The seventh installment in the Chucky franchise, Cult of Chucky, ended with some significant dangling threads and the tease of a major returning player. Instead of following it up with another movie, director Don Mancini instead let the killer Good Guy loose on television. It was a smart move; the first season of “Chucky” interwove new characters with legacy characters and expanded the mythology in massively surprising ways.
When speaking with Bloody Disgusting about “Chucky,” series creator Mancini revealed the inspiration behind the franchise’s move from film to TV: Bryan Fuller’s “Hannibal.” Mancini, who’d produced and written episodes of “Hannibal,” drew from personal experience when developing the next stage for Chucky.
CHUCKY — “An Affair to Dismember” Episode 108 — Pictured in this screengrab: Chucky — (Photo by: SYFY/USA Network)
“One of the reasons I wanted to bring Chucky into television was because of the very nature of television, the way it works, the way it’s run; it invites that level of collaboration. I experienced it on Hannibal and Channel Zero. I found it particularly instructive on Hannibal because it was an established movie franchise and literary franchise that now had made its way into television, but with a very specific vision that Bryan Fuller had. When I worked on that show, one of the things that was so exciting about it was that it felt in a way like fanfiction done by experts. A lot of what you do is speculate, as Bryan did with Hannibal. It’s like, okay, one thing they’ve never done is depicted Hannibal before he was caught when he was a practicing psychiatrist,” Mancini explains.
“If you’re a fan of something like that, as I was, you do spend some time fantasizing about that. What would’ve been Hannibal like in practice? What would it have been like to have been a patient of Hannibal Lecter? I think that that was a fundamental appeal of that show. The making of the show was Bryan bringing his own amazing talent and vision, but also the talents and genuine enthusiasm and fan boyishness and fan girlishness of seven or eight like-minded Hannibal fanatics,” Mancini continues.
“I realized if I did that with my own franchise, we could do something really amazing. Because Bryan had done it with Hannibal. That was the initial inspiration for bringing Chucky to TV, when I worked on Hannibal.”
From there, Mancini used that inspiration to delve into the dangling plot threads from Cult of Chucky. “I deliberately set up a bunch of different cliff hangers with the intention specifically of getting into the ramifications of those cliff hangers in the TV series because I knew that we were doing such potentially juicy stuff like Nica becoming possessed by Chucky. It’s such a big left turn that I felt like the ideal way to address the ramifications would be with television because you have so much room at your disposal, so much storytelling room, as opposed to just a film. You could do any individual 90-minute film, say on the origins of Charles Lee Ray or something, but it would take up a whole film. Do you know what I mean?”
Transitioning to TV series didn’t just allow Mancini and the team to play and expand upon new ideas, it allowed them to spend less time setting up familiar concepts thanks to a shorthand. Mancini says, “One of the things that we’ve learned to do over the decades when we want to reinvent the franchise, it always seems to work by establishing the new milieu and the new characters first, because Chucky himself gives us really handy storytelling, shorthand. You don’t have to have seen a Chucky movie to get easily caught up that Chucky is a doll from the eighties who was possessed by the soul of a serial killer, and he kills people.”
CHUCKY — “An Affair to Dismember” Episode 108 — Pictured in this screengrab: Chucky — (Photo by: SYFY/USA Network)
Mancini adds, “With Bride of Chucky, then Curse of Chucky, and now with the TV series, each time what we’ve done is we establish the new milieu and the new characters and get you involved in that and Chucky. Then we start feathering in the legacy characters and the legacy storylines and bring them in in hopefully surprising ways. I mean, I always wanted to try to do, if not the opposite of what you expect, just something a bit fresh and different.”
The inaugural season of “Chucky” did indeed deliver on fresh and different. Stay tuned for more from Bloody Disgusting’s chat with Mancini, where we dig into the season’s mythology, the show’s surprising new love triangle, and much more.
Season One of “Chucky” is available to stream on Peacock now.
source https://bloody-disgusting.com/tv/3694983/don-mancini-reveals-hannibal-inspired-chuckys-move-small-screen-interview/
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