In the original Child’s Play, murderer Charles Lee Ray used his final moments on earth to perform a voodoo ritual that allowed his spirit to transfer into the body of a doll so he could continue his reign of terror. This mythology continued for six sequels, yet the upcoming Child’s Play reboot aims to offer audiences a new experience. Rather than a supernatural story, the film will focus on a doll whose internal artificial intelligence begins to malfunction, sparking all manner of horrific behaviors. A new featurette for the film details the ways in which this story is more relevant than ever. Check out the featurette above and see the film in theaters on June 21st.
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Child’s Play follows a mother (Aubrey Plaza) who gives her son (Mike and Gabriel Bateman) a toy doll for his birthday, unaware of its more sinister nature. The film was directed by Lars Klevberg.
Producer of the new film Seth Grahame-Smith previously detailed the new opportunities this reboot will offer the story.
“We sort of lean into more of the AI/Kaslan story and hint at a Chucky that is driven by something different than he is in the original series, when he’s Charles Lee Ray and he’s just a truly psychopathic killer in the body of a doll,” Grahame-Smith shared with CinemaBlend. “[Also, there is] the mother/son story, the emotional component of the movie, which I feel like the movie really delivers. And then above all that, just the intensity, the gore, the fact that the movie is rated R, that it really does go there when it goes there. I think the movie looks big, is much bigger than a lot of movies that are our size – very affordable movie, we are. But we had big ambitions. Those are, I’d say, the primary things we’re going for.”
The original film played out like a more straightforward slasher, while the producer detailed the more psychological and emotional angles that the reboot will explore.
“You’re getting at the heart of, I think, what a lot of people are inherently skeeved out about AI,” the producer posited. “Does it have its own agency, or is it just a series of processes and commands and executions? The truthful answer is by the time the movie’s over, I don’t know. I think at the beginning of the movie, you’ll see sort of briefly why this particular doll is the way that he is, and it’s not every one of these dolls, right? So why is our Chucky special. And then it’s going at that inherent need to make his child happy no matter what, right? To bond with him, to be with him.”
He continued, “It starts out like you saw in the clip, very sweet. It’s two characters in Chucky and in Andy that both in their own ways at that point in the movie been rejected. Andy is certainly in need of a friend, and finds one in Chucky. So that’s the reason we showed you that clip, because we wanted to sort of lean into that this is a relationship that is genuine that goes off the rails in a big way. It’s not just brooding, and it’s not sinister from the jump. It gets there, for sure, but that I think just gets to the heart of what we’re trying to do here, and why we felt like there was a why and a cultural relevance to doing a different version of this classic series.”
The new Child’s Play lands in theaters on June 21st.
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