The new Child’s Play is hardly the first horror remake, but it’s one of the more complicated ones in recent memory. The original franchise is still going strong at Universal, but MGM holds the rights to the original, allowing them to remake only that film. In other words, they can’t touch the sequels; and they also aren’t incorporating every element from the original.
For example, in the new film Chucky isn’t a doll possessed by the soul of a serial killer, he’s an artificial intelligence with all the safeties off, which learns to kill through tragic misunderstandings and cultural osmosis, like watching Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.
But the need to differentiate the new Child’s Play from the other franchise didn’t stop there. It actually got in the way of one of the kills planned for Lars Klevberg’s new film.
“I mean, this is a re-imagination for the first one,” Klevberg told Bloody-Disgusting in a recent interview. “Like, the idea. But still there are some strange rules about all these law things.”
“Like, even if it resembled something from the other movies – from the first Child’s Play movies, like 2, 3 and also some of the Chucky movies – you couldn’t go into that, even if it wasn’t anything quite near it but it kind of felt similar, you couldn’t do it,” Klevberg explained.
“I think one story about that is the Shane kill, when he takes off his face,” Klevberg continued, referring to the death of David Lewis in the film. “In the original draft, Chucky chops off his head. So he puts the whole head on the desk for Andy, but apparently, they do it in the second or third one or something, so we couldn’t do that.”
“I was like, that’s ridiculous. Why can’t we? Like, they do that in any other movie,” Klevberg said. “No, we can’t, it’s not okay. So then you’re forced [to] come up with something different, and an idea that I had was, ‘Okay, can he chop off his face and stick it to a watermelon?’ ‘Like yeah, sure, that you can do.’ ‘Great, let’s do it.’”
Cutting off David Lewis’s face is a shocking moment in the film, and so is wrapping it in gift wrap and accidentally giving it to a neighbor, but the whole sequence is foreshadowed by that scene earlier on, when Chucky and Andy are watching a similar moment from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.
And yet, as clearly as a line can be drawn between the kill and that movie, Klevberg says that was actually “a happy coincidence.”
“In the script, it was just saying, like, ‘a cheesy horror movie,’ when they’re watching the movie, the horror movie,” Klevberg revealed. “And I had some ideas but sometimes it dials down to what movies are available, what the studio can afford and all that. They gave me a list and we watched, like, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [2] and we’re like, ‘That’s a lot of gore and violence that will sell the idea that he’s learning through his observations, or his surroundings.’”
“But then it’s like, wait, you know that scene when he’s holding up that [face]? That’s brilliance. That’s a coincidence, actually. So let’s use that,” Klevberg said. “So it doesn’t oversell it but for the ones that backtrack a little bit, they’ll see that. ‘Oh, he probably got the idea from that movie.’”
Lars Klevberg’s Child’s Play is now playing, with all of its heads intact! (The faces, not so much.)
