BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED: THE HISTORY OF CHUCKY

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CONTENTS CHILD’S PLAY’ by Robert Ebert

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A KILLER COMPANION IN ‘CHILD’S PLAY’ by Caryn James

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HOW ‘CHILD’S PLAY’ SURVIVED BAD TEST SCREENINGS TO BECOME A HORROR CLASSIC by David Weiner

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FOUR REASONS CHILD’S PLAY 2 IS BETTER THAN THE ORIGINAL

by James Swift

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WHY CHILD’S PLAY 3 DESERVES MORE LOVE THAN IT GETS by Nat Brehmer

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1988

CHILD’S PLAY

BY ROGER EBERT

What is it about dolls that makes them

seem so sinister? Why is it that kids in the movies always seem to share some evil secret with their dolls? And why is it that when you see a doll on a shelf, its eyes seem to move by themselves? I think that when we were kids, we all secretly believed that our dolls were up to something while we were asleep. And the movies can exploit that fear, because most of us are not aware that we carry that secret around as part of the subconscious trauma that makes life so interesting.

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“Child’s Play” is a cheerfully energetic horror film of the slam-bang school, but slicker and more clever than most, about an evil doll named Charles Lee Ray, or “Chucky.” This doll has been possessed by the mind and soul of the Lake Shore Strangler, a Chicago mass murderer who studied voodoo from a black magician.

Cut to Karen Barclay (Catherine Hicks), a widow who works as a sales clerk at Carson Pirie Scott. Her son wants a new kind of doll he’s seen advertised on TV, but she can’t afford the $100 price tag, so she buys one cheap from a peddler in the alley. No prizes for guessing which Lake Shore Strangler has possessed this doll.

Once Chucky the doll is home, he stays quiet around the adults but strikes up a friendship with Karen’s son, Andy (Alex Vincent). Chucky gets Andy to do favors for him, like carrying him into the living room so he can see the toy-store explosion on the late news.

And when the baby-sitter gets nosy, Chucky plants a claw-hammer between her eyebrows and sends her crashing through a window to the ground far below.

“Child’s Play” is better than the average False Alarm movie because it is well made, contains effective performances, and has succeeded in creating a truly malevolent doll. Chucky is one mean SOB. The movie also has an intriguing plot device, which is that nobody, of course, will believe that the doll is alive. Little Andy tries to tell them, but they won’t believe him. Then his mom realizes that Chucky is moving and talking, even though his batteries were not included. They won’t believe her.

Film Note: The claw-hammer scene is a case study of the False Alarm, a basic device in all horror movies of the Mad Slasher sub-genre.

Whenever there is a scare, and the scare turns out to amount to nothing, the movie takes a beat and then hits with the real scare.

After the police detective (Chris Sarandon) is nearly strangled by the little demon, who wrecks his squad car, the cop finally believes that Chucky is for real. (Curiously, in the next scene, the cop meets with the mom but doesn’t even mention what has just happened to him; in a movie like this, it takes a lot to hold your attention.) Second Film Note: The movie ends with superb demonstrations of two other conventions in all Mad Slasher movies. The first is that once you kill the monster, he is never really dead. He looks dead, he’s burned to a crisp and riddled with bullet holes, but then at a moment of peace and quiet we get another Whammo! Moment, and the god-awful thing is still alive. The second convention of these movies is that the door is always left open for a sequel. “Child’s Play” handles that with an ironic touch. The movie’s last shot is of an open door.

“ WA N N A PL AY? ”

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A Killer Companion in ‘Child’s Play’

By Caryn James

Even before a killer doll turns up in

‘’Child’s Play,’’ you may feel you’ve dropped into ‘’The Twilight Zone’’ -the television show, not the place. As a detective chases a murderer down a murky Chicago street and into a toy store, the scene looks so television-perfect, so shallow, artificial and lurid, that you expect the camera to pull back and reveal that we’ve really been watching television. Though the film never becomes so blatantly ironic, the television look suits Tom Holland’s clever, playful thriller. Straddling the line between sendup and suspense, ‘’Child’s Play’’ occupies the narrow, self-conscious space that is truly ‘’Twilight Zone’’ territory.

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When the detective (Chris Sarandon) shoots the scraggly-looking ‘’Lakeshore Strangler’’ (Brad Dourif), lightning flashes over the toy store and the murderer begins to chant. He throws his departing soul into the nearest available body - a three-foot-tall talking doll called a Good Guy. Soon, 6-year-old Andy gets a birthday present from his Mom - a Good Guy doll with Mr. Dourif’s chilly blue eyes and thin voice. ‘’My name is Chucky and I’m your friend to the end,’’ he tells Andy. He also tells him he wants to stay up and watch the 9 o’clock news, but the baby sitter, Maggie, says no.

‘’How did Aunt Maggie fall out the window?’’ Andy’s worried mom (Catherine Hicks) asks later. ‘’Chucky did it,’’ the boy blurts out, and instead of being rewarded for his honesty he is branded a bad seed.

Mr. Holland, the director and one of the screenwriters, borrows heavily from his own ‘’Fright Night,’’ a 1985 spoof in which a teen-ager spends the first half of the film trying to convince adults that a vampire lives next door and the second half trying to kill off the vampire (played by Mr. Sarandon). Similarly, in ‘’Child’s Play,’’ only the audience believes Andy at first. Eventuallly Chucky bites Mom and tries to slash the detective, so they become less skeptical. Originality is not the point of ‘’Child’s Play,’’ though. It’s the deft wit and swift editing that keep us off guard, no matter how predictable the plot.

The freshest twist in the film is Andy, who comes to battle Chucky one-on-one. When the doll (the walking, talking Chucky is actually a puppet) arrives at the hospital where Andy is being observed, no one believes the boy’s cries that ‘’Chucky is here and he’s going to kill me!’’ In a dark operating room, the 6-year-old’s resourcefulness is pitted against the doll’s criminal mind. Alex Vincent is wonderfully natural as Andy; he has a crying scene that makes most Method actors look like amateurs.

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‘’Child’s Play,’’ which opens today at the Embassy 2 and other theaters, has some limp dialogue among the clever touches. Its appeal is clearly for upscale horror fans rather than a general movie audience. Yet it is a fitting successor to the classic television horror stories it takes off from. As Rod Serling did in ‘’The Twilight Zone,’’ Mr. Holland treats his audience intelligently. You don’t believe in killer dolls, he suggests, and neither do the perfectly reasonable people in this film; it’s all a game. He creates an artifice with just a tiny chink to admit true horror: the most reasonable people on the screen believe in the living, murderous doll.

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CHILD’S PLAY, directed by Tom Holland; screenplay by Don Mancini, John Lafia and Tom Holland; director of photography, Bill Butler; edited by Edward Warschilka and Roy E. Peterson; music by Joe Renzetti; production designer, Daniel A. Lomino; produced by David Kirschner; released by MGM/UA. At the Embassy, Broadway at 47th Street, and other theaters. Running time: 88 minutes. This film is rated R.

“CHUCKY DID IT!”

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In the last months of 1983, fren-

zied consumers battled each other in the toy-aisle trenches of Sears, Macy’s and other stores to get their hands on Coleco’s coveted Cabbage Patch Kids for their children in time for the holidays. In 1985, Hasbro’s My Buddy doll followed suit by courting the then-controversial idea that boys should play with dolls, not just action figures. Intrigued and inspired

by Madison Avenue’s attempts to disrupt children’s traditional consumer habits for an almighty dollar, UCLA screenwriting student Don Mancini tapped into the zeitgeist by writing a dark psychological tale about a boy and his doll that turns deadly.

Three years later, Child’s Play hit theaters on November 9, 1988, winning the weekend at the box office and jolting the horror genre by unwittingly launching what has become one of the most enduring and consistent horror franchises of all time.

How ‘Child’s Pla Test Screening Horror

“I thought this was a fertile subject and right for a genre prism that hadn’t really been dealt with much,” says Mancini, who grew to recognize the coercive nature of selling children’s products at an early age thanks to his father, an agent of the advertising industry.

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BY DAVID

ay’ Survived Bad gs to Become a Classic

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Strongly influenced by Trilogy of Terror (the segment with the Zuni fetish doll that chases Karen Black), the creepy dummy in Magic and the “Living Doll” episode of TheTwilight Zone with Talky Tina, Mancini had a well versed knowledge of the killer doll trope that existed in the horror world and saw an opening to “treat the doll as a full-fledged character” with satirical shades.

Fascinated by animatronics, he was eager to test the boundaries of what a mechanized character could do onscreen: “I recognized post-Gremlins that they were sophisticated enough now that the doll could convey emotions and a characterization, and you could give him dialogue, stuff that really hadn’t been done that much before. The idea was always to have this story about a little boy crying wolf about his doll, and that doll becomes this f-bomb-dropping, wisecracking terror.”

While still at UCLA, Mancini assembled his ideas for a script called Batteries Not Included (prior to the 1987 release of the Steven Spielberg-produced film of the same name): “It was always a body-count movie structured with these murders happening in this kid’s life; the kid is crying wolf and he’s insisting the doll did it.

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Nobody believes him, the mom and the authorities are concerned that the kid is a budding psychopath, and ultimately the doll goes after the mom and the boy himself,” Mancini tells The Hollywood Reporter. “In the original premise, Chucky — or Buddy as he was called then — was not possessed by a serial killer.

Instead, in my script, the supernatural inciting incident was different.”

That plot catalyst tied into the script’s new title, Blood Buddy.

“One of the features the Good Guy dolls had was fake blood in them, because I was inspired by my sisters’ dolls — they peed, you could make their hair grow — and I thought in the context of a horror movie, how awesome to have a doll that would bleed,” Mancini says. “And since we were doing a satire on marketing, the idea was that when you’re playing with the doll, if you played too rough with it the latex skin would break and then this blood would start to seep out, so you had to go out and buy official Good Guy band-aids to put on. It was just a way to sell products. … So the way that the doll came to life was that because Andy is a lonely kid — no dad around, his mom is a busy working mother — in that classic rite of brotherhood he cuts his own thumb and the doll’s thumb so they’ll be best friends forever —‘friends ’til the end’ — and after that the murders start.”

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Mancini’s original storyline gave the murders a more psychological association, with the doll chasing down the boy’s various enemies out of vengeance. “Chucky was like an expression of the kid’s unconscious rage,” he says. “In the Blood Buddy script, Chucky only comes alive when Andy’s asleep. The way the rules were, we gradually come to understand that because Chucky is the embodiment of Andy’s unconscious he decides if he kills the kid then Andy will be asleep forever and he’ll be alive forever.”

Enter David Kirschner, who was producing the animated fable An American Tail for Amblin Entertainment and had created the Rose Petal Place toys, books and movies on top of work for Strawberry Shortcake and Jim Henson children’s products.

“I really wanted to prove that I could do something scary because I didn’t want to be pigeonholed just in animation,” says Kirschner. “I am someone who strongly believes that children have the most glorious imaginations by day, but by night they have the darkest of imaginations.”

Based on Mancini’s detailed descriptions of the freckled, red-headed doll and his overalls/ striped shirt ensemble in the script (but not the original idea of Chucky having a Flock of Seagulls-styled ‘80s ‘do), Kirschner first brought Chucky to life as a graphite pencil drawing, brandishing a knife in a dark and creepy corridor. He presented the compelling likeness at pitch meetings as an enticement and soon multiple studios wanted to make the movie. United Artists was the winner, and brought on Freddy’s Nightmares director John Lafia to punch up the script.

While developing projects for Disney, Kirschner stumbled onto Mancini’s script, which had already made the rounds in town as a spec and had been passed over. He immediately connected to the premise, optioned Mancini’s script, and then injected the concept of serial killer Charles Lee Ray’s soul inhabiting the doll’s frame after being killed in a toy store.

“That’s the Frankenstein moment,” says Kirschner.

“That’s what brings the character to life from flesh — or plastic in this case — to a moving thing, a monstrous psycho whose soul is stuck in that of the doll. Charles Lee Ray were the guys that haunted my childhood: Charles Manson, Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray.”

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S 1990

Five Reasons Child’s Play 2 is Better Than The Original

by James Swift

2020 marks thirty years since Child’s Play 2 was released theatrically, and a good three decades down the line, the debate still rages on: Is it truly a better movie than the 1988 original? It’s a discussion that’s bound to lead to some spirited conversation, if not an outright horror nerd donnybrook. And while both sides certainly have their merits, I find myself siding with the camp that prefers the 1990 sequel.

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One: The Emphasis is Actually on Chucky The same way many horror purists believe Freddy

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Krueger didn’t become The Freddy Krueger until Elm Street 3, I firmly believe that the concept of Chucky didn’t fully come to fruition until part two. Remember, in the first movie, we didn’t even know that Chucky was the killer until almost an hour into it, so for the most part in the 1988 flick, Chucky was relegated to, you know, just laying around the set. But there’s no mystery element in Child’s Play 2, and from the outset we know that Chucky is the one responsible for all the murder and mayhem. This allows Brad Dourif to truly go full ham in the role, bringing a sense of grandiloquent showmanship to the character that the original film was lacking. While Child’s Play may have introduced Chucky to the horror pantheon, Child’s Play 2 is the movie that solidified the villain as one of the all-time icons of the slasher subgenre — if not the single most charismatic horror movie antagonist of all-time.

Two: It Strikes the Perfect Balance Let’s be real here. The idea of an evil,

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murderous Cabbage Patch Doll is inherently silly, and the more you try to play the concept seriously, the lamer it gets. Thankfully, Don Mancini penned the script for Child’s Play 2 with tongue planted firmly in cheek, eschewing the “straight” thriller dynamics of the first flick for a moderately more self-aware (and decisively more comedic) screenplay. But while there’s certainly a fair bit of quasi-sardonic, self-mocking comedy in the script, that doesn’t mean it skimps out on the scares. Indeed, no other Child’s Play movie does as good a job at balancing the yuks and the genuine suspense as part two.

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Outside of the claw-hammer to the back of the

noggin kill (which, admittedly, is a fantastic one), most of the kills in the first Child’s Play movie were pretty humdrum — if not downright goofy, as is the case with the infamously lame voodoo doll scene. Needless to say, Child’s Play 2 ups the ante with not only a higher overall quotient of kills, but some Chucky-coordinated homicides that remain some of the finest in the annals of the slasher subgenre. The school marm getting battered to death with a yardstick? The social worker getting flayed alive next to the Xerox machine? The guy from Ally McBeal getting suffocated with a plastic bag? And of course, we have to give props to the flick’s coup de grace, the scene where the unlucky toy factory inspector gets his pupils poked out by a pneumatic press — it certainly gives new meaning to the phrase “the eyes have it,” doesn’t it?

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Three: The Kills are Way More Impressive

Four: Kyle is One of the Best Horror Heroines

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Yes, Catherine Hicks did a fantastic job playing An-

dy’s mom in the first Child’s Play movie, but at the end of the day, there really wasn’t anything that new about said performance. I mean, movies about mothers protecting their kids from supernatural hokum have been a staple of the horror genre since its inception, and it’s not like she showed that much charisma while being chased around her apartment by a homicidal My Buddy doll. In my humble opinion, Christine Elise gave us a far more original and endearing heroine in her portrayal of Kyle in CP2, the rebellious teenage protectorate who transforms from your stereotypical angst-ridden early ‘90s mallrat into a mini-Sarah Conner with really questionable taste in hats.

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J s e v r e s e D 3 y a l P s ’ d l i h Why C s t e G t i n a h T e v o L e r o M r e m h e r B t a

by N

Child’s Play is pretty well regarded as one of the

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major horror franchises. It ranks right up there with A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween and Friday the 13th. Chucky is a worldwide icon and a major figure in the horror genre. He’s been scaring and entertaining audiences for over twenty-five years now. The franchise is unique in that it is one of the few horror series in which every entry has been penned or co-pened by the same writer, that being Don Mancini. This has done a lot to keep the series fresh. Each movie stands apart from the others.

None of them repeat themselves and they all take the story in new directions.

Child’s Play is, naturally, the immortal classic. Child’s

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Play 2 is widely considered to be a strong follow up with some of the most fondly remembered scenes in the whole series, including the showdown in the toy factory. Bride of Chucky divides fans a little bit, but it has more admirers than detractors and most enjoy the black sense of humor and the way it works in comedy without losing sight of the horror.

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On this spectrum, in the overall scope of the franchise, Child’s Play 3 is just kind of there. It came out less than a year after the second and this spectrum, therushed. overallWhile scopethis of the franchise, Child’s most On people felt it was ainbit Play 3 true, is justthat kind of there.

It came is probably doesn’t change theout factless than a year after theone second most people feltseries. it was a bit rushed. While this that it’s of theand best entries in the Don is probably true, thata doesn’t change theI fact that it’s one of the Mancini has never been huge fan of it, but in the series.

Mancini has never been a huge think best thereentries are things that comeDon through in the fanthat—even of it, but I ifthink there plan are things that come through in the writing he didn’t on them— that—even if he didn’t plan“Chucky on them—work really well. It’s work writing really well.

It’s more than simply Goes to Military School.” Instead, it examines the concept of a Chucky film set at a military academy from every possible angle.

This has never been an overtly macho franchise, and Child’s Play 3 comments on that. It’s about a killer doll, an ambiguous toy that could be played with by either boys or girls and Chucky’s aggressive need to hold onto his masculinity despite his appearance has been a part of the doll’s character from the very beginning. Now, there’s really a whole movie based around it. With everything thrown in his way to keep him from achieving his goal, it’s not until somebody actually puts lipstick on the doll that Chucky utters the words “This means war.”

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Though it may be a silly sequel to a movie about a killer doll, Child’s Play 3 is inherently about the nature of masculinity and gender roles in general.

We have a supporting cast of guys who all think they’re the toughest badass on the block. Yet our central characters are Andy, who is as far from a macho hero as you can get, Tyler, a young boy who still plays with dolls despite being older than Andy was in the original, and then there’s the meek and mousey Whitehurst who is afraid to act on anything until he winds up sacrificing himself to save the others. The only truly capable character in the entire movie is De Silva, who is a girl. She’s the one who can handle pretty much everything. She’s the actual macho hero who shows Andy his own inner strength as the feature builds to its climax.

The men at the military academy may think they’re as tough as it gets, but they can’t find a way to survive the killer doll in their midst. The point is made especially clear when Colonel Cochran, the hardass man who runs this place and has survived multiple tours in Vietnam, takes one look at Chucky and then promptly has a heart attack and dies.

Then you have the barber, who’s entire job is based on providing these young men with a traditionally masculine appearance, who attempts to play with the doll when no one is around to watch him.

Definitely worth pointing out that Child’s Play 3 is the only major slasher film in which no female characters die. Yes, people might point out that it’s a military school and a male cast, but there are female characters present and all of them survive. Only the guys are killed. On top of the smart script and the surprising social commentary, Child’s Play 3 is simply a fun and entertaining horror movie. Chucky is at his meanest and scariest here. Replacing paintball ammo with real ammo is still one of the cruelest things the little doll has ever done.

The fantastic climax, set at a carnival, is just as good as the Good Guy factory ending of Child’s Play 2. There’s no real reason for this one to fall by the wayside. It’s one of the better slasher sequels of the ‘90’s, and definitely deserves way more praise than it seems to get. At the very least, it doesn’t deserve to be the forgotten entry in the series, because there’s a lot here that’s worth remembering. In addition to contributing to Wicked Horror, Nathaniel Brehmer has also written for Horror Bid, HorrorDomain, Dread Central, Bloody Disgusting, We Got This Covered, and more.

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