Chucky from Child’s Play is the modern universal monster

This October, Criterion Channel will present a series of precisely curated Universal horror films from the 1930s, ’40s and’ 50s, highlighting the fact that Universal’s monsters have not been a multiple element in decades. This has not always been for lack of trying. Sony produced unofficial adult-oriented reflections of these monsters in the 90s, with R-rated versions of Dracula Frankenstein, and the Werewolf (in Wolf). Universal made The Mummy in a hit adventure movie series from the late 90s and early 2000s, but it’s Werewolf remake lost money. Later, the studio tried and failed to launch a modern Universal Monster cinematic universe with Tom Cruise’s version of The Mummy in 2017, which bombed, but led to Leigh Whannell’s excellent remake of The invisible manand the idea that Universal would take a more filmmaker-centric approach to its monsters in the future.

As the monsters themselves haven’t been able to spawn many ongoing series, the Universal Monster figure has become more of a trope, though not one that has much use in contemporary horror movies. Generally speaking, a Universal-style monster is a creature with both monstrous and human qualities, often too beastly to serve as the film’s protagonist, but human-like enough to generate a giddy fascination. The individual levels of empathy they generate may vary, but they are all doing warped imitations of humans: the stitched Frankenstein Monster, the undead Dracula and Mummy, the half-animal Werewolf, the Humanoid Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Invisible man whose humanity fades with his physical form.

Image: Universal Pictures

This balance between monster qualities and human forms can be difficult to achieve. Most zombies, despite their obvious human roots, don’t have enough personality. Movie ghosts don’t have a consistent enough shape. Too many slashers hide behind masks. In contemporary cinema, the Universal Monster type is much more likely to appear in a superhero story than in a horror movie: characters like the Hulk or Venom more closely embody that monster / human duality (with the horror bonus of their Jekyll / Hyde dynamics). However, there is a large unrecognized Universal Monster from recent years that appears in horror movies released by Universal: Chucky, the killer doll from the Child’s Play movies (and, starting this month, a TV series).

Not that Chucky languishes in the dark, although, despite his highly touted self-titled show, he has never been as popular as some of his would-be contemporaries. Only five of his seven films have had theatrical releases, and even the three that could be described as hits didn’t consistently hit. Nightmare on Elm Street numbers. elm street is an easy point of comparison because the first Child’s play came out in 1988, the same year that Freddy Krueger reached his box office peak with A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: Master of Dreams. With Child’s Play 2 in 1990 and Child’s Play 3 In 1991, the series was late to the slasher market, and as a result, interest in movies waned. (More parallels from Freddy: Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare the original six-movie series ended just a few weeks later Child’s Play 3 failed.)

And in those early movies, Chucky works like a killer. In reality, he is serial killer Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif), who appears to commit murder for the sheer mad game of doing it, and whose soul possesses a harmless-looking “Good Guy” doll after a desperate voodoo ritual. The basic story of Child’s Play is easy to remember, because the movies repeat it several times: the possessed doll finds its way to a child (in the first three movies, exactly the same child), the doll befriends / stalks the child while killing others. people, and no one believes the child when he tries to warn them. The first three drawings of Child’s Play have the repetition of a post-Hallowe’en slasher, where the primary variations tend to be the mechanics of individual assassinations and convolutions of gibberish that manages to bring the assassin back to life once defeated.

Image: Universal Pictures

However, like so many classic horror villains, Chucky persists. The fourth entry, 1998’s Bride of chucky, is known for featuring Jennifer Tilly’s equally murderous Tiffany (who eventually becomes Chucky’s doll companion), along with a more explicit sense of teasing humor. It’s also where the Universal Monster connection grows strongest, from the title down. Writer Don Mancini, who has worked on all seven Chucky movies and the series, going from screenwriter to screenwriter and director, has Tiffany engrossed and even crying as he watches. Bride of frankenstein during his great death scene. Later, in her doll form, Tiffany wisely quotes the part of the movie that she found so returning to Chucky: “We Belong Dead.” Bride of chucky It’s both a comedy and a horror movie, which makes it all the more impressive when it gives Tiffany a twisted depth of feeling by acknowledging the couple’s misfit status. In its mix of black comedy and queer subtext (or, in The Seed of Chucky, strange actual text), Mancini reconnects with James Whale, the Bride of frankenstein and Invisible Man director whose influence added a similar subtext to the original Universal Monsters series.

It is appropriate, then, that Bride It is a turning point for the series. Chucky modifies his signature look, sporting Frankenstein-style facial stitches that he keeps on The Seed of Chucky, as well as DTV follow-ups Chucky curse and Cult of chucky. Little by little, Charles Lee Ray, who spends much of the series trying to find a human body to recover it, more or less disappears, and Chucky becomes a different personality from his creator, hybridizing his human and plastic forms. A plot becomes Cult of chucky allows the killer’s soul to divide and subdivide, creating more Chuckies that are not quite the same as more Rays while clearly more alive than a mere army of plastic dolls.

Although the Chucky The movies have more continuity than most Universal Monster series, they are pretty inconsistent about Chucky’s physical makeup. In the early movies, he is a doll that is supposed to become more human since he is possessed for a longer time; in the latter, it appears to have a beating heart, or at least some other organs underneath the plastic shell. The little physiological details, especially when they aren’t uniform, make Chucky feel weirder in the long run. There is something unholy about this living, breathing, and, at times, eerily sexually active toy.

Photo: Steve Wilkie / US Network

Emotionally, Chucky does not generate even close to the empathy of human-monster hybrids like the Werewolf or the Creature of Frankenstein; he’s certainly not as presentable or seductive as Dracula. If anything, she looks more monstrous because her doll shape encapsulates her human ugliness. Although we don’t see many images of the “real” Charles Lee Ray in action, Chucky seems to get more and more rude and joking as he spends more time in the doll’s body; sounds more like a curmudgeonly rude insult comedian in The Seed of Chucky of what it does in Child’s Play 2.

It’s easy to mistake this for a slasher development, specifically a Freddy Krueger knockoff, and Chucky sometimes plays that way. His films, however, change form, giving this breadth new contexts, such as the gender politics of Seed or the gothic melodrama of Curse – and his films that highlight the comedy factor recall the days when various monsters met Abbott and Costello. The new Chucky The series about SyFy seems to develop his human side even more. Chucky maintains his nastiness, but his friendship with teenage Jake (Zackary Wheeler) seems set for more depth than the crude manipulations and tricks he uses in the original film.

The astonishing longevity (and surprisingly high quality!) Of the Chucky franchise secures it a place in the pantheon of monsters. Where that spot is located feels less clear, even as Chucky continues to reside in the original monster studio – Universal got the rights to the series starting with Child’s Play 2, and has clung to them over the years; Chucky is also a part of the Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios. Still, the closest association with Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers, and the like persists, understandably, given when Child’s play hit theaters and impressed viewers for the first time. But Freddy and Jason, at least, haven’t resurfaced in over a decade. They are absent monsters, unsure of how to haunt us in the 21st century. Meanwhile, the killer doll has dabbled in marriage, parenting, and teen counseling. Oddly enough, Chucky is universal.