While the Child’s Play franchise started out with just subtextual queer themes, trailblazing queer director and creator of ChuckyDon Mancini has managed to fill his fan-favorite TV series with more LGBTQ+ characters and plot lines than we ever could have hoped for.
In season three of Chucky, the gang has left the Catholic reform school behind for Washington D.C. where Chucky has taken up residence at the White House as the favorite toy of the President’s son and our main characters Jake (Zackary Arthur), Devon (Bjorgvin Arnarson), and Lexi (Alyvia Alyn Lind) plot to stop him.
By the end of episode three, multiple characters—and guest stars—have been killed off in bloody fashion, but despite the violence and mayhem surrounding them, Jake and Devon’s queer romance has only grown stronger and now the teens have sex on the brain.
For Mancini, it was important to normalize gay sex and give his characters the same room for sexual exploration that every show out there allows straight characters to have—including the awkward moments that pop up during sex. “We wanted to normalize it. I mean you see this sort of thing with straight 17-year-old couples all the time on television shows and a lot of time with much more than the sort of PG-13 treatment we give it,” Mancini told PRIDE. “But at the same time, I wanted it to have some reality about it. When you’re a 17-year-old boy you are thinking about that and you do talk like that with your partner and it is sort of, like, awkward, but great and fumbling, all of that stuff.”
Watch PRIDE's full interview with Don Mancini below.
Jake and Devon’s relationship is at the heart of the show and Mancini hopes the new generation of horror fans watching the series can relate to them. “It was important to us to give gay teen horror fans a point of identification, that’s what Jake and Devon have always been,” he said.
When the iconic gay horror director was growing up there was almost no LGBTQ+ representation in pop culture so it’s meaningful to him to be able to provide that to his young audience now. “I would have loved to have seen a young gay couple and it’s just normalized and the parental figure is saying, ‘I support you,’” he explained.
In the first season of the show, the Chucky creator decided to have the pair kiss for the first time specifically to give queer fans something he didn’t have growing up. “It’s like, that’s the first kiss that I wished I’d had,” he said. “And that’s why I felt that scene was important is that we wanted young gay teenagers to see that and feel like that was the first that they could have.”
When season 3 begins, Jake, Devon, and Lexi have become a family unit after spending multiple seasons fighting side-by-side against the titular killer doll hellbent on destroying their lives. Creating a family when the one you were born into isn’t supportive—or has been killed by Chucky—is a theme that will resonate with queer audiences. “Sometimes, you know, found family is the one you have to rely on...we love dealing with all of that through a slightly metaphoric, horror-genre lens,” Mancini said.
Courtesy of SYFY
His queer identity snuck its way into the original Child’s Play trilogy, but it wasn’t until the campy Bride of Chucky in 1998 that it could be much more than subtext. Now he’s made an unapologetically queer show full of gay relationships, nonbinary characters like Glen and Glenda—nonbinary actor Lachlan Watson plays the characters, who are now back in doll form as Gigi—and last season even featured an odd love triangle between Nica (Fiona Dourif), Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly) and Chucky (Brad Dourif).
“It’s so wonderful that the world has turned to the point where we can do it and we’re not the only ones doing it now, which is awesome,” the 60-year-old director said of creating a show with so much queer representation. “Where before it was subtext then it just started becoming text with Bride of Chucky and increasingly so. But it’s wonderful to be able to do that. We like being the gay horror franchise. I think gay teenage horror fans deserve that.”
It’s unclear yet whether Chucky will be renewed for a fourth season, but we really hope we get a lot more of this radically queer horror series!
New episodes of Chucky season 3 air on SYFY and USA Network at 9 p.m. ET/PT and land on Peacock the next day.
