Chucky’s back with a pint-sized vengeance in the Child’s Play trailer

For too long, homi­ci­dal play­thing Chucky has been lying in wait, plot­ting his next spree while bid­ing his time from behind vac­u­um-sealed plas­tic cas­ing. But at last, the time has come for him to slash­er cinema’s most diminu­tive killer to make his meter-tall return.

Like a kitchen knife sud­den­ly plunged into the back of your calves, the trail­er for a new remake of Child’s Play took an unsus­pect­ing Inter­net by sur­prise today. Though the most recent instal­ment to the fran­chise came only two short years ago with 2017’s Cult of Chucky, this new film will wipe the slate clean to rewrite the mythos of the hyper-vio­lent doll.

The trail­er opens with a pseu­do-com­mer­cial for the Kaslan Cor­po­ra­tion, the com­pa­ny mass-pro­duic­ing the Bud­di toy teased in a mys­te­ri­ous guer­ril­la mar­ket­ing cam­paign ear­li­er this week. Though all we see of Chucky is the sil­hou­ette of his car­rot-topped head, the Bud­di icon gives in-the-know view­ers all the warn­ing they need.

The demon­ic hunk of pos­sessed plas­tic once again comes into the own­er­ship of a young Andy Bar­clay (played this time around by Gabriel Bate­man), pur­chased as a gift by his moth­er (Aubrey Plaza). It doesn’t take long for things to get stab­by, leav­ing a local cop (Bri­an Tyree Hen­ry) as the fam­i­ly and town’s last line of defense.

Direc­tor Lars Klevberg doesn’t have a lot of expe­ri­ence (his main accom­plish­ment appears to be a 2015 short titled ​“Polaroid,” which he expand­ed into a fea­ture due for release lat­er this year), but the co-sign from the pro­duc­tion team behind It counts as a vote of con­fi­dence. Plus, it’s a movie about a doll that kills peo­ple – to put it in Bar­ton Fink-ese, what do you need, a road map?

Child’s Play comes to the­aters in the US on 21 June.