The Child’s Play series really is quite remarkable. Most of the franchise’s slasher brethren have been through one or more storyline resets by now, but Chucky has the honor of retaining the same continuity for nearly 30 years, and on October 3rd, Universal Pictures will release the seventh installment, Cult of Chucky. There were dark days for everyone’s favorite Good Guy doll, though, and for a while it seemed that Child’s Play would not (and should not) return. Against all odds, creator Don Mancini in 2013 managed to right a sinking ship and deliver one of the most thoroughly satisfying horror sequels in recent memory, Curse of Chucky. As a result, Charles Lee Ray has now unexpectedly lived on screen in the same canon for longer than Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and Michael Myers. Ahead of Cult of Chucky, let’s reflect on this franchise’s crazy history and look at how Don Mancini pulled off one hell of a course correction.

Towards the end of the slasher boom in 1988, MGM released Child’s Play, written by Don Mancini and directed by Tom Holland (no, not that Tom Holland). Unlike some slasher flicks that tease out the true nature of the villain, with this one, it’s unambiguously clear from the very first scene that the soul of a serial killer, Charles Lee Ray, has entered a Good Guy doll via a Voodoo spell. That doll winds up in the hands of the adorable Andy Barclay, and it turns out that the spell has super specific rules whereby you can only transfer your soul into the body of the first person who you reveal your true nature to. After a few obligatory ‘80s slashings, Chucky is ultimately thwarted in his attempt to possess the boy, and the film ends with the doll being shot and burnt to a crisp after Andy utters one of the great pre-kill one-liners in cinema: “This is the end, friend.”

All in all, Child’s Play holds up as an enjoyable slasher with some effective kills and a memorable villain in the foul-mouthed Chucky. He’s not particularly funny in the first film outside of the novelty of seeing a doll uttering swear words, though the scene of him cursing out two strangers in an elevator is clearly intended for a laugh. But the reason the movie works as well as it does isn’t because of Chucky; it’s because of Andy. A killer doll movie is only as strong as its primary human character, and with Andy, Mancini successfully taps into the anxiety we have as children that adults won’t take us or our fears seriously. It’s horrifying to contemplate the idea of being harassed by a supernatural creature but being unable to get others to sympathize, as they all laugh when you tell them the truth. In contrast to the murders of Jason and Freddy, being hunted by Chucky is a profoundly lonely experience.

Child’s Play was a box office success, and so Chucky’s reign of terror would continue into Child’s Play 2, in which the doll is rebuilt because the PlayPals toy company wants to prove that they’re not at fault for the murders that took place years prior. Thanks to them, Chucky continues where he left off, still being driven by the same mission of possessing Andy because those Voodoo rules from before continue to apply. We pick up with Andy as someone whose life has been torn apart by Chucky. Karen was put into psychiatric observation never to be seen again for the rest of the series, and so Andy is moved to a foster home, where Chucky returns to swap himself out for another Good Guy. Chucky gets Andy in a whole lot more trouble, and the poor kid is on his own in this ordeal until the third act, not having his mother around to believe him anymore. Along the way, Andy forms a bond with his new foster sister, Kyle, who has been in numerous homes and encourages Andy to be self-reliant. Christine Elise is pitch perfect here, and it’s the affecting relationship between Andy and Kyle that anchors the movie.

Chucky has a lot more screen time in this sequel, and he’s a bit funnier, with crude jokes about women drivers and lines like “how’s it hanging, Phil” said to a man hanging upside down. At the same time, the franchise is continuing to treat the threat posed by Chucky seriously, and the moments of levity never undermine that. It all ends in a spectacular factory showdown where Chucky is unable to possess Andy and has molten plastic poured over him. Child’s Play 2 is definitely more of the same, but it succeeds thanks largely to the last half-hour and thanks to the performances of Christine Elise and Alex Vincent. The original Child’s Play is superior, but there’s an argument to be made that Child’s Play 2 is a more entertaining watch. It’s the A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 of this series.

Things are looking up for Andy at the end of Child’s Play 2, as he has apparently disposed of Chucky and has a new mother figure in Kyle. But eight years later, in Child’s Play 3, Andy has been sent to a military academy after not functioning well in several foster homes. What happened to Kyle is anyone’s guess. Meanwhile, the Good Guy factory for some reason decides to recycle Chucky’s old parts, and so Charles Lee Ray winds up with a brand new body, which he uses to hunt Andy down yet again. Chucky is even more comedic the third time, and the comedy verges on being too much. But even so, at no point are we meant to laugh off the danger posed by the doll. As with any slasher series, the kills have to keep escalating, and so Child’s Play 3 features some iconic ones that are actually somewhat unnerving, such as the unforgettable garbage truck death.

At this point in the series, Don Mancini decides to change up the formula a bit, first by setting the movie at a military academy and then by giving Chucky someone new to go after. Because Charles Lee Ray has a fresh Good Guy doll body, the Voodoo rules evidently reset, and this time a little boy named Tyler is the one he first reveals himself to. So while the two films saw Andy as the prey and a young woman as the guardian, now the guardian is Andy himself, who must look out for Tyler as Karen and Kyle looked out for him. As sensational as Child Play 2’s factory sequence was, Child’s Play 3 comes close to topping it with a visually dazzling haunted house finale that’s ideal for revisiting around Halloween. After needing help taking down the doll the first two times around, it’s all on Andy as he shoots Chucky dead and throws him into a fan to save a young kid just like Karen and Kyle helped save him. There’s even a shot of Andy grabbing Tyler that mirrors Kyle reaching out to him in Child’s Play 2. As Andy has finally taken his life into his own hands, it feels like the franchise has come full circle.

That could have easily been the end of the series, and it was for seven years. But in 1998, after Wes Craven made horror-comedy cool with Scream and Scream 2, Child’s Play returned with perhaps the most bizarre mainstream horror sequel ever released, Bride of Chucky. Much has been made of the fact that the franchise shifts fully into comedy here, and indeed, Bride borders on self-parody in contrast to the sporadic goofiness of its predecessors. These jokes seem intended to undercut the movie’s very concept rather than to entertain us between legitimate scares; Tiffany attempts to resurrect Chucky while reading a “Voodoo for Dummies” book, for instance. But that’s not even the movie’s most fatal flaw. The biggest issue is the fact that Bride gives far too much screen time to the dolls, and it’s only with this film that it becomes clear just how important Andy was in keeping us grounded in the first three installments.

Those movies were focused primarily on Andy (and on Karen, Kyle, and Tyler), not necessarily on Chucky’s antics. That’s key because, in a film with such an absurd premise, we need believable protagonists to keep us tethered to reality, even if comedy is the primary objective. Here, the movie devotes a huge portion of the first act to Chucky and his bride, Tiffany, with the other characters feeling less significant. This creates some issues because Chucky and Tiffany are both so ridiculously over the top that scenes just consisting of them interacting without anyone else present become a bit much to take. The balance shifts as the movie goes on, and the other storyline involves a young couple, Jesse and Jade, who become murder suspects. Things definitely improve in the second act when Chucky and Tiffany are given some people to play off of. But Jesse and Jade aren’t nearly as compelling as Andy was, and some of their key character beats are interrupted by shots of Chucky smoking weed or making jerk-off motions, so it’s difficult to become invested or see things from their eyes. We ultimately don’t care about them in the same way that we cared about Andy, and as a result, the stakes are fairly low.

Needless to say, Chucky no longer makes much of an impact when he’s displayed so prominently so often. In the original trilogy, we usually only saw Chucky when he was doing something related to the plot, but here, we just sort of hang out with him, watching him play with a Speak & Spell or rock out to the radio in scenes that are only mildly amusing. It’s not dissimilar to how the Scary Movie franchise might spoof the first three Child’s Play movies. Even during kill sequences, we’re often in Chucky and Tiffany’s perspective, and so any possible tension is lost. Take the death of Warren, for instance. If this were to happen in the first three movies, we would mainly follow Warren as Chucky sneaks around or lies dormant and finally jumps out for the kill. Here, there’s a whole 45-second long bit beforehand where Chucky and Tiffany debate what weapon should be used to kill him. All in all, the horror doesn’t really work, and if the film is primarily intended to be a comedy, there should be even more humor than there is.

Unfortunately, Mancini only doubles down on all of this in the next installment, Seed of Chucky. With Jesse and Jade gone, the human protagonist is actress Jennifer Tilly. But it’s Glen, Chucky and Tiffany’s son, who is really the movie’s main character, and the story is all about his life as an orphan wanting to know about his parents and learning to reject their violent tendencies. The film is less interested in Jennifer and more interested in Glen, as evidenced by the fact that she does virtually nothing in the third act and it’s Glen who has the final showdown with Chucky. The thrust of c is a totally baffling puppet soap opera that is so patently ridiculous that the fact that it is even being put on screen is somewhat amusing until the joke wears thin. It’s kind of fun to describe but not as fun to sit down and watch, and without any believable human character to guide us, the whole thing feels rather pointless.

At least Bride of Chucky took the Jesse and Jade storyline somewhat seriously, but here, even the Jennifer Tilly plot is played for laughs, and so there are few elements of the film that feel rooted in reality. Obviously, pretty much all horror has been drained from the series by this point, but to be fair, Seed of Chucky isn’t exactly a horror film. Mancini doesn’t attempt many scares, with the primary focus being the gags like Tiffany calling the widow of a man she murdered or Chucky not liking violins. A dark comedy with a slasher villain at the center is not entirely without merit, but it’s not Child’s Play, and for that to truly work, the jokes should be more clever than Chucky not knowing what gender his kid is. Though we might have theoretically been tuning in for the villain in the first three Child’s Play movies, by the end of two films built around Chucky and his wacky family, it’s hard not to grow tired of it all. These most recent two entries are like a stew with too much spice and not enough meat or vegetables.

Seed grossed about half as much at the box office as Bride did, and though it ends with a cliffhanger, this embarrassing effort was enough to kill the franchise for almost a decade. To be fair to Chucky, Child’s Play was not the only slasher series that had been driven into the ground and had nowhere else to go. So in the ensuing years, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th were all revived with remakes that disregarded the dumber sequels in an attempt to recapture the spirit of the original. It would have made sense to do the same with Chucky, putting out a new film called Child’s Play that’s just a pure remake of the 1988 classic in order to get audiences back on board and erase all memory of Bride and Seed.

But there was a problem with this new era of remakes and reboots: it always felt somewhat disrespectful to completely toss aside the series that we grew up with as if it never happened, especially when it wasn’t necessary seeing as few of the franchises had definitive endings in the first place. While a retooling might be appropriate, must the storyline and the characters that we loved be wiped out of existence? In this case, surely there’s a way to correct the problems of Bride and Seed without ignoring the beloved killer’s 25-year history and throwing the baby out with the bathwater, right?

In 2013, that’s precisely what Don Mancini did with the utterly brilliant Curse of Chucky, a movie in which he thoughtfully considers our criticisms while also allowing the entire franchise to remain canon. The movie gets back to horror, becoming the first Chucky film in over 20 years to be built around scares. They’re pretty good scares at that, with one journey up an elevator in the dark standing out. Mancini even goes for some different kinds of horror, such as a tense sequence where the audience is aware that one character has been poisoned but we don’t know who it is. Like many revivals of horror franchises, Curse also makes clever use of modern technology, having a character place a nanny cam on Chucky and looking at the footage later on.

Far more pivotal than Mancini’s decision to get back to horror, though, is his decision to center the film around a human character again. The protagonist of Curse is not a doll but a paraplegic young woman named Nica Pierce, whose life has been unknowingly damaged by Charles Lee Ray. We immediate sympathize with her as we did with Andy decades earlier and hope that she’ll overcome, though the dynamic is different. While Andy was an innocent child whose bright future Chucky was on pace to destroy, Nica is a girl who is at the end of her rope but is presented with an opportunity to take some agency and get revenge on the man who took everything. Once again, one person becomes aware of Chucky’s true nature but they’re living in their own personal hell of no one believing them, which is the sweet spot for Child’s Play. And thankfully, that person, not a doll, is the lead of the movie.

We soon discover that unlike remakes like A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), the basis of this film was not Don Mancini asking himself how he could retell the same story; it was him asking himself how he could flesh out the story that he already told. Why was Charles Lee Ray running from the police in the opening scene of the first Child’s Play? That question remained unanswered, but as this film explains, it’s because he was in love with a woman named Sarah and murdered her husband. She called the cops, and this led to the chase scene that started it all. That doesn’t necessarily ruin any of the mystique of Charles Lee Ray. It’s just a creative way to make Curse of Chucky feel like a relevant story worth telling in the existing Child’s Play universe.

It’s so common in franchises to erase certain poorly-received sequels from history, whether it’s Halloween: H20 pretending nothing but the first two films exist or even Jurassic World only acknowledging the original and not its sequels. But although Curse of Chucky is in some ways a rejection of Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky, it does not fully abandon those films and instead incorporates some of their positive elements, primarily Jennifer Tilly as well as Chucky’s messed up look. The film actually uses our belief that it will likely ignore the previous two entries to set up an unexpected and shocking twist: Chucky’s cleaner appearance suggests that only the first three movies are canon, but it’s later revealed that he has been wearing makeup, and he retains the same stitches from Bride and Seed. As it turns out, this movie is a direct sequel to Seed and not a reboot at all.

Mancini also plays with our expectations of what a Child’s Play movie even is, setting up a little girl who we assume will be the primary target of Chucky’s terror since she’s the first one to interact with him. In reality, this girl disappears for the whole third act, and Chucky’s attempt to possess her happens as sort of an afterthought. This time, Chucky wisely hides the girl away from everyone else, and his plan seems to involve waiting to go after her until he’s killed all of the adults. After being interrupted by adults so many times, Chucky has finally learned a lesson on how to handle possessing little kids. Mancini manages to build a final half-hour that is fresh and doesn’t recycle exactly what we’ve seen several times before. He also leaves us on a dark note by for the first time ending a Child’s Play movie without the death of Chucky. The doll remains “alive” as Nica is hauled away to a mental institution.

With Cult of Chucky, Mancini looks to be making all of the right decisions. Rather than shifting focus back to Tiffany or Chucky, the main focus seems to be remaining on Nica, a fantastic character whose journey will apparently center this series and keep us anchored as Andy did in the original trilogy. And speaking of Andy, he’s set to return to help Nica like Han Solo in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Whether Mancini can keep the franchise going in the right direction remains to be seen, but the movie’s trailer suggests that we’ve got another worthwhile sequel on our hands.

Even if Cult does not meet the standard set by Curse, Child’s Play is a franchise that can teach some valuable lessons about revitalizing a dying brand. After three fun slasher flicks that occasionally peppered in some dark humor, Don Mancini erred by shifting the focus to the villain and not centering the film around anything resembling reality. The result was two films of mediocre self-parody that desperately lacked a compelling lead character. But with Curse of Chucky, it was immensely gratifying to see Mancini bring the series back to its roots while embracing its rich history, respecting our memories of the original and expanding on what came before. As studios look to bring Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and hopefully Freddy Krueger back on screen in the coming years, they should look to Curse of Chucky to see how it’s done.