The Daughter of the Chucky Doll Creator Has Brought ‘Child’s Play’ to TikTok
Doll check-in, doll check-in. Well before the Sia-singing, paper-cutter wielding killer doll M3GAN stole our hearts, a different toy was the resident tyke-sized murderer on the scene.
Between the 1988 original film, a set of sequels that saw him get married and become a father and a recent television series, Chucky has been a mainstay in the slasher genre with a rightful claim as one of horror’s premier icons. The idea of the killer doll came to creator Don Mancini after he saw the hysteria that surrounded the Cabbage Patch Kids. Back in 2019, he told Mental Floss that during his time as a film student at UCLA, he “wanted to write a dark satire about how marketing affected children.”
While the original Good Guy came to life with the help of animatronics, nine puppeteers, short-king extras and child actors, its most famous iteration — the one that has haunted the hallowed halls of Spencer’s Gifts across America — was concocted by special effects designer Tony Gardner.
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Like many others in his craft, Gardner seemingly brought his work home with him, which inadvertently terrorized his daughter Kyra Elise Gardner. But she has turned that fear into history with her documentary Living With Chucky. The film, which was adapted from a school project that her professor told her was “incredibly boring” and “would be watched by no one,” features a mix of archival footage, interviews with the cast and crew behind the Child’s Play franchise and her own experience growing up with the doll.
Over the course of production, she’s also taken to TikTok to share some of these personal moments, like inadvertently seeing her father get decapitated in Seed of Chucky, the costly licensing fees behind getting her documentary made and her disdain for the 2019 reboot and the decision to replace Brad Dourif’s iconic voice acting with Mark Hamill.
Chucky may tell Andy that he’s his forever friend, but Kyra would clearly like to stake her claim on that designation as well.
