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The Surprising Empathy of Chucky’s Terror

Long-running horror franchises are either defined by their reinvention or lack thereof. The Friday the 13th series, famously, is formulaic to a fault, with even the one where Jason goes to space being beset with slasher tropes and cliches. The Halloween series makes stabs at originality (there was that brief moment in the '90s when it looked like Michael Myers was controlled by runes), but it always winds up coming back to Laurie vs. Michael. In a lot of ways, the Child’s Play series is no different. Each entry centers around Chucky, the “Good Guy” children’s toy that’s been demonically possessed by the soul of serial killer Charles Lee Ray.


Creepy doll (Chucky) with scars, wearing colorful striped shirt, blue overalls labeled "Good Guys," holds knife in ominous red-orange hallway.
Illustration by Yashashree A

But to watch the series in order is to witness a distinct evolution. From Bride of Chucky onwards, the series moves away from the familiar trappings of 80s slasher cinema into a much more distinctly queer text. The first three Child’s Play movies are fairly normal, at least as far as you can call a story about a serial-killer possessed doll “normal.” The first film sees Ray transfer his soul into a children’s toy to escape the police, and he spends the next three movies trying to move his soul out of said doll into the body of the first kid he reveals his secret to, the unlucky Andy Barcaly, whose mom just wanted to get him something nice for the holidays. 


It’s possible to read a queer subtext into the first Child's Play. Film Cred’s Queer Threads in the ‘Child’s Play’ Franchise and ‘Chucky’ acknowledges that while the first three films are lighter on overt LGBTQ+ themes, they are still present. They point out how Andy feels rejected by his father, a feeling often experienced by queer youth being raised by conservative  parents. I’d add that a lot of the first three films are taken up by Andy trying to convince the adults around him of a truth they’re conditioned to reject at their own expense, which mirrors queer youth having their basic truths rejected by adults who just aren’t ready to hear it.  


The original trilogy lapsed after Child’s Play 3 was poorly received, and the series went into a hiatus until the aforementioned Bride of Chucky  (released 7 years later). There had always been an undercurrent of comedy in the series, but the first three films had always counterbalanced the inherent ludicrousness of the series’ premise by playing the tone relatively straight, in a way that works. The sight of a little children’s doll running around, stabbing people and swearing his head off is beyond absurd, and treating it as if it were a threat on the level of Michael Myers just adds to the joke.


With Bride of Chucky, the series takes a tonal shift into overt camp. The opening scene of the film sees Jennifer Tilly breaking into a police evidence locker to steal the Chucky doll, as we see cameo props from famous horror franchises also in evidence, such as a Jason-style hockey mask and a Michael Myers mask circa Halloween 4. The cheeky references to other horror icons don’t stop there; a police officer’s face is impaled with a bunch of nails in a way that resembles Pinhead (apparently, Brad Dourif improvised the line, “Why does that look familiar?”).


And in a general sense, Bride of Chucky showcased an increased willingness to display non-normative lifestyles — grunge and nipple rings abound. And, of course, there’s the constant allusions back to Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, pioneering works by legendary gay filmmaker James Whale. This was, of course, intentional. Don Mancini was quoted by the New York Times in 2024 as being proud that “'Bride of Chucky' was one of the first — to me — certainly one of the first mainstream horror movies to have a sort of casually, positively gay character. We didn't make a big deal with it. He was gay.”


These elements were pushed even further with Seed of Chucky. The film introduces Glen/Glenda, the doll child of Chucky and Tiffany (long story), who is an openly nonbinary character with their gender identity as a central theme of the film. This was remarkably progressive for a movie that came out in 2004. Their journey of self-discovery is a thematic undercurrent that runs through the entire film and is treated with the most empathy of all the film’s plot threads. 


The fact that a reanimated doll coming into their own gender identity is the closest the film comes to a serious plot thread should tell you something about the type of movie this is. Camp icon Jennifer Tilly plays not only Tiffany but also herself, making cracks about the state of her career that would make the writers of Bojack Horseman blush. Even John Waters has an extended cameo, which is the second or third weirdest cameo he’s made in a series (remember, Alvin from Alvin and the Chipmunks has canonically seen Pink Flamingos).


The franchise went into another hiatus after Seed of Chucky, and when it came back, it seemed at first like it had gone backwards. 2013’s Curse of Chucky is, for all intents and purposes, a straight-up horror movie in the vein of the first one again. A good one too; for my money, this is the film where Chucky comes off the most menacing. 


There’s still an element of queerness in the film as one of the main characters is gay. However, the main strain of progressivism here is the depiction of Nica, played by Fiona Douriff. A character with paraplegia living with her mother, the film explores the casual way her family dehumanizes and infantilizes her, and the ease with which they blame her when the bodies start piling up. The film never makes the overt connection to how Nica is treated by her family with Andy from the first film, but the unspoken point still comes through loud and clear, because of her wheelchair, she’s treated with the same dismissive condescension and suspicion that they would show a literal child.


But it’s with Curse of Chucky, and later the TV show, that the series truly comes into its own, marshalling all its disparate strands of horror, comedy, meta-humour and earnestness into a single format. As a movie, Curse of Chucky is a bit of a mess — it’s best to treat it as a prologue to the TV show, because as a standalone it doesn’t have a definitive ending — but as a wild confluence of disparate story themes and strands, it’s hugely entertaining and pretty fascinating to watch. 


The tone of the movie, which is continued into the 2021 show, is celebration. The premise of the show underlines this, as it starts as just another Child’s Play rerun with original characters coming across the haunted doll, before expanding and coming to realign every aspect of the series, with both returning characters and an all-encompassing tone. It’s such a uniquely personal series now, and gives viewers the sense that everyone involved in making it truly loves each other and what they’re doing. 


The name Glen/Glenda is a reference to Ed Wood’s partially autobiographical Glen or Glenda, a messy but earnest exploration of gender identity and expression, and that’s as good a reference point as the Child’s Play franchise could hope for overall: it’s messy, oftentimes unwieldy, but at the same time daringly personal. It is a truly refreshing oasis of personal expression in a studio system that’s so often just corporate maintenance. 


I think this is why the 2019 remake (done without the approval or involvement of any of the original crew) was so poorly-received, despite being a pretty solid movie on the whole (it’s just not Mancini). The Child’s Play series has become so weirdly personal, so atypically humane, that being reminded of how it’s technically a marketable IP was unpleasant to people.


The show ended on a cliffhanger, leaving multiple characters’ fates up in the air and Chucky temporarily victorious. And yet, Mancini seems confident the series will come back in some way or another, and you know what? At this point, I believe him. The Chucky series has survived and reinvented itself across media, changing social attitudes, and even a studio-mandated remake and has remained pure and true to itself. Chucky will be back. He always comes back.




Edited by Anish Paranjape


Sam Stashower is a recent graduate student and a writer at Political Pandora. He has contributed film reviews and pop culture analysis to The Quindecim (Goucher College) and The Eagle (American University). A devoted media enthusiast, he can—and inevitably will—find a way to connect everything he watches, listens to, or reads back to Star Trek.


 

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Keywords: Queer Horror And Representation, Chucky As A Cultural Icon, Evolution Of Horror Franchises, Camp And Satire In Horror, LGBTQ+ Subtext In Early Films, Glen/Glenda And Gender Identity, Jennifer Tilly And Meta-Humour, Disability And Representation In Horror, Family Dynamics And Othering, Don Mancini’s Creative Vision, The 2019 Remake And Creative Ownership, Horror As Personal Expression, Studio Systems And Artistic Integrity, Legacy And Reinvention Of Chucky, Child’s Play As Queer Text.

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