![]() For instance, in Bride of Chucky, there’s a brilliant scene that Don wrote, with Jennifer Tilly being electrocuted as she’s watching The Bride of Frankenstein. So much of what Don created in that script, but ultimately didn’t make it into the film, we used in other iterations. That’s where the name Charles Lee Ray came from. And then, Chuck is my brother-in-law, who I love dearly and is a wonderful person, but there were three men that terrorized my childhood – Charles Manson, Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray. In my version, he put his hand on his head and, as he was dying, he transmogrified his soul into the doll and the doll became animated. So, with Tom coming up with the voodoo business, that made it that much easier for the audience to assess the fact that there was some kind of magic that brought it to life. In all his work, he has tapped into something like that. It just fascinated him, the idea of Catholicism, which he practices, and death. ![]() He said that so much of his childhood was filled with dead bodies on the street, growing up during civil war. It’s not that any of it really makes sense to us, but there are all these things that people have been indoctrinated with from the time they were little, and religion fascinates me. Tom Holland, our director, came up with the notion of voodoo, which made it easier for the audience to understand, almost like Catholicism. What is the thing that brings the creature to life? So, I had come up with the idea of this Lakeshore Strangler who’s on the run and takes refuge in a toy store, and then he his body into the doll. For me, I always needed a Frankenstein moment. It didn’t make sense to me that any toy company would put a needle in and you could prick not only your doll’s skin, but more importantly, your own skin. In Don original script, the doll was made with a red watery substance and it came with a pin, so that you could become a blood buddy with this doll. There were parts of it that did not work at all. She gave it to me and I really liked an awful lot of it. I came back and I gave my development person this book and said, “I would love to do something with a doll.” She said, “Well, there was a screenplay that went out about six months ago, called Blood Buddy.” I said, “Oh, I’d like to read it.” She said, “Well, everybody passed on it.” And I said, “I’m just so curious to see what somebody did with a doll story in a more contemporary form.” The whole doll thing and clown thing falls into the same weird category for me. I loved watching all the scary stuff during the day, and by night, not only would I pay the price, but my family would as well because every light had to be on in the house and I would have 12 blankets over me in the San Fernando Valley without air conditioning in the sixties. ![]() I was always frightened of my sister’s dolls, but the truth is, I was frightened of everything. When I was a kid, I watched an episode of The Twilight Zone with my big sister and my big cousin, called “Talky Tina,” and it starred Telly Savalas. For a little backstory, the reason I did Chucky in the first place, my wife and I had been in London and I bought a book, called The Dollhouse Murders, that I still have in my office.
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