Jun 11
Look Who's Among LGBTQ+ Allies this Pride Season: Chucky, the Killer Doll
Kilian Melloy READ TIME: 2 MIN.
He's a pint-sized terror with a killer wit and a sense of humor that's as sharp as the knives he favors – but Chucky, the possessed doll who has long been a horror icon, is also an LGBTQ+ ally.
It's a point that Peacock, the streaming service run by NBCUniversal, is playing up this Pride season.
Chucky, The New York Times noted, "was thrust into the L.G.B.T.Q. spotlight this month when Peacock... displayed a banner on its home screen advertising a collection of queer-themed movies and TV shows. The image included the demonic doll, as well as the evergreen gay icons Cher and Alan Cumming, beside the words 'Amplifying LGBTQIA+ Voices.'"
The writeup went on to add that "many seem to have been taken by surprise that he was also a queer ally" – though it's not exactly news to LGBTQ+ audiences.
"In the first season of the TV series 'Chucky,' one of several 'queer horror' offerings in Peacock's Pride collection, the doll reveals to Jake, a gay teenager who bought him at a yard sale, that he has his own queer, gender-fluid child," the Times recalled.
"You're cool with it?" Jake asks him.
"I'm not a monster, Jake," Chucky says. "Chucky, it seems, is a PFLAG parent," the Times quipped.
The character's creator – out screenwriter Don Mancini, who penned the more than half-dozen feature films starring the diminutive anti-hero – agreed that Chucky has "status as a queer icon," telling the Times, "I think that's fairly well known by this point."
Even as he was writing the films, the Times noted, Mancini "was open to the idea that the doll occupied a realm in which he is not bound by sexuality, or the limitations of human bodies, for that matter."
The movies – especially the later installments – have a queer vibe and a camp sensibility and, Mancini said, "Bride of Chucky," the third film in the franchise, included "a sort of casually, positively gay character," who "certainly wasn't judged for being gay."
More queer characters were to follow, including the genderfluid child that Chucky and his girlfriend – also inhabiting a doll – shared in the film "Seed of Chucky."
Said Mancini: "It has really been nice for me again, as a gay man, to have a lot of gay, queer and trans fans say that movie meant a lot to them, and that those characters meant a lot to them as queer kids," the Times relayed.
"We have been very proud to be branded as the – I don't know if we're the gay horror franchise, but we are a gay horror franchise."
Kilian Melloy serves as EDGE Media Network's Associate Arts Editor and Staff Contributor. His professional memberships include the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, The Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association, and the Boston Theater Critics Association's Elliot Norton Awards Committee.
