The One Detail From The Child's Play Remake Horror Fans Can't Get Over
The original Child's Play from 1988 is a horror classic. Writer Vince Mancini, director Tom Holland (not that one), and special effects designer Kevin Yagher created Chucky, a doll possessed by the evil spirit of serial killer Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif). Mancini was inspired by the Cabbage Patch Kids, the controversial My Buddy dolls, and the increasing proliferation of advertising directed at children, and Yagher built an animatronic Chucky that was incredibly sophisticated for the time, even if it didn't always work super well, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Chucky became such a successful character — there have been eight Child's Play movies made — because he tapped into real fears. The themes of children being preyed upon and parents' failure to protect them, despite doing their best, hadn't been articulated in quite that way at the time. Equally important, if not more so, was the fact that the Chucky design was weird enough to be disturbing, but still felt real. The original Chucky looked exactly like what he was supposed to be: a doll that came to life. By comparison, the 2019 remake of Child's Play was much less successful, because its Chucky was too smooth and human, but also not convincing. The technological improvements in animatronics and computer-generated imagery made the new Chucky more realistic-looking, but it removed its (evil) soul.
Chucky doesn't look right
Reddit users discussed Child's Play 2019, specifically the flaws in the reboot's Chucky, which was voiced by Mark Hamill and conceived as a rogue artificial intelligence instead of the spirit of a serial killer inside the body of a toy. "Anybody else [think] the doll itself looked way cheaper than the original despite having tech advanced by 30 years?" asked user TheDirtyFuture. "I just find that so odd. It looked [like] someone with botched plastic surgery."
"Yeah honestly I didn't like the look of it at all," answered frameworkautoco. "Maybe that was intentional, having it look like a cheap mass produced product? But it didn't come across well for me." "No kidding," wrote spookyostrich. "I actually liked the movie, but I couldn't really buy that any kid would want that spooky-ass thing near them." User themegaweirdthrow felt that the doll's cheap, mass-produced look was intentional, in keeping with the movie's satirization of the Internet of Things and global capitalism (in Child's Play 2019, Chucky is created when an abused worker at a toy factory in Vietnam tampers with the wi-fi-connected doll's settings). "It looked like crap, but I left the movie thinking that was the point," they wrote.
In the end, fear of out-of-control AI is not as visceral a fear as the fear of unintentionally harming one's family, so the remake was always at a disadvantage. And the design of the doll didn't help.