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The original 1988 Child’s Play and its 2019 remake are now both streaming on Prime Video as of November 1st. Both films center around a killer doll named Chucky who embarks on a bloody rampage. The original film, directed by Tom Holland and starring Brad Dourif as the voice of Chucky, spawned one of the biggest slasher franchises and remains one of the most iconic slashers from the ‘80s. Director Lars Klevberg revisited the film in 2019 amid the reboot era trend, bringing Mark Hamill on board as the voice of the terrifying doll.
The Child’s Play Remake Made a Major Change to the Original
When Child’s Play hit theaters in 1988, it created a new and iconic type of horror villain in Chucky, a murderous character who not only put a monstrous spin on the idea of a toy being harmless but was also far different from the hulking, silent slasher killers at the time. Although its 2019 remake mostly kept to the same premise and plot of a killer doll, it transformed the story from one based in the supernatural to something based in sci-fi.
The original film opens with Chucky’s origin story, showing serial killer Charles Lee Ray being chased by police and using a voodoo ritual to transfer his soul into a Good Guy” doll. The 2019 remake, which holds a 64% critic score and 57% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, completely removed that supernatural subplot in favor of a more updated origin story for the killer doll, replacing it with a sci-fi origin in which Chucky is a high-tech doll with a malfunctioning AI. Whether that change worked depends on who you ask, and the modern-day update ultimately split critics and audiences.
