In 1988, fans met Chucky in the Child’s Play slasher movie, but around the same time, another scary toy movie came out that deserves more love than it gets. In Child’s Play, a serial killer named Charles Lee Ray uses dark magic to send his spirit into a Good Guy doll after a shootout with police so he can live on in the doll and seek revenge against the people who betrayed him. This was so popular that it spawned a franchise that included six Child’s Play sequels, a reboot, and a television series following the original movies.
One year after Child’s Play proved successful, another movie franchise about demonic toys began. This series had a similar setup but was based on an even darker origin. Just like in Child’s Play, people used dark magic to bring the toys to life, but in the case of Puppet Master, this was the work of Nazis during World War II. What resulted was even bigger than Chucky, receiving 14 Puppet Master sequels, including a crossover with the Demonic Toys series.
Why Puppet Master Is Perfect For Fans Of The Chucky Franchise
The Movies Have The Same Humor & Themes
Both Child’s Play and Puppet Master tell horror stories about killer dolls brought to life by using black magic. However, both movies are so beloved because they mix just as much humor into the story as they do horror. Charles Band is a film producer who made his name in horror comedies. His most successful franchise included tiny killers with the Ghoulies franchise. Four years after producing the first film in that series, he took on new tiny horror killers with Puppet Master.
The Puppet Master story starts in 1939 when an alchemist named André Toulon (William Hickey) has a suitcase full of living puppets. The goal is for these puppets to kill potential rivals for an evil magician named Neil Gallagher (Jimmie F. Skaggs). The main film’s story takes place 50 years later and follows a group of psychics who find themselves the target of these evil puppets. What made Child’s Play so great was Chucky himself, as well as Tiffany in later movies. That is on display here as well with the puppets.
Blade and Pinhead are the only puppets to appear in every movie in the franchise.
The puppets include a drill-headed bellhop (Tunneler), a pin-headed brute (Pinhead), a knife-wielding slasher killer (Blade), a harlequin with changing faces (Jester), and a ballerina who vomits leeches onto victims (Leech Woman). Of these, Blade and Pinhead are the only puppets to appear in every movie in the franchise, making them the Chucky and Tiffany of this series. Much like the Child’s Play series, these puppets all possess the spirits of real people who all want revenge against the world for their untimely desires.
Puppet Master Deserves Its Status As A Cult Classic Horror
The Franchise Remains A Gory & Fun Horror Series
In the end, Puppet Master never received the acclaim nor the fame of Child’s Play. It might be because Chucky came out a year before Blade and his friends, but there is also the fact that Puppet Master is not as good as Child’s Play. Despite that, Puppet Master has everything a horror movie fan could want from a cult classic. It has a lot of gory moments, realistically even more than the Child’s Play movies. It is also just as scary, with as many jump scares as any Child’s Play sequel.
While Puppet Master isn’t as popular as Child’s Play and more people know Chucky than all the puppets combined, there have been many more movies in the Puppet Master series. Sadly, like the Hellraiser series, this also means there were more bad movies for the puppets than for the Good Guy doll. Then again, they did something Chucky never did and that is teaming up with another franchise, with the Demonic Toys crossover proving that it has the status to remain a lasting cult classic.
