“She Just Had an Accident”: “Seed of Chucky” at 20 | Features

“That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life!” a little girl (Bethany Simons-Denville) exclaims. She shouts it at the audience, who, in “Seed of Chucky”‘s first-person opening scene, takes a queer kid’s point-of-view. As she throws them into a toy chest, it’s like we fall into a closet. The kid comes out soon after and, in a “Halloween” riff, murders the girl’s parents. She reappears to scream at us. It’s a nightmare and, before we can fully decimate the family unit, we wake up.

It’s November 2004, and the fifth entry of a perennial horror franchise is hitting multiplexes across America. Mel Gibson’s apex of Hollywood conservatism, “The Passion of the Christ,” is still one of the biggest events of the year. Domestic icon Martha Stewart was found guilty eight months ago. George W. Bush, whose presidential campaign pushed anti-LGBTQ laws like the banning of gay marriage, was reelected last week. The film stars Jennifer Tilly, and she’s not just in two roles; she’s also in her career’s queerest offering yet. In it, a killer doll from the late ‘80s and his wife meet their gender-confused child, a pacifist who accidentally melts off John Waters’ face.

Calling “Seed of Chucky” silly is an understatement. However, it’s also one of the most radical studio films of the aughts: a distillation of Camp; a piece about performance; and, with both, a self-aware tale of gender. Its release on over 2,000 screens is a thing of wonder, and it’s not surprising it took a while to get there. Director Don Mancini, who co-wrote the first “Child’s Play” and would solely write each following film, began a script after “Bride of Chucky”‘s October 1998 debut. The final product would be a natural extrapolation of the series, both in its body-swapping mythos and its depiction of the physical form as farce.

Alas, initial reactions weren’t too glowing. “The line from the studio on the first draft was, ‘It’s too gay and it has too much Jennifer Tilly,’” Mancini would tell Bloody Disgusting’s “Horror Queers” podcast. He’d also note the April 1999 Columbine High School massacre as furthering the industry’s reluctance to fund projects involving kids and violence. Years later, however, “Seed” would find a revival in August 2003, directly after the release of New Line’s “Freddy vs. Jason.”

The script was largely ready, and with that, Universal greenlit production under its Focus Features subsidiary. Production would start in the spring of 2004, and Focus’ then-genre label, Rogue Pictures, would distribute. Save for a few establishing shots, “Seed” was filmed at Castel Film Studios in Romania, and while there’s a visual artifice to the picture, it fits. After all, this is a movie about killer dolls where a gay icon parodies herself to no end. But it’s not content to just be clever; it’s truly smart and knows exactly what it is.

After its opening scene, the young doll (voiced with a Dickensian affect by Billy Boyd) is revealed to be owned by a ventriloquist (Keith-Lee Castle) in England. The kid sees Chucky (voiced by Brad Dourif) and Tiffany (voiced by Tilly) on “Access Hollywood,” ships themselves overseas, and resurrects the couple, only to be horrified by their parents’ violence. However, the child was born without genitals. In a play on the Ed Wood film, Chucky names “him” Glen; Tiffany names “her” Glenda. To quote Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” in which she coined the term, the character’s presentation is “androgynous” and literally “sexless.”

Here, “Seed of Chucky” links Camp with queerness referentially and thematically. There’s an innocence, even, that partially comes from Glen/Glenda. They’re an avowed pacifist and gender-neutral. Mancini’s script divorces them from their parents’ predilections and, all the while, conflates the ensuing violence with a gender binary. “Camp rests on innocence,” Sontag established, and Glen/Glenda’s pressure to conform to one identity further confuses them. Narratively, the setup is just as rich. As if dividing by zero, Chucky and Tiffany force specific genders onto an estranged child ambivalent to such, leading to a comedy of errors.

This first happens on the set of “Chucky Goes Psycho,” where a fictional Jennifer Tilly (playing herself) laments her professional downfall. To revitalize her career, she plans to sleep with rapper-turned-director Redman (playing himself) for the role of the Virgin Mary in his Biblical epic. (“Mel Gibson ain’t the only one God’s been talking to in Hollywood,” he claims.) The dolls, meanwhile, shack up in her mansion’s attic with a scheme: Chucky will inhabit Redman’s body, Tiffany is to become her favorite actress by possessing Jennifer, and the latter shall become a surrogate mother to Glen/Glenda. If Chucky and Tiffany can also kick their “addiction” to killing, they’ll be the perfect family.

To use Sontag’s words regarding Camp, “Seed of Chucky” also operates on “a mode of seduction—one which employs flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation; gestures full of duplicity, with a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more impersonal, for outsiders.” This modus operandi of “Seed”‘s artifice is twofold: its meta-humor (and “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” setup) is the starting point, which then intersects with the supernatural use of its characters’ bodies and the performances inherent to them. “Camp sees everything in quotation marks,” Sontag explained. “To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.”

“Seed” purposefully turns the character of Jennifer’s “sexpot” image, and her unique brand of femininity, into plastic. One of Tilly’s characters drugs and artificially inseminates the other. There are jokes about her role in “Bound,” jabs at Jennifer’s body, and moments of Tiffany impersonating the actress’ voice. All the while, Tilly delivers most of the film’s comedy with a propulsive, self-deprecating commitment. The body hijinks and gender questions surrounding her roles, though? They build on the series’ mythos.

“Child’s Play” has always centered its conflict on owning and possessing bodies. Chucky’s motivation for four films has been to transpose his self into a carousel of prospective human hosts. “Seed of Chucky” extends that basis’ potential. Yes, the dolls are patently absurd. Their episodes of domestic drama are detached from reality, and the film is all the more entertaining for it. But there’s an emotional truth throughout: the characters are literally stuck in the wrong bodies.

What could be read as queer in previous films becomes fundamental. In the most literal sense, it’s how the parents throw a gender binary at Glen/Glenda. It’s the splitting of Tilly as a persona against Jennifer as a character, the latter relying on seduction and broad femininity to win a movie role. “Persons… respond to their audiences,” Sontag wrote. “Persons begin ‘camping.’” In that respect, Jennifer ‘camps’ for Redman, playing a part just as Tilly lampoons her star image. Despite their parallel storylines, a focus on presentation unites Glen/Glenda and Jennifer. Displacement is the impetus of the “Chucky” movies. This one is all about performance.

Sontag wrote that Camp is “the difference… between something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice,” and Mancini’s script is attuned to the characters’ semiotics. Redman, whose role admittedly borders on caricature, ogles Jennifer until she reveals her unexplained pregnancy. (In one of its best subtextual jokes, the script sets Redman up as having a Madonna-whore complex—quite literally, given the film he’s directing.) After he fires her, Tiffany murders him for disregarding her idol, that “pure artifice” of a woman she wants to be.

Not long after, Jennifer’s moralistic assistant, Joan (Hannah Spearritt), dies after trying to save her. Jennifer’s limo driver and suitor, Stan (Steve Lawton), meets a similar fate once he becomes an undesirable new target for Chucky’s possession. In the scope of the dolls’ conflicts, those who perform survive, whether spiritually or corporally. Those who are obvious, even earnest in their interactions, don’t.

“Seed of Chucky” has carried a generally artificial look thus far, but given this tone, it works. Mancini’s tendency to quote Brian De Palma’s style (complete with a Pino Donaggio score) benefits the film, particularly by signaling its inspirations with a wink. There are allusions throughout, from a slow-motion disaster to a “Body Double” parody, and, with Joan’s death, Glen/Glenda reveals themselves to adopt a murderous feminine persona à la “Dressed to Kill.” It’s Glen who is the pacifist, Glenda the “lady killer.”

It’s a well-known trope. After all, Alfred Hitchcock popularized it 20 years before De Palma with “Psycho.” “Seed of Chucky,” however, uses it to marry the artifice of gendered presentation with supernatural fiction. Sontag wrote that “Camp discloses innocence, but also, when it can, corrupts it.” The parents have now corrupted Glen/Glenda into performing a gender binary, its conflation with violence coming full circle. “Seed” doesn’t view genderqueerness itself as unreal. The film is too knowing to be gauche, and with that, the male/female expectations are the true absurdity.

Jennifer soon gives birth to both a boy and a girl, and just as Tiffany prepares to transfer Glen/Glenda’s soul(s) into the respective newborns, Chucky reneges on his choice to become human. He realizes “it’s less complicated” to be a doll, and while this works for character growth five films in, it’s the subtext of his dialogue that stands out. “This is who I am, Tiff. This is me,” he reveals, rejecting a sense of normalcy while owning what Tiffany perceives as a physical and identical deviance. She may love the idea of her child. However, she doesn’t like the reality of something different, even in the form of her husband.

Some of Chucky’s dialogue has a queer bent already; in an earlier scene, he references his murders as something he refuses “to hide in the closet.” Here, the film links those implications to his character and body. As if the movie couldn’t be queerer, Chucky has now, in a sense, come out. “Seed of Chucky” has lovingly matched queerness with Camp from the start. By now, whether through Tilly, the focus on performance, or the gender dysphoria, the film has linked its main characters together via said sensibilities.

When Tiffany decides to leave Chucky and take their child, he kills her just as she possesses Jennifer. In retaliation, Glen/Glenda calls themselves a boy and dismembers their father. It’s another act of performance; here, they enact Chucky’s own expectations of masculinity against him. Five years later, Tiffany lives in Jennifer’s body, and Glen/Glenda have split themselves into a kind boy and an evil girl. Tiffany even has a housekeeper named Fulvia (Rebecca Santos) in a reference to Todd Haynes’ “Safe.” At least, that is until Tiffany uses her old body—the doll itself—to bludgeon her.

“Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system… has hardened into an idea,” Sontag said. That’s precisely what happens to the characters throughout “Seed of Chucky.” By framing itself as a parody of domestic dramas with a meta lens, the film is, as Sontag wrote, “the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” Is Glen/Glenda’s transformation imperfect? Precisely. The ultimate punchline is that the binary is too literal. The movie toys with its semiotics as characters morph into Platonic ideals of mother, son, and daughter. As Chucky’s severed arm returns to attack Glen in the final seconds, their happiness is short-lived.

Somehow, “Seed of Chucky” hit malls across the country on November 12, 2004. Worldwide, it barely doubled its $12 million budget; if it did break even, it didn’t by much. “It just seemed like a really modern kind of question, this question for a child to wonder about his gender… and I think that it’s not the sort of thing most people would come into a ‘Chucky’ movie [expecting],” Mancini said in the 2005 audio commentary alongside Tilly.

Where he got it wrong is that these themes weren’t modern for mainstream audiences. They were years ahead of them, and they likely still are. Despite continuing with another two films and a three-season television series, this would be the series’ final theatrical outing. Universal would even make Mancini cut a mention of Glen/Glenda in “Cult of Chucky” 13 years later.

Is “Seed” a perfect movie? Of course not. A few jokes don’t work, but of those, it’s not that many have aged poorly; they were always a little broad. The pacing is slightly uneven, and act two has an eight-minute stretch—a good chunk for an 81-minute movie sans credits—where Glen/Glenda is neither seen nor mentioned. Some aspects, like the licensed music, could have benefited from a higher budget, and Mancini himself admitted on “Horror Queers” that he “wasn’t able to move the camera as much as I would have liked” due to cost limitations and wall-to-wall animatronics.

And yet it’s bursting with originality and retains its singularity 20 years later. Its influences aren’t superficial. They’re intrinsic to its themes and story, and with a sensibility so different from its contemporaries, “Seed of Chucky” is one of the most progressive wide releases of the 2000s. Mancini clearly loves his characters. More importantly, he loves their potential, be it narratively or thematically. Could another movie of the studio system be like this: so queer, so purely Camp, and so compulsively itself? Well, that’s an impossible question. No one else even thought to try.