The first teaser for Don Mancini’s Chucky series is just 20 seconds long, ahead of a full trailer set to debut next week during Comic-Con@Home. But it gives us everything we want, namely: the shining return of the O.G. Chucky (with his iconic laugh reminding us Brad Dourif is back voicing the character), who looks good as new and wastes no time in arming himself with the nearest butcher knife.
This is exactly why you should be very cautious about picking up random creepy dolls at garage sales! But there’s more to the story than that, as it turns out. While you don’t get too much about the plot from the brief clip below, Mancini spoke more about Chucky in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly.
“The main character is a 14-year-old gay boy who’s bullied and sort of lost after the recent death of his mother,” Mancini told EW. “He’s a young artist [making] sculptures with doll parts. He finds Chucky at a yard sale and buys him, but it turns out that he gets much more than he bargained for.”
Though Mancini explains the series’ main characters will mostly be teenagers (Zackary Arthur plays the young artist), it will also feature some fan-favourite faces from Chucky’s past. Along with Dourif voicing the killer toy, the show will co-star Chucky’s original foe, Alex Vincent, as well as Fiona Dourif (Curse of Chucky, Cult of Chucky), Christine Elise (Child’s Play 2), and Jennifer Tilly (Bride of Chucky, Seed of Chucky, Curse of Chucky, Cult of Chucky).
“One of the things that we pride ourselves on, and I think makes our franchise singular, is that we have spun a relatively consistent and coherent narrative over the course of 33 years,” Mancini said, noting that this established storytelling style will continue into the TV series; it should go without saying that the recent Child’s Play remake, which Mancini wasn’t involved with, will have no bearing here.
“I deliberately ended Cult of Chucky on a series of cliffhangers, major cliffhangers, because I knew a TV series would be the ideal place to accommodate delving into the ramifications. So we begin the series introducing our new story, our new milieu, and then we start to bring the veteran characters into the story, and it all comes together for a big showdown.”