When director Tom Holland (who also wrote and directed the original Fright Night and wrote 1984’s Cloak & Dagger) first had the project come his way, he wasn’t fully sold on it because he felt the young boy, Andy Barclay, was too unsympathetic.
What started as a script by Don Mancini called Blood Buddy, about a doll that came with a pin so that you could become its blood buddy, turned into a tale about a struggling mother ( Catherine Hicks) unknowingly gifting her son ( Alex Vincent) a Good Guy doll that a killer ( Brad Dourif) on the verge of death used voodoo to transfer his soul into.