Child’s Play creator Don Mancini has been chatting about what we can expect from his upcoming Chucky TV series, which Syfy ordered earlier this year before our eternal winter of discontent the lockdown began.
In a new interview with Syfy Wire, Mancini reflected on keeping Chucky alive and relevant across several decades, noting that the murderous doll has represented everything from “consumerism run amok” to becoming “a symbol for LGBTQ rights” over seven movies under the Hannibal and Channel Zero writer’s watchful eye.
“We’ve sort of embraced, over the years, a kind of specific gay identity for the franchise,” Mancini said. “I think it’s just being attentive to what is going on in the culture and what is going in the zeitgeist at any given time, and then using Chucky to get at those issues in an interesting, fun way.”
Chucky will be a continuation of the universe Mancini has meticulously developed, from his earlier, more straightforward horror entries, to his more bonkers reemergence in Bride of Chucky and beyond. Faces from Chucky’s past have popped up as the film series has progressed, but it’s been a while since we saw his son Glen, voiced by The Lord of the Rings‘ Billy Boyd. It seems unlikely he’ll make a comeback here, as Mancini teases that although his new TV series will bring back some unexpected characters from past movies, it will seek to capture the essence of the franchise’s beginnings.
“With this TV show, our mission has been to preserve the straightforward scariness of the original film or the first couple of films,” he said. “But at the same time, continue on with this ever-expanding tapestry of consistent story that we’ve spun over the course of seven movies and 30-some years. I think fans are really gonna love to see the new characters that we introduce into this realm and just to see how they came off of our classic characters. Not just Chucky, but some of the others that you may be hoping to see. There’s a good chance they may turn up.”
Chucky will certainly have to evolve if he’s going to keep causing his own delirious brand of havoc in an age where kids are mainly glued to their screens, however, and it’s a direction Mancini has embraced in the new show.
“One thing I think I can probably safely say is that it’s a look at what it means to be a kid today in the 21st century, as distinct from what it was like to be a kid in the 1980s, when we first showed up on the scene,” Mancini mused. “That’s one thing I think people can look forward to and thinking about: ‘How does Chucky operate in a world where kids spend so much of their time on social media?’, for example. Playing video games, interacting with one another on social media as opposed to in a park, which is what we might have depicted 30 years ago. I think the prospect of seeing Chucky sharpen his skills and add to his toolbox, some of the technical goodies that we have at our disposal now, that’s something I think people will find pretty interesting.”
He added, “It’s so important to give Chucky new weapons, new strategies, and new targets, new goals … Chucky has a different goal in the TV show than he’s ever had before, and it’s specifically something that is designed to evoke something that’s going on in the zeitgeist today.”
Here’s the official synopsis of the series, courtesy of Syfy:
“After a vintage Chucky doll turns up at a suburban yard sale, an idyllic American town is thrown into chaos as a series of horrifying murders begin to expose the town’s hypocrisies and secrets. Meanwhile, the arrival of enemies — and allies — from Chucky’s past threatens to expose the truth behind the killings, as well as the demon doll’s untold origins as a seemingly ordinary child who somehow became this notorious monster.”