Interviews
Don Mancini Reveals How “Hannibal” Inspired Chucky’s Move to the Small Screen [Interview]
The seventh installment in the Chucky franchise, Cult of Chucky, ended with some significant dangling threads and the tease of a major returning player. Instead of following it up with another movie, director Don Mancini instead let the killer Good Guy loose on television. It was a smart move; the first season of “Chucky” interwove new characters with legacy characters and expanded the mythology in massively surprising ways.
When speaking with Bloody Disgusting about “Chucky,” series creator Mancini revealed the inspiration behind the franchise’s move from film to TV: Bryan Fuller’s “Hannibal.” Mancini, who’d produced and written episodes of “Hannibal,” drew from personal experience when developing the next stage for Chucky.
CHUCKY — “An Affair to Dismember” Episode 108 — Pictured in this screengrab: Chucky — (Photo by: SYFY/USA Network)
“One of the reasons I wanted to bring Chucky into television was because of the very nature of television, the way it works, the way it’s run; it invites that level of collaboration. I experienced it on Hannibal and Channel Zero. I found it particularly instructive on Hannibal because it was an established movie franchise and literary franchise that now had made its way into television, but with a very specific vision that Bryan Fuller had. When I worked on that show, one of the things that was so exciting about it was that it felt in a way like fanfiction done by experts. A lot of what you do is speculate, as Bryan did with Hannibal. It’s like, okay, one thing they’ve never done is depicted Hannibal before he was caught when he was a practicing psychiatrist,” Mancini explains.
“If you’re a fan of something like that, as I was, you do spend some time fantasizing about that. What would’ve been Hannibal like in practice? What would it have been like to have been a patient of Hannibal Lecter? I think that that was a fundamental appeal of that show. The making of the show was Bryan bringing his own amazing talent and vision, but also the talents and genuine enthusiasm and fan boyishness and fan girlishness of seven or eight like-minded Hannibal fanatics,” Mancini continues.
“I realized if I did that with my own franchise, we could do something really amazing. Because Bryan had done it with Hannibal. That was the initial inspiration for bringing Chucky to TV, when I worked on Hannibal.”
From there, Mancini used that inspiration to delve into the dangling plot threads from Cult of Chucky. “I deliberately set up a bunch of different cliff hangers with the intention specifically of getting into the ramifications of those cliff hangers in the TV series because I knew that we were doing such potentially juicy stuff like Nica becoming possessed by Chucky. It’s such a big left turn that I felt like the ideal way to address the ramifications would be with television because you have so much room at your disposal, so much storytelling room, as opposed to just a film. You could do any individual 90-minute film, say on the origins of Charles Lee Ray or something, but it would take up a whole film. Do you know what I mean?”
Transitioning to TV series didn’t just allow Mancini and the team to play and expand upon new ideas, it allowed them to spend less time setting up familiar concepts thanks to a shorthand. Mancini says, “One of the things that we’ve learned to do over the decades when we want to reinvent the franchise, it always seems to work by establishing the new milieu and the new characters first, because Chucky himself gives us really handy storytelling, shorthand. You don’t have to have seen a Chucky movie to get easily caught up that Chucky is a doll from the eighties who was possessed by the soul of a serial killer, and he kills people.”
CHUCKY — “An Affair to Dismember” Episode 108 — Pictured in this screengrab: Chucky — (Photo by: SYFY/USA Network)
Mancini adds, “With Bride of Chucky, then Curse of Chucky, and now with the TV series, each time what we’ve done is we establish the new milieu and the new characters and get you involved in that and Chucky. Then we start feathering in the legacy characters and the legacy storylines and bring them in in hopefully surprising ways. I mean, I always wanted to try to do, if not the opposite of what you expect, just something a bit fresh and different.”
The inaugural season of “Chucky” did indeed deliver on fresh and different. Stay tuned for more from Bloody Disgusting’s chat with Mancini, where we dig into the season’s mythology, the show’s surprising new love triangle, and much more.
Season One of “Chucky” is available to stream on Peacock now.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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