From the creepy ventriloquist’s doll in Dead of Night, to M3gan and The Boy, via The Conjuring and Child’s Play, dolls have made a consistently chilling contribution to the horror genre
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.”
