We can have two things at once. We can have the deeply personal and very good documentary Living with Chucky (2022), which frames the famed haunted doll alongside those who grew up with the movie franchise. We can also have Doc of Chucky, a wide-reaching and more official document that covers every corner of the Child’s Play universe with exhausting for-the-fans-only depth. We can have a causal Child’s Play documentary and an absurdly detailed one and enjoy both, within the same couple of years.

When you compare two alike documentaries side-by-side, you begin to see that approach and perspective are everything. The documentarian must shape the narrative. You can tell a personal story or a more objective one. There will always be a bias, and the bias of Doc of Chucky is that this series, known for being a bit silly and about the outsized personality of a little doll, is actually transgressive, full of progressive ideas, but also is pushing horror towards new ideas, that these are not basic movies, but all the parts are worth considering at large. In that sense, the project is a success, highlighting all the best sequences of the series, from Child’s Play (1988) to the modern day. The insight from writer-director Don Mancini (who appears in both docs), is vital and creates a new narrative, that Child’s Play is forward-thinking and deeply inclusive.

That has always been true. Someone just needed to say it. That’s the value of the long-form documentary, the runtime eclipsing and doubling any prior Chucky movie. You can begin to grapple with the contents of those movies, learn about the actors and their relationships to their characters, and get a wider sense for how all these pieces even came together. Five hours is a big ask but franchise advocates already spend all their time thinking about movies in exactly this way, it’s a sort of wish fulfillment to create an all-encompassing doc in the mode of the lengthy exposés Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (2010) More Brains! A Return to the Living Dead (2011) and Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (2013). Between all these docs, you’ve got a good fifteen hours of incisive horror content, all written and produced by Thommy Hutson, who also directs Doc of Chucky, and as a result, this one has perhaps the clearest authorial voice of his projects.

The documentary is narrated by social media influencer Autumn Ivy, who affects a sort of news anchor voice, giving the documentary a charming presentation. The selection of subjects is also simply everyone you might want to hear from, for the most part, with some important anecdotes from Chucky and Tiffany actors Brad Dourif and Jennifer Tilly respectively. For series superfans, it’s also a treat that cameo and bit-parts are accounted for — there’s some excellent stuff from John Waters, among others.

Doc of Chucky will be essential viewing for the average Child’s Play fan. It is a piece of historic fan service that ought to be watched for years to come during the spooky season. It’s a blast. Documentaries rarely have such a fun subject. Paired with the Living with Chucky documentary, the two works paint a more complete portrait, of what the series means to the people who lived with it and now, what the series means to the people who made it. You’ve got to have both. As talking heads documentaries go, Doc of Chucky is complete and comprehensive, and creates a new lens for viewing the series, making it a great accompaniment to any Child’s Play marathon.

8/10