Don Mancini, a screenwriting student in the mid-1980s, claims the original concept for his first film in what would become one of the most iconic slashers of the late 20th century was inspired chiefly by two factors: First, the experiences of his father, an advertising executive during a time where marketing became hyper-focused on children, and second, the notorious Cabbage Patch Kid riots of 1983 that broke out after the company could not make enough dolls to satisfy the public’s ravenous demand. In the past few decades, Mancini has opened up more and more about the film’s various quirks and their origins; according to Mancini’s testimony during San Diego Comic Con’s “Horror is Queer” panel in 2020, his being gay led to a troubled relationship with his father, therefore leading to a subconscious decision for the film’s protagonists to be a young boy (Andy Barclay, played by Alex Vincent) and his mother (Karen Barclay, played by Catherine Hicks). While most agree that the film’s core commentary focuses on the influence of advertising on young children, as even early drafts of the script in which Chucky is filled with fake blood (which leads to Andy making a fatal blood pact with the doll) in order to promote Good Guy-branded bandages, I always felt there was yet another hidden message in the subtext of the first Child’s Play movie:
How the mind of a child processes a traumatic event, and (with the context of later installments in the franchise) how that trauma plays a part in influencing that child as they grow.
The film begins with a chase scene through the streets of mid-1980s Chicago. Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif) is fleeing on foot, pursued by CPD’s Detective Mike Norris (Chris Sarandon); just when Ray comes close to his getaway car, his accomplice and driver Eddie Caputo (Neil Giuntoli) speeds away and leaves him for dead. The chase ends after Norris corners Ray in a toy store, fatally shooting him—But not before Ray can grab one of the Good Guy dolls that’d fallen off of a nearby display, performing a ritual that will transfer his soul into that artificial body.
Thick storm clouds and crackling lightning gather overhead, and though these effects are certainly dated by the standards of the 2020s, so much more focus is put on the spectacle of the practical effects within the toy store set when one final bolt of lightning crashes through the glass ceiling and blows everything away that I feel these very early examples of computer-generated imagery can be forgiven. In every Child’s Play project Mancini has been involved in, practical effects are never neglected—at the very least, in the case of Chucky himself. Even in the recent SyFy television show, the crew simply innovated from already-existing puppeteering and green-screen technology to ensure their human actors always had the sadistic little redhead to play off of in real time.
After the death and soul-transfer of Charles Lee Ray, we’re introduced to our protagonists as a six-year-old Andy Barclay makes his mother some breakfast (to the best of his very limited ability and understanding). It’s clear that Andy is a Good Guy superfan from a young age, pouring branded cereal for his mother and wearing branded pajamas and slippers. He watches television as he works, first with disinterest as the channel plays a rerun of the in-universe Good Guys cartoon, then with awe as he catches an advertisement for a new line of “life-size” talking Good Guy dolls. His mother, already preparing as best she can on her limited budget for the Christmas season, tries to appease him with a branded toy tool set, but Andy is insistent: He wants a Good Guy, not just a Good Guy’s tools or clothes. Andy cannot understand that his mother is already at her wit’s end, dealing with only alluded-to frustrations at her job with what looks to be a department store in the same vein as Macy’s, but thankfully Maggie Peterson (Dinah Manoff), a close family friend, seems to have found the answer to both Karen’s and her son’s problems in the hands of a peddler in the back alley outside that had recently looted the wreckage of a destroyed toy store.
Only when Karen brings the doll home, to Andy’s instant delight as he wastes no time in bonding with the doll, calling himself ‘Chucky’, does the allegory I see most prominently in the film begin in earnest. Andy is an only child to a single and overworked mother, babysat by his “Aunt Maggie” whenever his mother has to work longer than expected; it comes as no surprise that the moment he’s given even the simulated experience of friendship that he latches onto it, as he is seen going everywhere from that point until the film’s climax with Chucky faithfully in tow. The only time we, the audience, start to truly feel any concern is when Maggie brushes off Andy’s request for Chucky to “stay up” and watch the news (where the manhunt for Eddie Caputo is still being reported on) and instead tucks him into bed. This leads to Chucky (who, at this point, we only follow with shots from his point of view) hitting Maggie in the head with a hammer, causing her to stumble backwards and fall from the third-story window of the Barclay’s apartment to the streets below.
Karen returns home after her shift to the sight of police surrounding the building. She’s quick to make her way home, pushing past nearly every cop in Chicago to be sure her son is safe, even quicker to let out a sigh of relief when he comes running giddily into her arms. This little moment feels almost completely contrary to the earlier draft of this film’s script mentioned before, where Andy’s silent resentment of his parents’ separation and desire for his mother’s love would have led his subconscious to commit these murders by controlling Chucky as Andy slept. Instead, Karen clearly loves her son and prioritizes his safety and happiness above all else—to the point that when Det. Norris starts to suspect Andy’s involvement in Maggie’s murder based on a matching shoe print between the print left on some flour spilled onto the kitchen counter and Andy’s “Good Guy PJ Sneakers.” She hurriedly sends Andy to bed and the cops out of her home. Only when the police clear out does Karen walk into her son’s room and see him sitting across from the doll on the floor does he first claim that he can talk to Chucky, who claims to be an angel “sent down from Heaven” by Andy’s father (implied to instead be deceased instead of divorced, as the original script would have gone) to be his friend.
Then Andy relays another thing Chucky said: “Aunt Maggie was a real bitch and got what she deserved”. Not to get too dark, here, but it’s fairly clear from this scene that Andy’s communication with Chucky very closely mirrors an abuser grooming their victim, if not stands as an example of grooming a child for homicide and/or homicide apologia rather than sexual abuse. Andy is drawn to Chucky by his being a doll that promises to be a close and unwavering confidant, and through this, Chucky is able to isolate Andy and frame his presence as a source of comfort, and his crimes as something done to benefit both of them. This is even more obvious after Chucky seemingly convinces Andy to skip school to instead get explosive revenge on Ray’s ex-partner, Eddie Caputo. When Andy is found at the police station by his mother, he can be seen answering the questions of Det. Norris’ partner, Jack Santos (Tommy Swerdlow):
DET. SANTOS:
Do you have any idea why your aunt Maggie fell out of that window?
ANDY:
Yes.
DET. SANTOS:
Could you tell me why?
ANDY:
‘Cause she saw Chucky, and it scared her so much, she fell out.
DET. SANTOS:
Oh, she did, huh? So why did Chucky go to see Eddie Caputo?
While Andy’s answers sound rehearsed, they don’t necessarily have the same excitement or exaggeration that a child telling a lie of their own authorship does. Instead, it sounds more like the simplified relaying of a lie that a child very readily took as truth. A toddler guilty of candy theft will often tell you the entire epic tale of how that treat magically fell from the mouth of a giant robot with rainbow-laser-eyes into their hand, incidentally; a toddler given candy by a more experienced liar that tells him it fell off the back of a truck will tell you just that, that a man found it after it had fallen out of a truck and gave it to them for being a good kid. From the sound of it, Chucky had lessened the severity of his own actions by taking advantage of Andy only possibly hearing Maggie’s death instead of witnessing it firsthand: if all Andy heard was Maggie’s screams and her body breaking through the window, he’d have no reason to believe Chucky didn’t just try to talk to her and that she, in turn, didn’t overreact to the very sight of him. If we keep Andy’s answers in mind when he then tries to talk to Chucky in front of both Detectives Norris and Santos, as well as his own terrified mother, his anger when his “friend to the end” tries to suddenly cut his losses with the boy and let him take the blame makes perfect sense. Andy doesn’t understand why Chucky couldn’t possibly explain things away as a mere misunderstanding like he had before; he just knows that he isn’t explaining, even after being told that Andy would be institutionalized if he didn’t cooperate. Andy already knows, explicitly, that nobody believes him.
I don’t think I need to explain why it is so poignant that Andy does, in fact, know that nobody believes him about Chucky. I similarly admire the fact that one of Andy’s angered demands of the inanimate Chucky is to tell him “why he lied about everything”. This indicates that Andy now understands that Chucky was only using him as a means to an end; he just doesn’t understand why he was being used, nor to what end. He’s just as scared to be away from his mother as his mother is of losing him, and he knows their separation wouldn’t even have been considered if it weren’t for this doll’s influence. Even so, Andy’s rage only convinces Doctor Ardmore (Jack Colvin) from County General to have the boy admitted for inpatient 1980s mental health “treatment” for a few days, sending Karen home shellshocked with Chucky under her arm.
After questioning the doll and her own reality, Karen ends up picking up the box Chucky had been packaged in. (Watching the film nowadays makes me wonder just how Chucky avoided getting his face caved in without styrofoam molds holding him still in that giant yet flimsy cardboard box.) Just when she seems ready to just put Chucky back and hide him away, however, the two D-cell batteries included with (but not yet installed into) every Good Guy doll suddenly fall to the ground. The music suddenly swells; tense string section tremolo and the sudden scraping of piano strings cinch the feeling of discomfort and swelling unease as Karen slowly approaches the doll, opens the battery compartment on its back, and finds Chucky running on empty. To his credit, he does keep up the ‘doll’ act even after he’s effectively caught dead to rights, only speaking his mind after Karen turns up the fireplace and threatens to throw him in.
It’s here that the film’s age shows the most, when Chucky finally chooses violence and gets into a tangle with Karen until he escapes. Rapidfire smash cuts between different angles, some shots showing Catherine Hicks struggling against the animatronic puppet while others show the illusion of motion via thrashing around with the loose prop, all run together in the desperate hope that the sequence will go by so fast that the audience doesn’t notice its numerous seams. The advancement of technology, where practical effects are concerned, has helped the franchise as a whole tremendously, and it’s no more apparent than upon comparison to the original film. Once Chucky manages to escape after landing a pretty nasty bite on his captor’s arm, Karen rushes out with the knowledge that Andy was always telling the truth; she hunts Det. Norris is down to catch him up to speed as best she can, only to find herself at another impasse: Andy is a child, she is a woman, thus the cops are inclined to believe neither of them is doing anything more than overreacting or imagining things. Karen tries to plead her case, but when the detective makes it clear that he’ll hear none of it, she instead decides to investigate the peddler she’d bought the doll from, even when Norris warns her against it. Undeterred, Karen searches from one encampment to another in the back alleys and side roads of Chicago in the dead of night; the conflation of the homeless and impoverished with untrustworthiness and even horror was rife in the films of the 80s and 90s, though thankfully, this stereotype has died down in time.
Another part of this film that is looked back on as embarrassing, even though Mancini continued using the concept at first by popular demand before expanding its lore in the more recent film and TV show installments, is the origin of Chucky’s soul-transfer ritual. The ritual here is described by Chucky himself as a “gris-gris”, though from my understanding this term refers to a talisman, and invokes Damballa—the real name of a spirit in Haitian and West African religious tradition, though the entity portrayed in the Child’s Play franchise is most certainly far removed from this spirit in all but name—through a chant that, at the time of the first three films, was nothing more than vaguely Franco-Latin-esque gibberish. Mancini’s original reluctance and disdain towards this plot device was always its total and irrevocable removal from his original concept of exploring Andy’s darker subconscious through the use of Chucky as a proxy; granted, when we learn this much of the ritual, we finally get to see the doll bleed, but it seems he was never supposed to. The more time he spends in a doll’s body, the more human and mortal that body becomes, which Chucky is not at all happy about. At first, his old mentor John Aelsop Bishop (Raymond Oliver) refuses to help Chucky any further upon realizing he’s using his faith for evil, but tells Chucky after torture-via-voodoo doll (a practice that is actually completely irrelevant to real-world African diaspora religions) that the only way to attain a human body would be to perform the ritual again with the first person he had revealed his “true self” to. This detail on its own—specifically, that through Chucky’s initial abuses of Andy he finds himself needing only Andy’s body, thus being unable to harm or kill him yet still able to harm him by isolating the boy one last time to metaphysically infiltrate and overpower—stands out to me, though the scene ends with an unfortunate line so blatant and blunt that it nearly spoils the fun of all that analysis I just did. Nonetheless, Chucky stabs the doll in the heart before making his exit, leaving John to slowly bleed out and die on the floor. Thankfully, he doesn’t die before telling a frantic Karen and Det. Norris, how the doll can be stopped: Get him through the heart, as by now it should be “almost human”.
We come back to see Andy in his room at the county inpatient psychiatric ward, though we’re given no time to see how he’s coping before Chucky (or, at least, actor and stuntman Ed Gale doing whatever motions were too complex for animatronics at the time in a Chucky costume) can already be seen climbing up the stairs of the fire escape. He calls for Dr. Ardmore’s help, but when the doctor assumes Andy to be hallucinating and steps away, the boy crumples up and sobs desperately in a stunning and impressive display of acting prowess in Alex Vincent from a very young age. Of course, his performance might have been a little too good, and that may be due to what Tom Holland was doing behind the camera: according to an interview with Alex Vincent at last year’s Blood & Ink NY, he recounted that director Tom Holland was “screaming things at [him]”, even very personal barbs about Vincent’s parents divorcing, to get him to convincingly cry. Andy manages to give Chucky the slip for a moment, but he’s cornered in a treatment room by both the doll and, eventually, Dr. Ardmore, who Chucky kills by turning a session of electroshock therapy back around on him.
When Andy escapes, he naturally runs back home, but he doesn’t come back alone. A final string of chase sequences plays out, and while some shots in these chases work well, others certainly fall short even for the best of its era. By no means is the movie technically perfect. For the purposes of my original point about the film, the ending is the least relevant portion, except for the very last shot of the movie: after Det. Santos shows up for a final non-believer to suddenly see the light regarding Charles Lee Ray, the three adults leave the bedroom in which Chucky’s charred, shot corpse lies oozing with blood, with Andy under their arms. The detectives and Karen are assumed to be looking forward, thus away from the doll, but Andy looks back just as the door nearly falls shut. The shot freezes on that frame of Andy looking back at not only the remains of a literal killer, but at the killer of his childhood and innocence. While he’s still too young to fully understand the extent of the damage done to his psyche, Andy already knows that even if that really were the end of Chucky, what had already happened to him had made its impact for good—we see this to its fullest extent in the later two films, then again into Andy’s adulthood in the more recent installments.
My own personal reasons for loving the franchise aside, I do still have to recommend this movie for those who can stomach seeing some of the horror genre’s growing pains in exchange for an excellent and multifaceted commentary that can be read either as the critique of American consumerism that Mancini intended to make, as the allegory for childhood trauma that I see in it, or perhaps even both. It’s a wonderful thing to start the month of October either way.
Written by Alexei Lee
