When Peacock launched its Pride month collection, there was some confusion online over the inclusion of a certain killer doll. Like his recent AI-driven protege M3GAN, Chucky is something of an LGBTQ+ icon.
At the beginning of June, Peacock debuted a curated assortment of movies and shows for Pride month. The Amplifying LGBTQIA+ Voices collection predictably includes classics (The Birdcage, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) along with camp offerings (Burlesque, The Traitors) and—Child’s Play? Some people were a little surprised to see Chucky, the red-headed doll and prolific serial killer, included in the collection.
Unless you’re a horror fan or really keyed into pop culture, you probably didn’t realize that Chucky is a queer icon. Unlike the Babadook and M3GAN, horror movie characters adopted as campy mascots by extremely online members of the LGBTQ+ community, Chucky is canonically a queer ally, and he was created by a gay man—screenwriter Don Mancini.
While the first three movies in the Child’s Play franchise aren’t overtly queer-coded, the series took a distinctively campy turn with 2000’s Bride of Chucky, which includes a casually positive representation of a gay character (Damien, played by the late Alexis Arquette) at a time when such a thing was still weirdly unusual in pop culture, and especially in horror. In the 2004 follow-up, Seed of Chucky, the eponymous doll and his bride, Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly), welcome a new addition to their family: Glen (Billy Boyd), a pacifistic living doll who rejects his parents’ violent habits. But Glen is sharing his body with another soul—Glenda, a girl-doll who revels in killing. In addition to this delightfully deranged take on gender fluidity, Seed of Chucky features John Waters—queer icon and King of Filth—in a supporting role.
The New York Times recently spoke with Mancini, who also created the Chucky series, about his character’s legacy. “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,” Mancini explained. “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.”
In Seed of Chucky, Glen/Glenda’s souls are successfully transferred into the bodies of Jennifer Tilly’s twin children (in the Chucky universe, Tilly also plays a fictional version of herself), who appear as teens in Chucky season 2. The series, which just wrapped its third season, centers on a young gay protagonist named Jake (Zackary Arthur) who finds Chucky at a yard sale at the start of season 1. During an early interaction between the two, Chucky reveals that he has a queer kid of his own. When Jake asks if Chucky is cool with that, the killer doll replies, “I’m not a monster, Jake.”
Chucky is available to stream on Peacock as part of the Queer Horror collection, which also includes Elvira’s Movie Macabre, Knock at the Cabin, and M3GAN (of course).
