New Child’s Play Featurette Explores Bringing Chucky to Life for New Reboot

The Child’s Play franchise launched back in 1989 and displayed advanced special effects to convincingly bring a killer doll coming to life to commit brutal murders. Throughout much of the film’s legacy, productions had to rely on practical effects as CGI was both expensive and looked rudimentary, with the current state of visual effects being much more sophisticated than they were 30 years ago. A new reboot of the original film is landing in theaters next month, with the filmmakers honoring the traditional filmmaking styles to create the killer for their new film. Check out the above featurette to learn more about how Chucky came to life for the new film.

The original film focused on the murderous Charles Lee Ray using his final moments on earth to perform a ritual that transferred his spirit into the body of a doll, allowing him to continue his reign of terror. This upcoming reboot will instead focus on the dangers of artificial intelligence, with the new doll being of the “BUDDI” brand as opposed to a “Good Guy” doll. The new film will feature Mark Hamill voicing the killer doll.

Despite the influence of technology on the narrative itself, MastersFX was in charge of designing the new character, whose primary goal was to honor the spirit of the original series.

“MastersFX has brought the new Chucky doll to life on screen like never before in a mixture of practical on-set puppet work and digital FX enhancements,” a statement released last year about the film read. “Todd Masters, founder of MastersFX, and his team took six weeks to prepare and assemble seven practical animatronic puppets, each with interchangeable arms and heads that perform a variety of required actions on set. The FX team, led by ace puppeteer Keith Arbuthnot, along with Mike Fields, Jason Ward and Josh Raymond each controlled a different part of the doll.”

“It was important to [director] Lars [Klevberg] that we use animatronics as much as possible,” producer David Katzenberg shared. “As fans of Todd’s work, we were thrilled when he and his team of exceptional artists and puppeteers agreed to take on the challenge of creating our take on a classic character.”

The new Child’s Play lands in theaters on June 21, 2019.

Are you looking forward to checking out the new reimagining? Let us know in the comments below or hit up @TheWolfman on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars!