The Child's Play TV Adaptation Chucky is Freakishly, Almost Disconcertingly Good

There are Friday the 13th people and Halloween obsessives and Nightmare on Elm Street folks and, to a much lesser extent, fright fans in thrall to the grubbier charms of the Critters, Leprechaun, Wrong Turn, Saw, Hellraiser and Phantasm franchises. 

For all of my affection for the first Halloween and Halloween III: Season of the Witch and the original Nightmare on Elm Street movie, I, however, have always been a Child’s Play guy. 

Tom Holland's 1988 modern day horror classic accomplished the formidable feat of making a legitimately scary horror movie based around a dead-eyed hunk of plastic. Child’s Play II and Child’s Play 3 offered the expected diminishing returns but just when it seemed like the franchise had run its course it audaciously re-invented itself with 1998’s Bride of Chucky. 

Instead of denying or playing down the camp and comic aspects of a franchise about a foot tall doll terrorizing people anywhere from three to six times its height they instead leaned into the absurdity, lustily embracing kitsch as part of a post-Scream move towards winking self-awareness. 

2004’s Seed of Chucky didn’t just go further: it took the queer camp craziness of Bride of Chucky as far as it could possibly go with an out and out kooky comedy, complete with a prominent supporting turn from John Waters, that re-conceived the series as a bonkers meta-textual show-business comedy starring Jennifer Tilly and Redman as fictionalized version of themselves and Billy Boyd as the voice and soul of Chucky and Tiffany’s gender-fluid offspring Glenn/Glenda. 

The Child’s Play movies kept getting gayer, campier and crazier until they hit a wall as to how gay, campy and crazy any one horror film can be. 

The series radically switched gears all over again for its first direct-to-video entry, 2013’s Curse of Chucky. This time the franchise pivoted back to straight horror with a spooky and effective haunted house narrative starring Fiona Dourif, the daughter of Brad Dourif, the voice of Chucky as well as the actor who plays Charles Lee Ray, as Nica Pierce, a paraplegic woman forced to deal with a murderous toy. 

I did not see the film’s 2017 sequel Cult of Chucky but I quite enjoyed a 2019 reboot that found Mark Hamill replacing Dourif as the voice of Chucky. The new Child’s Play was satirical in a decidedly different way than Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky, taking aim at the complicated, fraught nature of our relationship with technology.

I liked the 2019 Child’s Play reboot but I fucking love the first Child’s Play television program, Syfy’s Chucky. On one level the show marks a return to the franchise’s origins in that it revolves around his complicated relationship with a troubled young man. 

Only instead of the riotous camp of Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky, Chucky offers a shockingly sensitive, nuanced exploration of the unfathomably complicated emotional terrain of teenaged life centering on Jake Wheeler (Zackary Arthur), an artsy, off-beat queer fourteen year old who comes into possession of Chucky. 

In addition to being one of the most incisive looks at middle school/high school life this side of Freaks & Geeks and Pen15 Chucky is a surprisingly tender and moving gay romance. 

Chucky is such a rich and haunting portrait of life among the young and deeply traumatized that it almost doesn’t need Chucky. Remove the kills, the violence and the bloodshed and Chucky is still absolutely riveting although there is a metaphorical richness in Chucky essentially being an external manifestation of the internal trauma Jake has been dealing with throughout an early adolescence even more brutal and scarring than most. 

That Chucky fits into this world at all is a testament to the writing and the extraordinary voice performance of Dourif, who transforms a killer doll into an unexpectedly complex, three-dimensional figure. 

There are two episodes left in the first season of Child’s Play and I will be VERY upset if it is not renewed, particularly since it keeps getting more and more ambitious in terms of its world-building and the way it is currently bringing together the original films and the direct-to-video sequels. 

Thirty-three years after Child’s Play was a sleeper hit the franchise is stronger and deeper than ever. That’s a minor miracle so if you have not checked out this rare and unexpected gift of a television show I cannot recommend it highly enough. 

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