One of the most enduring horror movie franchises over the past 30 years is Child's Play, featuring the murderous, sentient doll Chucky. All seven installments of the original film series were written by filmmaker Don Mancini, who went on to the most recent three in the series, 2004's Seed of Chucky, 2014's Curse of Chucky and 2017's Cult of Chucky. While Mancini did not have any direct involvement with last year's cinematic reboot Child's Play, he has since been developing Syfy's television continuation of the original film series as the series' creator, director and executive producer.
Simply titled Chucky, the series was developed alongside horror anthology series Channel Zero creator Nick Antosca, with a ten-episode order slated to premiere next year. As part of its Comic-Con@Home virtual programming, premium horror streaming service Shudder hosted the Horror Is Queer panel, promoting its upcoming documentary on LTBTQ+ representation in horror cinema and television. Among the panelists was Mancini, himself a proudly openly-gay horror filmmaker.
"The first three Chucky movies, there was nothing explicitly queer in those films," observed Mancini on how his queer identity informed the Child's Play franchise. "In retrospect, certainly, I would say...those movies were informed by my queer identity in the sense that the lead character Andy Barclay, the little boy, he's lonely and isolated and wants to find that one special friend in the end. That is not something I was thinking about consciously when I wrote that but then years pass and you go back and think 'What were my motivations? Why did I make that character fatherless?'"
With the absence of strong father figures in the original trilogy of films and paternal issues resurfacing in the films directed by Mancini himself, the veteran filmmaker realized this familial dynamic came from his own childhood and the tumultuous relationship he had with his father.
"I didn't think about it at the time but, nowadays, I think it had to do with my very, very conflicted relationship with my own dad growing up as a gay man with a macho father whose greatest nightmare in the world was that I would become gay," Mancini said. "In a way, it was revenge [writing that parental absence into the films]. There is no dad! He's dead! [Laughs] But the loneliness, I think, definitely was autobiographical. Then, when we got to Bride of Chucky, I think that's where I consciously tried to gay it up. I had an explicitly gay character, I cast Jennifer Tilly and Alexis Arquette and John Ritter, various people who had connections to gay culture. And, from then on, we've just gotten gayer and gayer and gayer. But since Bride, it has been a really conscious thing for me to want to make my franchise be of specifically gay thing."
Created and directed by Don Mancini, Chucky stars Brad Dourif. The series premieres on Syfy and USA Network in 2021.