Most Americans celebrate their 21st birthday with a few drinks and their first legal night out on the town. Charles Lee Ray, far from your typical American, prefers to terrorize innocent bystanders, dabble in voodoo incantations and seek yet another body to which he can transfer his soul.
Perhaps his skewed vision of ideal birthday festivities comes from the fact that he is, in fact, a homicidal maniac forever immortalized in the 2-foot frame of a doll.
The serial killer, better known as Chucky, turns 21 this year. To celebrate, UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television will present a special screening of “Child’s Play,” the first film in the Chucky franchise, Thursday, Oct. 29 at the James Bridges Theater. “Child’s Play” writer and UCLA alumnus, Don Mancini, will be in attendance. Joining Mancini in a panel discussion about the film will be David Kirschner, the movie’s producer; Kevin Yagher, the creature designer who built the animatronic Chucky; and Catherine Hicks, the female lead of “Child’s Play.”
Mancini wrote “Child’s Play” as an undergraduate in UCLA’s English department in the 1980s. He said he conceived his satirical slasher about a lethal plaything in light of the hype surrounding Cabbage Patch Kids.
“I wanted to write something dark about how advertising and marketing affects children. That literally was my original impulse before I settled on the killer-doll angle as the vehicle for that idea,” Mancini said.
Advancements in animatronics during the mid- and late-1980s facilitated Chucky’s creation. Mancini sold his script in 1985, just one year after the release of “Gremlins,” another film that greatly explored the boundaries and capabilities of puppetry and animatronics.
“The puppetry was very sophisticated, especially … facially sophisticated so that these puppets could convey relatively subtle emotions,” Mancini said, explaining how new technology made Chucky a reality. “You (can) treat the doll front and center as a full-fledged character and you can give him pages of dialogue. That had never been done before.”
Judith Halberstam, USC professor of English and gender studies, has published academic papers on the Chucky film franchise. She lauded the film as a great accomplishment in terms of puppetry, citing the complexity of the technology needed to make Chucky come to life.
“They’re using this new technology that’s a bit robotic and that is creating horror from a creature that is not human,” Halberstam said. “(The doll) is supposed to be a sight of comfort … and ends up being really creepy.”
“Child’s Play” was arguably the last film of the classic slasher era. Starting with 1978’s “Halloween,” the slasher genre based its success on iconic villains, helpless victims and ““ most importantly ““ copious amounts of gore and exsanguination. Characters like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees helped modernize the face of horror.
Ryan Gilmore, a second-year master of fine arts screenwriting student who specializes in writing horror movies and thrillers, explained the slasher genre’s role in the evolution of horror films.
“Up until that point, horror … was very Gothic. It hearkened back to old world mythology: vampires, werewolves, Dracula, Frankenstein, these kinds of things,” Gilmore said. “The slashers were hulking murderers.”
Gilmore explained how the slasher genre made horror more relatable to contemporary audiences.
“Instead of having a movie set in a creepy old castle in Europe, (the slasher film) set it right in a world that was easy for contemporary audiences to relate to. For example, “˜Halloween’ is in the suburbs. “˜Child’s Play’ is dealing with a single mom and a child. These are contemporary issues that the audience can immediately relate to,” Gilmore said.
The slasher films that preceded “Child’s Play” influenced Mancini as he wrote the script. Freddy Krueger, of the “Nightmare on Elm Street” film series, especially motivated him.
More so than the silent, almost emotionless Michael Myers and Jason, Krueger had dialogue to express his morbid sense of humor. Mancini applied this “wisecracking slasher” model to his Chucky character.
Compared to his more grizzled and beastly compatriots, Chucky is a less-threatening source of terror. And the incredible notion of a murderous doll that is so difficult to vanquish continues to draw criticism today.
“Chucky was so over the top, there was nothing eerie about it. It was so over the top that I was conscious of the fact that it’s a doll in a movie, and it totally spoiled it for me,” said Christine Coe, a fourth-year film student.
When compared to “torture porn,” as Mancini put it, like “Hostel” or the “Saw” franchise, it is easy to diminish Chucky’s role as a veritable horror icon. “Child’s Play” was novel in that it deviated from some of the major tropes of the slasher genre.
“”˜Child’s Play’ doesn’t actually focus on teenagers having sex. The main characters are a 30-ish mother and her 5-year-old kid. In that sense, it’s very different. It straddles more than one genre as well. There’s something almost traditional classic ghost story about the set-up of “˜Child’s Play,'” Mancini said.
Halberstam asserted that the Chucky franchise is committed to a different type of family. “Child’s Play” features an oedipal dynamic between a boy, his toy and his mother.
“Bride of Chucky” is a feminist allegory. “Seed of Chucky” not only depicts a very interesting scene of artificial insemination, but also deals with Chucky’s gender-ambiguous child.
“(The Chucky films) become increasingly funky. I would call them anti-normative,” Halberstam said. “They’re not really committed to returning everything to the status quo.”
After 21 years behind him and prospects of remaking the original “Child’s Play” in 2010, the deadly doll’s claim to staying power is irrefutable. As he says it himself, “I’m Chucky, and I’m your friend till the end.”