By PAYTON McCARTY-SIMAS
To horror fans in the know, it’s obvious that the Child’s Play franchise is inherently queer. Helmed by writer-director Don Mancini, a gay man, and originating during a time when the genre wasn’t yet recognized as a welcoming space for queer artists, the films’ play with gender and sexuality has only become more overt over the decades. Chucky (Brad Dourif) himself, that most ribald of murder dolls, is a stereotypical macho man – in a 29-inch body. But when it comes to the queer community, as he tells his gay teenage owner in an episode of Chucky (2021), he’s “not a monster.” He’s horny, he’s hellish and, as we learned 30 years ago in Seed of Chucky, he’s got a gender-fluid kid. But before we turn to Seed of Chucky, it’s worth noting that the franchise has always displayed something of a queer sensibility.
Queering the Chucky Franchise
Chucky was conceived as an outsider in the long lineup of ’80s slashers. The first version of Child’s Play (1988) that Don Mancini wrote as a student at UCLA was intended as a satirical anticapitalist commentary on “how marketing affects children,” a far more anti-establishment framework than the conservatism of some of the “teenie kill pics” modeled on Halloween (Nevertheless, the least successful of that franchise, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, certainly merits direct comparison here, with its sorcery-using, toy-making, child-murdering archvillain, Conal Cochran.) Chucky was also conceived as a direct ironic counterpoint to what Mancini has described to Buzzfeed as “all these big, hulking guys who just sort of relentlessly come after you” in slashers like Friday the 13th. He’s the little guy, coming back to haunt his enemies. As the author of the interview referenced above points out, Chucky’s infamous blue streak makes his “closest relative” among the more traditional villains of the era the snarky, nightmare-inducing Freddy Krueger. This reference to Krueger is a telling comparison for Chucky in this context: Krueger’s own status as an oddball queer horror icon was solidified by the homoerotic camp classic Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge in 1985, canonized by Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen’s 2019 documentary Scream, Queen!
In Bride of Chucky (1998), the fourth film in the franchise and the immediate precursor to Seed of Chucky, Mancini’s script makes the series’ queer undertones more explicit than in the previous three Child’s Play installments. The film, a direct riff on James Whale’s 1935 classic Bride of Frankenstein, heightens the premise’s interest in Chucky’s sexual difference by introducing Tiffany Valentine (Jennifer Tilly) as his lover from his past life as a run-of-the-mill (i.e. human) serial killer. Beyond the lightly political undertone of Child’s Play (which fades as the series progresses), Chucky, as Bride highlights, has always had something of a queer aura about him. As the killer spirit of Charles Lee Ray battles to overcome the limitations of his diminutive doll frame, he finds himself – very literally – trapped in the “wrong body” (to borrow an old turn of phrase) from the start. On this score, the series’ use of a somewhat schlocky “voodoo” hook to justify Chucky’s life as a haunted doll makes body and gender-swapping constant plot points, driving the entire family of diminutive “Good Guy” doll-killers throughout the franchise. This body-swapping is also often used as a means of sexual gratification, an element Bride foregrounds: Chucky and his bloodthirsty lover, Tiffany, crave human bodies, more often than not, to have sex… not that their anatomically correct, plastic physiognomies stop them either way. Tiffany mocks Chucky’s sexual desire for her human body ruthlessly, presenting their coupling as “unnatural,” a reflection both of what she suggests is his failed masculinity and a kind of odd-couple dynamic often homophobically assigned to queer people on film. As revenge for his emasculation, Chucky kills Tiffany and traps her soul in another doll, making them a matched, albeit unconventional, set. Bride also features an out gay character for the first time, a sweet “gay-best-friend” type named David (Gordon Michael Woolvett), who tries to help the killer couple’s prospective victims/new bodies before it’s too late.
Queerness and Seed of Chucky
Seed of Chucky, the fifth entry in the series, brings the franchise’s interest in queer characters and dynamics to the fore through a fascinating blend of overt pastiche and campy humor, a new combination for a franchise known for wild tonal fluctuations. More than a coherent narrative, the film is a riotous cavalcade of references to queer horror history played out through the story of Chucky and Tiffany coming to terms with plasticized parenthood. It begins by putting us in the perspective of the film’s central queer character. After an opening title crawl drenched in animated semen and sperm (you know what kind of movie you’re getting into right away), we begin with a strange kind of birth. A black screen is torn apart from beyond our vision, revealing a little girl’s eagerly peering face from the other side of a strip of wrapping paper. The camera rises as she picks up her new plaything, her delight turning to consternation, then outright disgust as she looks directly at the viewer. “I don’t like it!” the girl cries to us, “It’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in my life!” She carries us to a toy chest and drops us in, slamming the lid.
This opening not only brings in a subtly disruptive meta flourish (the familiar cinematic black screen itself is an unreliable element to be ruptured), it forces the viewer to identify as an “ugly” unloved outcast, a bullied kid, without the distancing effect of something like the mask Michael Myers wears in the opening of Halloween. Here, we are being insulted and abandoned before the character is aware of any identity of their own, we seek our revenge against our tormentors, and we discover with this character what they look like for the first time – sort of like if you tossed Winona Ryder, Oliver Twist, and Tony Hawk in a haunted house blender, or if someone left Alan from Barbie out in the rain for two years. Though we lose this direct perspective after the opening sequence, this point of identification is immediately sympathetic and grounds us in the framework of our central Othered character, forcing a kind of empathy for experiences queer viewers may find familiar.
Beyond their status as an immediately disliked figure, too “ugly” to make an appropriate plaything for a little girl who favors princess dolls, this unnamed but already murderous character is quickly described in gender-resistant terms, often using horror references. After murdering their surrogate family, they’re bought by a goth ventriloquist as part of a tawdry sideshow act and named “Shitface.” The act focuses on Shitface’s sexual failings: “He ain’t even anatomically correct!” the ventriloquist crows, continuing to insult them after the curtain falls. Eventually, Shitface goes to find their parents; When they arrive on set to find the pair are inanimate robots, they bring them back to life with voodoo, further denaturalizing the idea of traditional birth and parentage through this role reversal. Their at-first reluctant parents soon soften (at least, Tiffany does), and they quickly work to build a more familiar kind of nuclear family, starting first and foremost by picking Shitface’s gender. It devolves into bickering: Tiffany wants a girl (“I’ll call her Glenda”), and Chucky, a boy (“It’s Glen!”). “Don’t look at me,” the child shrugs, revealing their neutral anatomy. The names are, of course, direct references to Ed Wood’s early work, the camp classic Glen or Glenda (1953). The rest of the film, a comedic tug-of-war between Tiffany and Chucky for primacy over Glen(da)’s identity, is stippled with this kind of winking reference to earlier pieces of queer film ephemera of varying iconicity, ranging from a nod to Norman Bates in Psycho – Glen(da): “I wouldn’t hurt a fly” – to a climactic play on Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1974). The latter film, a Giallo in which a young man dons a wedding dress to kill young women, becomes central here as Glen(da) snaps under the weight of their parents’ expectations.
Seed of Chucky cleverly explores genderqueerness by paralleling Glen(da)’s struggle with their identity and their parent’s struggle with their murderous instincts. It’s a mixed, tongue-in-cheek metaphor. Chucky and Tiffany’s murderous ways are also described as an addiction in a handful of scenes. However, at the same time, it brings the outsider dynamics already evident in the previous films to the surface even further. Like Mancini’s inclusion of an extended John Waters cameo (he plays a tabloid reporter who snaps a shot of Chucky masturbating), Tiffany’s insistence that murder isn’t “something you should have to hide in the closet,” feels refreshingly irreverent and laid-back, a kitschy nod to the kind of queer comedy filmmaking that was producing cult films like D.E.B.S around the same time. After pushing Glen(da) to choose a gender for the entire film, Chucky modeling masculinity through murder, and Tiffany modeling femininity by trying not to kill anyone, Glen(da) snaps, killing someone and deciding they want to reject the binary altogether: “Sometimes I want to be a girl; Sometimes I want to be a boy… Can I be both?” Glen(da)’s choice is declared “multi-talented” by their father – but only after proving their worth as a murderer while wearing a dress.
Developed at the height of the postmodern horror-comedy boom that followed the explosive success of Scream, Seed of Chucky, like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, is also a meta riff on the franchise’s previous four entries. Chucky and Tiffany’s doll bodies are starring in a film about the “urban legend” of the doll killers featuring a down-on-her-luck Jennifer Tilly (playing herself). Tilly’s career is on the ropes (she went from the Academy Awards to “fucking a doll” after all), and she’s decided to go after a very important role in a rapper’s retelling of the birth of Jesus. Beyond the oh-so-2000s vibe of this salacious send-up, it ties in with the film’s broader tongue-in-cheek thematic question of supernatural (queer?) birth and reproductivity: Chucky impregnates her with his doll progeny in the hopes of providing a body for Glen(da). A Bound threesome casting-couch joke, this plotline is less overtly queer, and more camp, placing Tilly in the role of a fading, Norma Desmond-esque diva.
Underneath the threesome jokes and buckets of blood, the fun of Seed of Chucky comes from the fact that it’s, ultimately, a shockingly wholesome story. Tiffany possesses Jennifer, and Glen(da) possesses one of her newborns. They start fresh, and Glen(da)’s typically maudlin voiceover reverses the rejection of the film’s opening sequence: “I know I’m not alone, I know I’m not a freak, and I know my dad really loved me,” they say wistfully. Particularly in 2004, it was rare to see a non-vilified trans character in a mainstream horror film, let alone a trans kid. These closing passages bring the audience back into the perspective of the ugly, bullied Other and present a positive, affirming alternative to the rejection of that early scene. Related by blood or not, Glen(da) and Tiffany have formed a kind of found family.
Seed of Chucky underperformed at the box office, and both Tilly and Mancini have suggested part of the reason was its queer overtones. In an interview with io9, Tilly describes the studio reaction as “It’s too gay, it’s too funny.” “There were a lot of the core horror fans who are young, straight guys who were like, ‘What the hell is this?’” Mancini recalls. Subsequently, the central creative figures in the franchise have all received an overwhelmingly positive reception for this film, solidifying Chucky’s status as a “queer icon,” a characterization so ubiquitous that the New York Times ran a story as recently as last year on the phenomenon after Peacock featured Seed of Chucky in its Pride collection. “It has really been nice for me, again, as a gay man, to have a lot of gay, queer and trans fans say that movie meant a lot to them, and that those characters meant a lot to them as queer kids,” Mancini explains. That sentiment holds true two decades later, even as a broader range of queer media has become available – in part because of Mancini’s campy play with tone and willingness to get weird. The lesson? “Nobody’s perfect.” All we can do, as Tiffany puts it, is try to “be a good girl or boy… or whatever.”