Chucky is a sweet-looking ‘Good Guy’ doll which becomes hideously evil when its body is inhabited by the soul of a killer.
Like many other movie stars, Chucky’s off-screen persona is totally unlike his nasty behaviour on camera. Around the set, he loved to crack up cast and crew alike by dancing, telling jokes, doing impressions, singing and laughing.
The most elaborate and sophisticated ‘creature’ ever built for film, Chucky was created by David Kirschner and designed and operated by Kevin Yagher and eight members of his staff. Actually, nine Chuckies were made for Child’s Play: The simple ‘toy’ doll which appears at the beginning; a doll which could stand without visible means of support; a walking doll; a couple of hand-puppets which could sit, flail and bite for use in close-ups and expendable stunt dolls for hurling against walls or other similarly brutal treatment called for in the script.
Creating the dolls required 45 sheets of plastic for the shells, hundreds of pounds of plaster for the moulds, and 30 gallons of silicone rubber for the face and hands. In addition to the complete dolls, the dollmakers turned out 50 pairs of interchangeable hands, 35 costumes and 20 pairs of shoes. 500 feet of cable was used for the manual controls.
Chucky’s face was more expressive than many human ones. He could look sad or mean. He could even squint, scowl or smile because of 17 servo motors attached to little tabs strategically placed inside his realistic-looking skin. One of the most fascinating pieces of equipment was a headbrace-transmitter which replicated movements of the puppeteer’s face on Chucky. Four joysticks positioned the lips for making different vowels and consonants of words which were later dubbed in by Brad Dourif. The doll’s brows, baby blues and mouth were operated by three puppeteers using remote control units. Two more operated the arms, one the hands, another the head and a lead puppeteer controlled the body and cued the others.
An astonishing amount of coordination had to be achieved among them for even the simplest movements. If seven puppeteers moved simultaneously but the head was a second slow or the eyes an inch in the wrong direction, the effect was ruined.
‘At first, Chucky was like a little baby deer just starting out, stumbling and falling all the time. Then it was amazing,’ enthused Yagher. ‘Even to the guys who controlled him, it seemed as if he was coming alive before our eyes.’
In the end, to all those who worked with him on Child’s Play, he wasn’t a doll. He was just … Chucky.
Production notes
A contemporary review
That toys have a life of their own is an undisputed fact among nursery occupants, writers of children’s books, and occasional fantasists like Angela Carter or Theodore Sturgeon (whose classic tale of a bloodsucking teddy still evokes a shudder). In the cinema, dolls from Pinocchio to D.A.R.Y.L. have with increasing frequency strutted their stuff, symbols of the mysterious logic and longings of the adult world and signs, at the same time, that a genuine android invasion is in preparation for our immediate future. The homicidal dummy of Child’s Play, however, owes less to the berserk avengers of Westworld than to the psychotic instruments of Dead of Night and Magic, in which animated models take the pain and blame for their deranged owners. Sadly, the more serious explorations suggested by Child’s Play seem to have been briskly discarded. All that remains as potential insight is a weak and woolly observation about the vulnerability of infants to the cynicism of hard-sell television advertising, and the obvious but unforced irony that, in one child’s experience, the much-touted ‘Good Guys’ turn out to be a lethal nightmare.
Since the repellent playmate, Chucky, incarnates the Lakeside Strangler by virtue of some ludicrous supernatural gobbledegook (as implausible, but nowhere near as charming, as Lionel Barrymore’s thought-control technique in Tod Browning’s dotty Devil Doll of 1936), his coherence as a warning of consumerist peril is disastrously betrayed even as the story opens. By its close, Chucky’s real purpose – as a killing machine that, in the fashion of today’s horror films, keeps on coming despite graphic dismemberment – is enervatingly clear. It may be unreasonable to expect logic within a tale of such amiable contrivance, but Child’s Play seems constructed on the basis that if we’ll accept the idea of a mass murderer spiriting himself into a doll we’ll accept anything. No amount of exchanges between the central characters that they don’t believe what they’re seeing can convince us that they’re wrong, chiefly because, despite industrious performances (both Catherine Hicks and Chris Sarandon manage to suggest complex private commitments without actually giving any details at all), both characterisation and context are sparsely sketched.
Among other obscurities, it is uncertain why the Strangler should wish to blow up (by complicated and unlikely means) his former colleague, while the assertion by his voodoo guide that the killer must transfer his soul to the first person he told his secret to seems a blatant example of making up the rules to suit the plot. Which said, there is no doubt that Chucky becomes a pleasingly demented figure of menace, his plastic features increasingly weird turning, and that Tom Holland mightily enjoys the action sequences – the exploding toy shop, the defenestration of the babysitter, the driver struggling to stay on the road as a knife plunges up through the car seat, the pest-disposal mayhem of the final struggle. The vampire neighbours of Fright Night were more fun, but the signs remain that Holland can handle a good story when he finds one. His most accurate stroke of horror in Child’s Play is neatly mundane: the birthday kid’s loving preparation of his mother’s breakfast tray produces a mound of lurid cereals and charred toast congealing in a lake of fruit juice and milk…
Philip Strick, Monthly Film Bulletin, June 1989
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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