Watch the Ghoulish First Trailer for SyFy’s Chucky Series

After a 2019 film reboot that left much to be desired from a scripting perspective, despite a game performance form Mark Hamill, it wouldn’t have been terribly surprising to see the Child’s Play franchise slink back to the cultural subconscious for a decade or so. That wasn’t good enough for original series creator Don Mancini, however, and so now we’ve got a new take on the original killer doll franchise—a Chucky TV series on Syfy that gets back to the basics of the character, even as it presents an interesting new relationship between Chucky and his teenage “owner.” A first trailer for Chucky dropped today, which you can see below. The official series synopsis is as follows:

In the series, titled Chucky, after a vintage Chucky doll turns up at a suburban yard sale, an idyllic American town is thrown into chaos as a series of horrifying murders begin to expose the town’s hypocrisies and secrets. Meanwhile, the arrival of enemies and allies from Chucky’s past threatens to expose the truth behind the killings, as well as the demon doll’s untold origins as a seemingly ordinary child who somehow became this notorious monster.

It seems clear that Mancini and co. are simply ignoring how this take might fit into the overall Chucky mythos, in terms of why Chucky now looks as he did in 1990’s Child’s Play 2, rather than his scarred appearance from more recent entries like Mancini’s own Curse of Chucky and Cult of Chucky. What’s more important is the fact that the series can boast a returning Brad Dourif as the killer doll, and that is by far the most critical element to imbuing any depiction of Chucky with the right kind of psychopathic edge.

With that said, the trailer below seems to indicate that Chucky won’t just be a season-long slasher binge, in which our protagonist spends the entire time trying to convince people that his doll is evil. Rather, it looks as if Chucky is actually cozying up to this family on some level, trying to corrupt them and drag them down to his level. Could this be more of a darkly humorous antihero streak for the character? And what should we expect from returning series veterans such as Jennifer Tilly, or Alex Vincent, who played Chucky’s original owner Andy in the 1988 original? It will be interesting to see how Mancini and co. attempt to work in material from the history of the now 30-year-old series.

Chucky will premiere on Syfy on Oct. 12, 2021. Check out the first full trailer below.