Somehow meeting Chucky in a run-down mental institutiononHalloween felt, well, right. If anything – almost too on the nose.
It’s a rainy Vancouver day when a couple journalists (including myself) journey to the fabled Riverview Hospital – which I’m told repeatedly is the number one location to shoot at in the city. Today, the crew ofChild’s Play(in their last week or so of production) have set up shop there. It would be fair to assume the crew is prepping for a creepy derelict hospital set-piece; but in actuality – they’ve merely redressed a single room into a basement locker. It almost felt like a weird practical joke: shooting two short scenes… in a supposedly haunted mental institution. In my head, I imagine an AD & Location Manager cackled with glee at the thought.
There’s been seven films in theChild’s Playfranchise, all entwined in the same interlocking mythology: a mortally-wounded serial killer, Charles Lee ‘Chucky’ Ray, transfers his rotten soul into a child-sized ‘Good Guy’ doll. Said doll is then bought by a single mom as a present for her six year old son, Andy – who the evil doll marks as the perfect human vessel. From there it’s pretty simple: Chucky tracks Andy down (through the sequels & decades), killing everyone who gets in his way… which (turns out to be) quite a lot.
However the newChild’s Playreboot takes significant departure from this mythos – the first in the series to tell a new stand-alone story. The basics are still the same: A single mom (Aubrey Plaza) buys her son Andy a ‘Buddi’ doll – which, of course, has a mind of its own. But this new Chucky isn’t a voodoo-imbued serial killer; it’s high-tech AI gone bad (voiced now byMark Hamill). This new technology-run-amok angle opens the series up to a bevy of interesting choices, many of which I learned about on set. Below are all the bullet-point highlights.
Child’s Playopens in theaters June 21st. Watch a new behind-the-scenes featurette below.
