Hardcore fans of Child’s Play probably know every little thing there is to know about it by now, but an article went up on THR yesterday that dug into some interesting aspects of the original film, which overcame a disastrous round of early test screenings and went on to become a franchise-starting classic. Child’s Play, also, wasn’t actually even the original title.
Before Tom Holland came on board to direct, an original version of writer Don Mancini‘s script was titled Blood Buddy, and the voodoo aspect wasn’t yet part of the story.
“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,” Mancini explained to THR, recalling the film’s early origins. “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. 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.”
Mancini continued, “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. Chucky was like an expression of the kid’s unconscious rage. 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.”
Ultimately, it was producer David Kirschner who came up with the idea of a serial killer putting his soul into the body of a doll, and Chucky was born in the newly titled Child’s Play.
The rest, well, it’s horror history.
