A video of a child-sized person dressed in a realistic Chuckie from the Child’s Play movies costume has gone viral as the creepy doll ran amuck on New York’s subway, attacking horrified passengers. But now the real reason for the horror-movie-like scene has been revealed.
Social media went wild for the video with many remarking, ‘only in NY’ as they watched ‘Chuckie’ appearing to attack a woman who was sitting on a subway seat of the moving train.
There seemed to be no motive behind the little doll’s rage as he clung to the woman and tried to snatch her handbag. “Get the f—off me. Give me my f—ing bag, what is wrong with you? What the f’” she yelled as Chuckie fell to the floor and grabbed her legs.
No one on the train makes any attempt to help the woman as she frantically fends off the infamous doll before moving off down the carriage. Chuckie scrambles off the floor and begins to run down the carriage after his victim in a classic Child’s Play pursuit before another passenger grabs the ginger hair of the freaky mask as the little person runs past.
The mask appears to come off the attacker’s head and he falls to the floor.
Child's Play Remake Gets #Trailer – #ChildsPlay #Chuckie – https://t.co/kaGTaMuAe6 pic.twitter.com/zMIuJNNtSx
— Movie News Net (@TheMovieNewsNet) February 16, 2019
The video racked up over 8 million views by Friday and 270,000 likes, with many social media users criticizing the on-lookers on the subway for not attempting to help the woman during the ‘attack’.
"*" indicates required fields
But now another layer of strangeness has been piled onto this overwhelmingly weird scenario as it was revealed in the New York Post earlier today that the entire episode was a planned “social experiment” set up by filmmaker Rodrigo Valencia. ‘Chuckie’ was in fact played by self-proclaimed actor, comedian and influencer who goes by Miguel on Instagram and who appears to have dwarfism.
The ’victim’ was another actor called Sara who was also in on the prank.
“I expected people to at least help her out,” he said. “She’s a female screaming for help surrounded by people and not one person reached out,” said Miguel.
The trio said they set up the ‘experiment’ to see if New Yorkers would step up to help the struggling female. They also decided to keep their victim mask-less to see if it would influence the likelihood of on-lookers supporting her:
“As expected, no one helped. Instead, they decided to record,” said Miguel.
only in new york city pic.twitter.com/tQ0omBNX2Y
— kira 👾 (@kirawontmiss) June 30, 2022
“We chose for Sara not to wear a mask to see if that would affect people helping her out in this situation,” he added.
The crew said they re-played the same prank on another subway car but had “pretty much the same reaction”.
Most social media users posted their dismay that no one helped the woman.
@AlexJam91754067 said “The most “only in NYC part of this is everyone filming instead of intervening”.
@JamesFr60414759 Tweeted: “How about people help her and not freaking film?”
Others speculated that other passengers had not attempted to help the woman because they were savvy New Yorkers and had seen through the tomfoolery:
“Nobody helped because it was Chuckie. Pretty clearly a harmless prank,” posted @gophertortoised