people at the Good Guy Doll factory were gearing up to relaunch the Good Guy dolls.
As Karma works in mysterious ways, Chucky ends up at the house of the CEO of the Good Guy Doll Company.
Chucky likes to make his appearance by finding creative ways to kill while delivering cheesy dialogues. So he kills President Sullivan by throwing darts at him and strangling him to death. Speaking of cheesy one-liners, Chucky talks about how there’s nothing like strangulation to get the circulation flowing.
And the Lakeshore strangler proceeds to catch up with his old best friend Andy. The orphanage thought it would be a good idea to send Andy to the military to get over his PTSD. Maybe there’s scientific logic behind how being sent to military school can help you get over the trauma of your childhood toy killing everyone around you but it’s bound to get worse when the killer doll ends up at your academy.
At the academy, he meets Colonel Cochran who is obsessed with turning everyone into a real man. Ronald Tyler was the youngest member to attend the military school and he was about to become Chucky’s new obsession.
Tyler’s amazement at seeing the Good Guy Doll commercial was identical to Andy’s expression in the first film. The school had a stereotypical jock bully and a nerd who always managed to get on his nerves. Andy met his nerdy roommate for the first time stuffed and tied up inside the closet.
Every school has a badass that stands up to the bullies and Kirsten De Silva was there to play that role. She was the only one daring enough to stand up to Shelton, the commanding officer Cadet Lieutenant Colonel who gave hell to the new cadets. Chucky arrives at the school as a gift-wrapped for Andy in the form of a Good Guy Doll.
Not thrilled with having another Chucky look alike, he gives it to Ronald, who was genuinely excited to see the toy. We know that Chucky likes to go after the people who don’t take him seriously, so Chucky was bound to come after Colonel Cochran after he threw him in the dumpster.
Death has to follow wherever Chucky is, so he slits the throat of the barber, kills the garbage truck driver, and replaces paintball guns with real bullets but to his disappointment, Colonel Cochran died of a heart attack before he could kill him. This was the first movie where Chucky had used a gun to kill someone.
Once again Andy manages to kill Chucky by the end of the film, only for the killer doll to be resurrected for another sequel. It’s not uncommon for criminals to get inspired by pop culture, just like Charles Manson was inspired by the song Helter Skelter, there were some crimes that were inflicted by Chucky.
Suzanne Capper was the victim of one of those crimes, was captured and tortured by her former friends who forced her to listen to a recording of the doll saying “Hi, I’m Chucky, wanna play?” in full volume over a hundred times.
The producer had always stood by his opinion that people who commit crimes after watching movies are disturbed, to begin with. The third installment in the series tanked in comparison to its predecessors but it was a refreshing change from seeing Chucky trying to kill an eight-year-old.
This Halloween, Chucky – gets lucky Bride of Chucky (1998)
Chucky returns in another sequel, but this time he’s not here for Andy. The story of Chucky takes a totally different form from here on. One would assume that being dead would help you from having crazy ex-girlfriend problems, but to Chucky’s dismay, he is resurrected by his ex-Tiffany. She bribed and killed a police officer to get a hold of his remains and stitched him back together.
This is the first film to introduce a new look for Chucky. As soon as Chucky was resurrected, he smothers Damien to death. He still hadn’t given up the hope of existing in a human form and he needed the amulet he was buried with to make that happen. Tiffany was no worse than Chucky and she had enjoyed watching people die as much as he did. Before the hell-crossed lovers had parted, Charles Lee Ray had presented Tiffany with a diamond ring.
To him, it was just a souvenir he picked from one of his victims but Tiffany had mistaken it as an engagement ring. Chucky being the crazy person he is, laughed at her face and ended up angering her. To retaliate, she locked him up in a playpen and presented him with a doll dressed as a bride.
As Tiffany left for a bath, Chucky used the ring the doll was wearing to break free from the playpen. He attacked Tiffany with a knife while she was watching the bride of Frankenstein. After getting knocked out, he electrocuted her and transferred her soul inside the doll dressed as a bride. And that’s the story of how Chucky ended up with a bride.
Before Tiffany had turned into a murderous doll, she had made arrangements with Jesse for Chucky to be shipped out of the state. Unaware that the doll was alive and possessed by the soul of a serial killer, he agreed to help her. The events of this film are set one month after the events of the third part, but the movies were released 8 years apart. Jesse had his own plans for running away with Jade and it looked like an offer he couldn’t refuse.
The next day he arrives to pick up the dolls and then drives away with his girlfriend. Chucky and his bride Tiffany took a cue from Toy Story and pretended to be inanimate in front of the unsuspecting couple. Jade had an overprotective Uncle who was also a Police Chief, and he always got in the way of the lovebirds driving into the sunset.
He ended up tracking Jessie’s truck, but unfortunately, he ended up meeting Chucky and Tiffany who attacked him and put him inside a board trunk. It is interesting to note that before Katherine Heigel, Julia Stiles was cast for the role of Julia, but she had dropped out to film 10 Things I hate about you.
Chucky also ends up killing the police who had detained Jesse for possession of the green Chucky was smoking. The explosion had the couple doubting that their partner was a killer but that doesn’t stop them from marrying each other. Just like Joe and Love from You, they didn’t care about what the other one was capable of.
Meanwhile, the killer dolls continue to kill, the over-possessive uncle gets stabbed to death and the pickpockets meet a similar fate. Once the corpses are found in their room, both of them start to believe they have married a killer. The suspicions don’t go away until Chucky and Tiffany reveal they are alive.
Bride of Chucky was the first movie in the franchise to parody itself while Chucky explained to Jesse how he and the missus ended up in a doll’s body. The scar from the stitches made him appear more sinister than he did in the previous movies. One of the most bizarre moments from the film was when Tiffany gives birth to a baby, only Damballa can explain how that was possible.
And one of the funniest scenes is the one where Jessie and Jade turn Chucky and Tiffany against one another.
The dialogues in Bride of Chucky are wackier than the cheesy one-liners in the previous movies. And it is so rare for villains from horror franchises to not obsess over the same victims in every sequel like Reverend Kane did in Poltergeist.
This installment was Brad Dourif’s favorite Chucky film. An album of love songs featuring Brad Dourif and Jennifer Tilly was planned, where their puppets would appear in the music videos singing for each other.
Time to Raise Some Hell – Seed of Chucky (2004)
If you thought Chucky’s relationship with his bride was complicated enough, wait till you hear about his child. This film was the last Child’s Play movie to be released in theatres before the reboot. Chris Sarandon was approached to revive his role as Mike Norris but he dropped out because of scheduling conflicts. It is also the last movie in the franchise where Chucky tries to leave his doll form.
Estranged from their parents at birth, Glen/Glenda always wondered what their parents were like.
They didn’t have a happy childhood as the kid was always belittled as an ugly doll. After seeing their parents on-screen, Glen/Glenda went to Hollywood to track them down. As Chucky and Tiffany died while Glen/Glenda was born, their vessels were now being used as a dummy in a Jennifer Tilly film. Jennifer Tilly not only appeared as herself in the movie, but she was also the voice behind the bride of Chucky.
The film also made a reference to how Tiffany and Jennifer sound alike in one of the scenes! After finding their parents’ vessels, Glen/Glenda resurrects them with the Heart of Damballa amulet.
After meeting the kid for the first time Chucky makes fun of how Glen/Glenda looks and talks about how ugly their parents must be. Upon finding out he has a child, Chucky faints while Tiffany embraces her child. As the dolls were manufactured in China, Glen/Glenda greets their parents in Japanese.
No one was sure about the gender of Glen/Glenda as most dolls aren’t given reproductive organs by the manufacturers. Chuck thinks of Glen as a boy and Tiffany treats Glenda like a daughter.
When the child learns that their parents are killers, they wonder if they are going to end up as a killer as well. Glen/Glenda was already confused about their gender and the possibility of being a killer like their parents was stressing them out. When Glen/Glenda speaks about how violence is bad, Chucky corrects them saying Violins are bad not violence. Murder was a stress-busting hobby for Chucky while it was an addiction for Tiffany.
Now that they need to set a good example for their child and become responsible parents, Tiffany decides that they should refrain from killing others and Chucky promises to do the same, but with the intention of breaking the promise.
Chucky wants to spend some quality time with his son and takes Glen to teach how to kill people for father-son bonding time. While Chucky enjoys the sight of a man getting burned by acid, Glen feels disturbed at the sight of violence.
Meanwhile, Tiffany had joined a twelve-step program to help with her killer addiction and was trying really hard to not kill anyone. While making amends, Tiffany calls even called the widow of the police officer she killed at the beginning of the last movie.
Chucky and Tiffany were still dummies on the sets of Jennifer Tilly’s film, who had just discovered she was pregnant. When she told about her condition to Redman, the possible father of the baby, he not only denied the possibility of it but also fired her from the next film.
Upon learning of it, Tiffany felt like she would fall off the wagon and called up her sponsor to talk her through it. But the call backfired and somehow ended up convincing her it was fine to have a lapse. That was all the encouragement she needed to go and gut Tilly’s boyfriend.
Seed of Chucky still has the erratic kills as the other movies, including one where Chucky pushes Britney Spears off a cliff but it is centered on family conflicts. It wasn’t Britney Spears who appeared in the film, it was her lookalike, and there were disclaimers in the TV version, stating the same.
The father-son dynamic was so complex that Glen killed Chucky at the end by going Karate kid on him while yelling are you proud of me now? The series entirely moves away from the horror genre in the Seed of Chucky and focuses on being an absurd dark comedy.
While Glen/Glenda may not have shared their parents’ dark addiction in the beginning, seeing Chucky kill their mother definitely drove them to unleash their dark side. Over the course of the film, Chucky and his family have a collective kill count of 12.
Be afraid. Be effing afraid – Curse of Chucky (2013)
After a series of sequels where they focus more on the humor than the horror, Chucky finally returns as the terrifying killer doll he is. Four years had passed since Chucky was dismembered by Glen/Glenda, but this time too, he was somehow resurrected again. Sarah was living a quiet life with her paraplegic daughter Nica, but that was about to change as Chucky arrived at their home in a mail package.
Fiona Dourif, the actress who plays Nica is the daughter of Brad Dourif. Sarah ended up throwing Chucky in the garbage as it’s dangerous to accept packages from an unknown sender. Chucky never reacted well to being thrown at the garbage and he ended up killing Sarah.
Just like Chucky had previously framed Maggie’s murder as suicide, Nica believed her mother has killed herself. Her extended family arrived the next day to help her through the grieving period. Barb’s personality was different from her sister Nica. She arrived with her husband, daughter, and full-time nanny, to help her sister put the house in order.
Her daughter Alice finds Chucky in the bathroom and thinks of him as her friend to the end. Chucky being Chucky, ends up poisoning the priest who had arrived to counsel the family. As if being poisoned wasn’t enough, his head gets severed when the firefighters try to rescue him from the car. Alice panics a bit after noticing that Chucky has disappeared.
Jillian, the babysitter, manages to calm her down and put her to bed. While an ongoing storm outside continues to mess with the phone signals. Barb was involved in a passionate affair with the nanny and no one seemed to be aware of it. After finding Chucky, Nica thought of returning the doll to Alice. As Chucky wasn’t much of a philanthropist himself, he tried to stab her leg while they were stuck in the elevator.
After Alice was reunited with her new friend, Nica began to doubt that the doll was alive and evil. While she looks up about Chucky’s murderous history on the Internet, he electrocutes and kills the nanny.
While going to check on her lover, Barb follows Chucky to the attic, mistaking him to be her daughter. Charles Lee Ray was an old family friend who was in love with Sarah. He was so crazy about her that he killed her husband, and after getting rejected, he stabbed her while she was pregnant.
He tells Barb she has her mother’s eyes before poking a knife in it. Nica knew what Chucky was capable of and that terrified her. But Ian was reluctant to believe that a pint-sized doll was capable of doing anything but realizes he was wrong after coming across the corpse of his wife and nanny.
Nica and Chucky find themselves in a final face-off, only for it to be disrupted by Ian who mistakes Nica as the murderer. The Curse of Chucky makes a lot of reference to the first film, including the elevator used in the building. It’s the only film since the original where Charles Lee Ray appears in his human form, and Andy Barcley returns for a cameo.
The film was released Video on Demand but it does have its eerie moments. In the Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky, the franchise had taken a comical turn and focused on wacky dialogue exchanges between Chucky and Tiffany.
But in the Curse of Chucky, the doll doesn’t speak until we are almost forty minutes into the movie. Even the setting is more haunted and less campy than its predecessors. It is a good reminder of why one should be effing scared of Chucky.
The knife Chucky uses in this movie is the same one he used throughout Child’s Play. Excessive make-up and lighting were used to make Brad Dourif appear similar to how he looked in the first movie. The entire movie was shot in the duration of 30 days and it took Brad Dourif only one day to record his voice as Chucky.
Friends till the end, remember?- Cult of Chucky (2017)
At the end of The Curse of Chucky, the doll had ended up in the hands of his first nemesis, and he had a grudge to settle. This film suffered from its fair share of controversies as the entire movie was leaked online 2 weeks prior to its release. The incidents in this film take place four years post-Nica’s institutionalization after she was blamed for all the murders that Chucky had committed. Her therapists had almost convinced her that it was her who had committed all the murders and Chucky was a figment of her imagination.
Meanwhile, Andy Barcley was busy torturing Chucky by deforming his face every day. Nica had been sent to another facility with less stringent security, but the doctor there thought it would be a good idea to bring in a new good guy doll for the sessions.
There were other patients in there who were suffering from multiple personality disorder, delusions about being dead, arsonists, and the guilt of unintentionally killing their baby. Most of them were terrified by the Good Guy Doll but Madeline started thinking of it as her dead baby.
What can go wrong in an institution full of mental patients if they are introduced to the lookalike of a killer doll? When the lookalike of Chucky was present, his bride couldn’t be far behind. It turns out Tiffany Valentine was now the legal guardian of Alice, and she visited Nica to inform her of her niece’s death. But she didn’t part without leaving her a gift and gave her a Good Guy Doll as a memory of Alice.
The grief of her only relative dying was too much for Nica to bear so she tried to kill herself. Chucky somehow got wind of the attempted death of his new nemesis and ended up stitching up her slit wrists.
He didn’t leave without making a kill and leaving evidence of his presence. When Nica woke up to the news of Angela dying and a message left in blood about how Chucky did it, she was once again convinced that the killer doll was real and didn’t exist in her imagination.
While Malcolm and Nica try to save Madeline, she ends up throwing her doll along with Malcolm into an empty grave. He gets rescued by the orderlies but Chucky had managed to transfer his soul into Malcolm. Chucky had made many attempts to exist in a human body and leave behind the pint-sized doll.
Now that he had managed to transfer his soul into a human, he also managed to possess multiple bodies at once. When Andy learns of the Chucky infestation in Harrogate Psychiatric Hospital, he comes up with a way to commit himself into the asylum.
From there on a number of Chucky dolls terrorize and kill the patients and staff at Harrogate, while it is up to Andy and Nica to stop them. But it was easier said than done, as Nica herself ends up being possessed by Chucky. Cult of Chucky has eerie vibes similar to its predecessor Curse of Chucky.
In the last two installments, it shifts away from the campy nature but brings a good amount of it back in the Cult of Chucky. It’s hard for franchisees to retain the same elements as the original by their seventh sequel, but it wasn’t the case with this one as it was written and directed by Don Mancini, who also wrote the script of the original film, all the sequels and even directed some of them.
Chucky has killed more people than Freddy Krueger and that is quite an achievement considering he has been trapped in the body of a doll. The charm of Chucky lies in the Good Guy Guy running around with a knife and stabbing people and he does plenty of that. Alex Vincent reprises his role as Andy since the first sequel to Child’s Play.
He did have a short cameo at the end of Curse of Chucky, but here he marks his comeback as a main character. Although Andy was well off because of the insurance payout, he was still haunted by his PTSD. Don Mancini wanted to play around with the idea of multiple Chucky’s since Child’s Play 3, but he executed his vision in the Cult of Chucky.
As the producers had trouble differentiating between the Good Guy dolls, all of them were given subtly different looks and named Buzzcut, Ragamuffin, Edwardian, and Evil Dead.
More than a toy… he’s your best friend – Child’s Play (2019) – Reboot of the original film from 1988
Chucky returned to the big screens once again, but this time as a reboot of the original film. While most of the original characters were retained, it was no longer Charles Lee Ray who was controlling the doll.
The Good Guy Dolls Company was replaced by Buddy Dolls by Kalsan Industries. While the Good Guy Doll came with the promise of being a new best friend, the new Buddi Dolls had multiple features that could be controlled with technology and help the owners in their daily lives.
The Barcley’s were a family of two and had just moved into their new apartment in Chicago. In the original, one of the good guy dolls becomes evil after being possessed by a serial killer, but the reboot took a different approach. A bitter employee had disabled the safety features of the doll he was supposed to assemble after he was fired by his supervisor.
As if meddling with the toy wasn’t enough, he killed himself by jumping out of a window. On the other side, Karen encouraged her son to make new friends. He was a teenager with a hearing impairment and Karen worked at Zed-Mart. She wanted to make the transition easy for her son and thought that a new Buddi doll would cheer him up.
She ended up bringing home the doll that the employee had tampered with. The Doll introduces himself as Chucky starts to become protective of Andy. Chucky wasn’t able to deliver on most of the technical aspects he was supposed to but he made up for it by being a good listener.
He was there to listen when Andy wanted to vent about his mom’s new boyfriend Shane. Although Chucky used to creep out Andy at times, he still taught the doll how to pull pranks on Shane and scare him. At times Chucky was a good influence on Andy as he helped him make new friends, but at the same time, he displayed violent tendencies like killing the pet cat for scratching Andy.
These tendencies were amplified after Chucky watched the Texas chainsaw massacre and picked up all the wrong things. It wasn’t long before Chucky started killing people on his own and Detective Mike Norris arrives at the crime scene and suspects Andy as the prime suspect behind the killings.
Child’s Play reboot is completely different from the original. While they retained the relationship of a single mother and her young son and how it gets affected by the involvement of a killer doll, they made a lot of changes to their backstories, but without changing their names.
None of the original creators had returned for the reboot and Chucky this time was voiced by Mark Hamil. The involvement of AI with Chucky is an interesting concept and it’s always fun to watch the doll hold a knife. It is understandable why the fans of the original would find the reboot disappointing, but it is a decent film to watch if treated as a stand-alone.
None of the original creators of Chucky were involved in this film and the story isn’t considered canonical by Don Mancini. The reboot was heavily influenced by ET, and it can be seen in Chucky’s glowing fingers and how he learns everything by watching TV.
Future of the Franchise
Chucky is set to return on the small screen as a limited series on the SyFy network on October 12. It will be a continuation of the story since the events of Cult of Chucky and it will have no connections to the reboot. Not only will Don Mancini be heavily involved in the production, but Brad Dourif will also reprise his role as the voice of Chucky.
Even the characters of Andy Barcley and Kyle are set to return and the original actors are coming back to play the roles. Jennifer Tilly is set to return as Tiffany Valentine. From the looks of the trailer, this time the story is set in a suburban town and it is up to Jake to ensure that Chucky doesn’t kill anyone. The show has a similar setting to IT and Stranger Things.
Don Mancini had also announced that the show won’t be the last of Chucky, he will continue to appear in his own shows and movies. Now, all we have to do is wait for October 12th as our favorite slasher doll returns to our screens. As we have come to the end of the video, we would like to know about your favorite Chucky kills. Have a good day and remember to not buy dolls from peddlers.