Chucky: Body horror and metaphysics

For no discernible reason I started watching Child’s Play (1988) the other day. I hadn’t seen it in many years. (I’ll just be calling the movies Chucky, Chucky 2, etc. from now on). I liked it, and decided to watch Chucky 2 (1990). This is where I gained a surprising appreciation for the concept—in fact, Chucky 2 is one of the better horror sequels I’ve seen. It takes the metaphysical concept of the first film—a soul trapped inside a toy—and really plays that out. In the first film, everything needs to get set up and established, that the core concept is somewhat in the background. With Chucky 2, it’s pure metaphysics and—towards the end—pure body horror.

Chucky gains his defining quest about halfway through the first film—he has to get his soul into the first person who saw his true form, which is Andy, a 6 year old boy whose Mom was unlucky enough to buy Chucky from a weird guy in an alley, and brought him home to Andy. According to the rules of voodoo that enabled Chucky to put his soul into the doll in the first place (the serial killer Charles Lee Ray was dying in a shootout with the cops, and preserved his soul by doing a voodoo spell to inhabit the Chucky doll), Chucky can only escape the doll by entering the body of the first person who saw that he was a human soul trapped in a doll. Make sense?

In Chucky 2, Chucky tries the whole time to accomplish this. He comes close a few times, but is always foiled before he can pull it off. Then at the very end, he successfully does the spell over Andy, and the dark voodoo clouds and lightning encircle them…but nothing happens! Chucky has become human—his soul is now one with the doll forever.

This is a terrifying thought—being a soul that is permanently stuck in a ghastly, alien form; but it’s also a form that is somewhat close to human, without being human at all. This makes it even worse. Indeed, the suffering that Chucky himself experiences is maybe the most terrifying part of the movie—and this is one thing that differentiates Chucky from other horror movies. In most horror movies, the horror is something that happens to the other people, not the monsters. In the Chucky movies, there is horror that happens to the other people, like Andy and so on—but there’s also an absurdity to it, because Chucky is just a stupid doll after all, and not that hard to defeat. Jason and Michael Myers are very hard to beat—and they hardly ever experience real horror themselves. Chucky on the other hand gets so profoundly violated in so many ways, especially at the end of Chucky 2, that it’s like an endless carnival of bodily degradation, utterly satanic in its rending of flesh. And at that point in the movie, Chucky is fully human (his doll form consists entirely of flesh, blood, and bone—his soul seeped outward into his plastic body and transformed it into human tissue. He failed to escape his plastic body before his soul turned the plastic human. This was the ticking clock that Chucky had to race against…and he failed). This is another part of the terror Chucky experiences—he can feel his human soul getting trapped in the doll body with every passing moment.

And of course, as Chucky is profoundly tortured at the end of Chucky 2, Andy laughs gleefully, as does the audience—Chucky is evil after all, and he deserves to be stretched, crushed, pulverized, burnt, disincorporated, dismembered, gouged, and ultimately turned into a steaming pile of plastic and meat.

This is the real horror of the movie—watching, and feeling and hearing, a sentient humanoid creature become transmogrified into a smoking wad of meat, fabric, plastic, and awkwardly protruding limbs. But even this is not the end of Chucky’s total physical disincorporation—the meat wad gets filled with air and expands outward and explodes. Chucky becomes a meatball and then gets exploded. And the horror added on top of this is that we are, with Andy, laughing as this grotesqueness happens.

A few other things that are cool about the Chucky movies: The first one came out in 1988, and Chucky 2 came out in 1990. That’s pretty fast for a sequel. Sequels nowadays come out further apart I feel like. Having them come out so quickly one after the other keeps the imagination at the core of the concept tight and grounded and connected—it all feels like one thing.

But apart from the body horror that Chucky himself experiences, the real horror of the Chucky movies is that he is an evil that can’t be shared, because nobody will believe you if you say that a doll is trying to kill you. Andy tries to convince people and they never believe him—until it’s too late, and Chucky kills them. Indeed, when the truth of Chucky is realized, it is already too late—it is a fatal encounter with truth. And truth is also inadequate—Andy can’t even tell anyone the truth about Chucky, because it’s a truth that is literally unbelievable. Truth is both fatal—too much—and inadequate—not enough.