Rating: ★★½

Living With Chucky is a Documentary about the Child’s Play series of films. The films consist of Child’s Play (1988), Child’s Play 2 (1990), Child’s Play 3 (1991), Bride of Chucky (1998), Seed of Chucky (2004), Curse of Chucky (2013) and Cult of Chucky (2017), as well as the tv series Chucky (2021- ). The first half of the film takes us through each of the Child’s Play films one at a time. The only one that is omitted altogether is the much hated remake Child’s Play (2019) – even the tv series, which it appears was shooting around the same time as the documentary was being made, gets a mention and we see some footage from the set. Most of the key cast and creative personnel from the series are interviewed. The later sections of the film deal with family connections, while a small amount of time is spent on the fans and conventions.

Original screenwriter Don Mancini takes us through the creation of Chucky with input from David Kirschner on the development. We get some interesting titbits from the first film and the creation of Chucky – how the personality of the doll was based on Jack Nicholson. Everything is placed in the context of 1980s horror and the popularity of Freddy Krueger, which created the wisecracking killer anti-hero. We learn that Child’s Play 3 was shot fairly much-back-to-back with the second film – a grown-up Alex Vincent, who played Andy in the first two films, speaks of his disappointment at being dropped so they could make the film with a teenage Justin Whalin.

The introduction of Jennifer Tilly as Tiffany in Bride of Chucky was seen to be a stroke of genius – Tilly is present and proves a very entertaining interviewee. There is reasonable discussion of Seed of Chucky, which I am of the opinion is the best of the series, and how its introduction of a wild level of meta-fiction seemed to be too much for fans of the series. There is also discussion of that film’s gender-bending issues, which were seen as ahead of their time. (One of the interesting insights is that Don Mancini is gay in real life and it is pointed out how the films come coded with a number of gay themes). The subsequent films were seen as an attempt to go back to basics with a scary Chucky once again. There is discussion of how the later sequels suffered limited budgets necessitating, among other things, that Curse of Chucky be contained within a single setting.

The latter half of Living With Chucky reveals that director Kyra Gardner is the daughter of Tony Gardner, the makeup effects artist on the series from Seed of Chucky onwards. Kyra had previously made the seven-minute short documentary The Dollhouse (2017), which formed the embryo of Living With Chucky. At this point, Living With Chucky goes from a Making Of documentary about the series to one that explores families and camaraderie on the set. It is interesting to see the two Dourifs Brad and daughter Fiona interacting – there is a lot of praise throughout for Fiona’s performances and what she managed to bring to the series. Don Mancini even speaks of seeing Kyra at different ages on the sets of the films and watching her grow from a youngster to someone now making her own film.

The documentary addresses issues clearly important to Kyra such as the long working hours or absences of the parent abroad and their missing key events in the child’s life. This is balanced out by discussion of the camaraderie and family that grows on set with a crew that see each other every few years. Kyra seeks a kinship with Fiona Dourif – both had experiences of being terrified, Fiona at seeing her father enact being burned alive while recording the voice of Chucky, Kyra frightened at seeing the dolls in her house. It becomes an oddly touching way of Kyra and her father – both of whom seem as shy as each other – connecting and bonding through the course of the film.

Trailer here