The Original Child’s Play Could Have Been Way Darker

The first Child’s Play is one of the darkest installments in the Chucky franchise, but early drafts of the original screenplay could have made the story more tragic. The 1988 movie succeeded in transforming a cutesy little doll into a horror icon, spawning six blood-soaked sequels, a modernized reboot of the original, and an upcoming Child’s Play TV show. Each installment has taken the killer toy in a different direction with varying degrees of cheesiness and gore. Yet, none of his appearances has ever come close to screenwriter and Chucky creator Don Mancini’s first gloomy idea for the character.

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Child’s Play tells the story of Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif), a serial killer on the run who transfers his soul onto a doll through a Voodoo ritual moments before he dies. Soon after, Karen Barclay (Catherine Hicks) buys the toy and gives it to her son Andy (Alex Vincent) as a birthday present, oblivious to the fact that she’s bringing a dreadful threat into her home. Now going by “Chucky”, the criminal resumes his killing spree and finds out he needs to transfer his soul to Andy’s body in order to avoid a permanent existence as a little doll. However, Karen, Andy, and Detective Norris (Chris Sarandon) fight back and burn Chucky, before the charred remains of the toy return and Norris shoots him in the chest, apparently killing him for good.

Although Chucky is not half as imposing as Jason Voorhees, and doesn’t have the same dark aura as Annabelle, his charisma in Child’s Play instantly made him a terrifying presence in the genre. The red-headed sociopath almost wasn’t a traditional slasher—an early version of the film had Andy as the unwitting serial killer. Before director Tom Holland joined the project, the whole Good Guys toy line was supposed to come with realistic blood and skin (to entice customers to buy Good Guy bandages), and Chucky was only supposed to turn violent when Andy voluntarily made a blood pact with his new friend. The toy would only come alive as an extension of Andy’s unconscious mind when he was sleeping. The reason behind the boy’s macabre decision is that he felt too distant from his mother, who had recently divorced from Andy’s father and spent most of her time working as an advertising executive for the Good Guy company.

Changing Charles Lee Ray’s bloodthirsty wickedness for Andy’s internalized resentment would have greatly impacted the message of the movie. Instead of a traditional battle between the righteous protagonists and the inherently evil villain, Chucky’s motivations would have been tied to Andy’s innocent longing for the love of his mother and his silent grief after his parents divorced. A full line of blood-filled toys was already creepy, but an unwillingly murderous child would have taken Child’s Play to another level of woe.

It turns out that Don Mancini still hated the Voodoo curse aspect of Child’s Play, as it departed too much from his original concept, but fans loved it so much that he kept it for all the following sequels. Although Chucky became more of a comical character after the original film, it’s always interesting to imagine what would have happened if it had introduced Mancini’s tragic version of his origin story. Maybe Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky wouldn’t exist, or maybe they would have been even creepier.

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