The Child’s Play franchise, as with all the best slasher series, is all about the villain. The “Good Guy” doll is occupied by the soul of a serial killer, and thanks to his being voiced by the great Brad Dourif (one of the few actors to take on a slasher movie role after they became famous), has more personality than the likes of Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers laid end to end.
Now Chucky can add a documentary to his ever expanding filmography (to date: seven films and a TV show, plus a non-canon reboot). “I do remember Chucky being at my birthday parties,” says Kyra Elise Gardner, whose father, Tony Gardner, has been the franchise’s head puppeteer for the past two decades. Her film, Living with Chucky, explores the series’s history and shows how cast and crew bonded into alternative family units on the long shoots away from home. Gardner’s earliest Chucky-related memory is of her parents dressing her as his soulmate, Tiffany, for Halloween. “I wasn’t allowed to see the movies, but they told me I was going to be Tiffany, because it was the only year I was going to fit into that dress.”
After B-movies such as Dolls and Puppet Master, Chucky – who had made his debut in Child’s Play in 1988 – evolved into the elder statesman of the evil doll subgenre, amassing a loyal midnight movie fandom. Recently, though, we have had evil dolls up the wazoo. They include Robert, inspired by a supposedly real haunted doll on display in a museum in Key West, Florida; Annabelle, a haunted porcelain doll introduced in The Conjuring and brought back for three spin-offs; The Boy, in which a nanny finds the child she has been hired to look after is a doll (who resurfaces in a sequel). Last year there was M3gan, the “dancing meme” doll, who is scheduled to resurface in a sequel in 2025.
Why do people find dolls so unheimlich? Gardner suggests it’s “this thing that’s supposed to be innocent and cute, and so the idea of it not only coming to life but potentially being evil is pretty creepy. Not only that, they can hide anywhere. It’s not like your typical 6ft guy who would have trouble. They could be under your bed, they could be under the sink, they could be in the kitchen cabinet …”
From 1929’s The Great Gabbo onwards, ventriloquists’ dolls have rarely been depicted as anything other than accursed objects, possessing their own puppeteers in films such as Dead of Night (1945), Magic (1978) or Devil Doll (1964) – not to be confused with Todd Browning’s The Devil-Doll (1936), in which Lionel Barrymore uses miniaturised people to wreak revenge on evil bankers. But the fact that dolls are shaped like real people, more or less, is a reminder of the “uncanny valley” effect, identified (if not named as such) by the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in the early 20th century, and cited by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 study The Uncanny. Both men were thinking principally of the lifesize robot Olimpia in ETA Hofffmann’s story The Sandman (played by Moira Shearer in Powell and Pressburger’s 1951 film The Tales of Hoffmann). But dolls are arguably more sinister in diminutive form, even when they’re the passive poppets used in witchcraft (in The House That Dripped Blood, 1971) or voodoo (I Walked with a Zombie, 1943, or The Plague of the Zombies, 1966).
Gardner thinks part of Chucky’s enduring appeal is that he is only “3ft-tall, and so it’s kind of a fun game to see what a doll could actually do …” Sometimes they don’t even have to do anything; the dolls in Mario Bava’s Operazione Paura or Dario Argento’s Deep Red are freaky enough just lying there. In the 1963 Twilight Zone episode Living Doll, Telly Savalas is horrified when his daughter’s doll says, “My name is Talky Tina and I’m going to kill you!”; we never actually see Tina moving, although she contrives to trip her victim on the stairs. As for the demonically possessed Annabelle, she just sits around exuding evil influence, letting other people do her dirty work.
Proactive evil dolls are the worst. In Barbarella, the heroine is swarmed by sharp-toothed homunculi who leave her tights shredded. But dolls don’t often have the advantage of numbers, so they bring down their prey by hacking at ankles, like the knife-wielding Zuni doll that terrorises Karen Black in the 1975 TV movie Trilogy of Terror, or climbing on furniture to stick a scalpel into someone’s neck, like the robot doll with real innards in Asylum (1972). Chucky has progressed to the point where he doesn’t even need sharp objects; in his TV show he shows admirable initiative by combining a bottle of whisky, drunken vomiting and a fuse box to lethal effect.
If Chucky met Annabelle, who would win? “I think Chucky,” says Gardner. “Annabelle’s like an entity who can do shit, but Chucky can just go up to her and …” She makes a Chucky-esque slashing gesture with her arm.
• Living With Chucky is available on streaming, download and Blu-ray in the UK from 24 April
