Josh Bell
Chucky is a horror icon. The killer doll who debuted in 1988’s Child’s Play is part of the pantheon that includes characters like Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers—villains who defined the slasher era and continue to be major pop-culture figures even for people who don’t watch horror movies. But Chucky’s rarefied status was far from guaranteed after his first three films, and it was only after a bold reinvention of the franchise from creator Don Mancini that he secured his place in horror history.
Looking back at the seven main Child’s Play movies (six of which are now streaming on Netflix), it’s fascinating to see the evolution of both the franchise and Chucky as a character, without losing his core appeal. Most of the credit for that transformation should go to Mancini, who created the character and co-wrote the first movie (with John Lafia and director Tom Holland). Mancini has sole writing credit on the subsequent movies, and he directed the last three as well. He’s become indelibly associated with Chucky, and he’s infused more of his personal vision into the character over the years, especially as an exploration and celebration of queer identity.
The turning point for that vision is 1998’s Bride of Chucky, the first movie to ditch the Child’s Play branding and the first to fully embrace Mancini’s camp sensibility. Although Chucky (voiced by Brad Dourif) has always had a sardonic sense of humor, Bride is the first Chucky movie that could truly be called a comedy, while still racking up an impressive body count. Letting Chucky be funny opened up a whole new audience for the character, while introducing Jennifer Tilly as Chucky’s love interest and occasional nemesis Tiffany Valentine infused new energy into the franchise.
That’s a stark contrast to the original Child’s Play, an effective if sometimes derivative slasher movie set in a gritty version of Chicago, where single mother Karen Barclay (Catherine Hicks) struggles to provide for her young son Andy (Alex Vincent). All Andy wants for his birthday is a Good Guys doll, a popular toy that’s like a cross between 1980s sensations My Buddy and Cabbage Patch Kids. Unfortunately for Karen, the secondhand Good Guys doll she buys from a street peddler has been possessed by the spirit of serial killer Charles Lee Ray (Dourif), who used a voodoo ritual to transfer his soul into the doll after being gunned down by cops in a toy store.
Child’s Play follows a familiar slasher-movie structure as Chucky takes out various victims, with the goal of transferring his soul into Andy’s body. Although Holland builds suspense by showcasing Chucky sparingly until the finale, Dourif still makes him into a memorable villain, with hints of the snide attitude that would develop further in the later films.
The highlight of Chucky’s initial slasher era is 1990’s Child’s Play 2, which brings back Vincent as Andy but also gives Chucky more of a spotlight, allowing him to be more playfully mean-spirited. Directed by original co-writer John Lafia, it opens with a majestically scored sequence of the Chucky doll being reconstructed at the Good Guys factory, because the toy company has decided that the best way to respond to the PR disaster created by the events of the first movie is to restore the supposedly evil doll to its full capacity and prove that it’s harmless.
That, of course, does not turn out well, and Mancini and Lafia offer up some amusing anti-corporate satire as the resurrected Chucky immediately starts killing toy-company employees. It’s no longer possible to play coy about Chucky’s true nature, so he’s openly animated and violent from the beginning, although poor Andy still has trouble convincing anyone else that Chucky is alive. Child’s Play 2 adds Christine Elise as Andy’s teenage foster sister Kyle, and it features the series’ greatest climax, an epic showdown set in the labyrinthine Good Guys factory, which looks like it was designed by an especially sadistic Willy Wonka.
The success of Child’s Play 2 turned out to be a mixed blessing, because it meant that Mancini and his collaborators had to churn out another sequel less than a year later, and 1991’s Child’s Play 3 is a low point for the franchise. Swapping out Vincent for Justin Whalin as a teenage Andy and set at a strict military academy, Child’s Play 3 features annoying characters, forgettable kills and a muddled plot, and it left the franchise dormant for the next seven years.
At that point, Chucky might have faded away, joining the likes of second-tier horror characters like Sleepaway Camp’s Angela or My Bloody Valentine’s Miner, but Mancini made the smart move of doubling down on the series’ campier aspects with the vibrant, funny and stylish Bride of Chucky, which remains the best movie in the franchise. Tilly brings a vivacious, mischievous glee to her role as Tiffany, who casts her own voodoo spell to resurrect Chucky in a misguided act of love.
Tiffany herself ends up in a doll body, mostly for Chucky’s twisted pleasure, and the animatronic dolls — who’ve become much more expressive in the decade since the first movie — have just as much chemistry as Tilly and Dourif. Andy is nowhere to be found, but Katherine Heigl and Nick Stabile make for decent replacements as a pair of teen lovers on the run who inadvertently enable Chucky and Tiffany’s killing spree. Hong Kong director Ronny Yu brings an appealingly exaggerated approach to the visuals, including a doll sex scene shot in silhouette and an amazingly gruesome murder by mirror in a honeymoon suite.
In his first film as director, Mancini has a bit of trouble living up to Yu’s standards with 2004’s Seed of Chucky, the most overtly comedic installment in the franchise. While some of its humor is pretty dated (the Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears references have aged particularly poorly), it’s still fun to watch thanks largely to Tilly’s continually committed performance, both as Tiffany and as a version of herself, starring in a movie about the Chucky saga.
Seed also introduces Chucky and Tiffany’s non-binary child Glen/Glenda (voiced by Billy Boyd), building on the queer representation via supporting characters in Bride and demonstrating Chucky and Tiffany as surprisingly loving and accepting for a pair of homicidal maniacs. At this point, Chucky has become aware of his own fame, and seeing him in a human body rather than his iconic doll form is no longer a worthwhile goal either for the audience or for Chucky himself. “I’m Chucky the killer doll, and I dig it!,” he declares triumphantly.
Mancini’s increasing creative freedom has allowed the franchise to construct a complex (and sometimes confusing) internal continuity, which takes hold in the next two Mancini-directed installments, 2013’s Curse of Chucky and 2017’s Cult of Chucky. Curse initially returns to the horror roots of Child’s Play, set in an evocative Gothic-style isolated house, where paraplegic Nica Pierce (Fiona Dourif, daughter of Brad) lives with her mentally ill mother. A mysterious package containing a Good Guys doll sets off a series of murders, but Mancini holds Chucky back here even more than Holland did in Child’s Play, not letting him speak in Brad Dourif’s voice until 45 minutes into the movie.
It’s yet another impressive creative reset, dialing back almost all of the comedy and making Chucky scary again. That is, until the finale, which ties in elements from previous films and even brings back Vincent as Andy in a Marvel-style post-credits scene. Cult, set in a snowbound, cavernous mental institution, is full-on fan service, with both Vincent and Tilly returning as major characters. It’s still creepy, thanks to Fiona Dourif’s intense performance, although Chucky’s newfound ability to transfer his soul into multiple dolls and/or humans at a time makes him nearly invincible, lowering the stakes for the horror.
Cult’s muddled, unresolved ending looks like less of a liability thanks to the 2021 launch of the Chucky TV series, which doubles down on everything that has made Chucky entertaining for nearly four decades — the kills, the humor, the returning characters, the queer solidarity. As creator and showrunner, Mancini has brought his creation to new heights, and while there’s no word yet on the show’s renewal following its recently concluded third season, Mancini has said that he has plans for another movie.At this point, anything less than the Avengers: Endgame of Chucky movies would be a disappointment, but Mancini has proved that he has the ambition and imagination to pull off that kind of shift, over and over again.
