Chucky is one of the most iconic figures in the spectrum of horror. Anyone can immediately draw to mind what the doll looks like. The major elements are all very much recognizable to most people. There’s something so perfect about the look and design of the doll where you completely believe that it could have been a popular toy that a kid received for his birthday in 1988. But it took a long time for that iconic figure to make it to the screen, and it went through a long and difficult evolution both before and after its debut appearance.
Like anything in film, it all begins with the script. Don Mancini’s original screenplay was very different from what wound up being made. His story was called Blood Buddy and was much more focused on the consumer satire that is sort of a background element in Child’s Play. A solid idea, Blood Buddy is an interesting twist on a killer toy story as the doll is actually a manifestation of Andy’s id. Satirizing dolls that pee, etc. the “Blood Buddy” is a doll that bleeds when cut or scraped, so that kids would have to go and buy special band-aids from the toy company to patch their buddy up. In this initial story, Andy makes a blood pact with the toy, mixing his blood with its synthetic blood and causing it to inadvertently come to life. From that point on, even if Andy doesn’t realize it, the two are linked. The doll kills anyone that the boy harbors an unconscious resentment toward.
The look of the doll wasn’t too specific originally, so it was left up to makeup wunderkind Kevin Yagher to design it. Producer David Kirshner also did a lot of design work. While most people believe that Chucky was directly influenced by the My Buddy doll, it was only a minor influence with the bulk of it coming from the Cabbage Patch craze. The finished Chucky design is perfect for what they had in mind. It’s such an ‘80’s toy. That’s what makes it so scary. Before the scars and the stitches, what made him scary was the fact that he was just a doll that you could actually believe a kid would own. It was all so innocent, which made everything that he winds up doing so much scarier.
Chucky looks basically the same in the second as he does in the first, except that his look does not evolve over the course of the movie, as stated. Most of the changes are subtle and made for the sake of functionality more than anything else.
Child’s Play 3 sees the first redesign, which is much tamer compared to everything that would follow it. The design is mostly to fit the story, in which the Good Guy doll is dusted off and rebranded for a 1990’s market. Chucky is a little meaner looking here, a little more menacing, but can still switch back to his natural doll-like state. It wasn’t a drastic redesign, just enough to make things interesting.
In Curse it at least makes a sort of sense because that film is about tying all the loose ends of the franchise together, so it’s incredibly appropriate to have both unscarred and scarred Chucky in that one. There was a backlash against the doll’s appearance after the trailer was released, but they were holding off revealing the scarred look until its release, which was a surprise that actually worked. The reason Chucky looks so bad in certain shots of the trailer is because it is actually the scarred doll digitally altered to look unscarred.
In some ways, Curse of Chucky was an appropriate way to bring the series back to its roots both with a straightforward horror movie as well as return to Chucky’s original appearance. Things appear to have come full circle, but it’s hard to imagine that the franchise is over. In fact, Mancini is already hard at work on writing the next one. And as long as the series keeps on going, Chucky’s appearance will no doubt continue to evolve.