Contains Chucky season 2 and 3 spoilers
The way we discover movies has vastly evolved in our short lifetimes. Scanning VHS covers in rental store aisles turned to scrolling movie posters on streaming apps. Searching newspapers for movie times at the local theaters turned into quick Google searches.
When I was younger, I was one to flip through channel by channel on cable and see what I could find. If I found something but didn’t know the title, I would have to turn to the guide screen and wait and wait and wait for the guide to scroll around to the corresponding channel.
Now I’ll admit- a lot of my memories of my relationship to the horror genre have blurred together over the years. That’s the way the cookie crumbles thanks to my brain. Some memories are vivid while some are just small glimpses but glimpses strong enough that they’re like a core memory.
My discovery of the Child’s Play franchise came during one summer while I was staying at my grandma’s house. Monday through Fridays over summer break I would spend there while my parents were at work. Most of the time I could be found in the side room curled up in front of the TV watching whatever would catch my attention. I watched a lot of The Price Is Right, The Young and The Restless, and whatever movies I could kill a couple of hours with. During summers like this I found movies like Shaun Of The Dead, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, and Bride Of Chucky and Seed Of Chucky.
Don’t ask me how old I was when I first saw Bride and Seed Of Chucky because I don’t rightly remember. A lot of those summers spent at my grandma’s house blurred together in my mind. I know I was old enough to be watching them (albeit they were edited for television) but I was also young enough to instantly recognize Hannah Spearritt in Seed from her days as a member of the pop group S Club 7. Young me also wasn’t entirely knowledgeable about the LGBTQ+ community at the time. Bride Of Chucky had the first openly gay character I saw on a screen while Seed Of Chucky had the first openly trans character I saw on screen. Yet I didn’t actually know that franchise creator Don Mancini was gay until a bit later. All of that coming together made it feel like some things were made just for me.
By then, I knew I wasn’t straight and I knew of trans identities but I still saw gender as a thing of “one or the other”. I knew a person could be trans but I only knew of men and women. It wasn’t until I saw Glen in Seed look up at Chucky and Tiffany and say, “Sometimes I feel like a boy. Sometimes I feel like a girl. Can I be both?” that the idea that someone could be something outside of the binary was seeded in my mind, so to speak.
Jump ahead nearly twenty years, I couldn’t contain my excitement when I saw the news that Glen and Glenda were making their return to the Child’s Play franchise with season 2 of Chucky. My heart was so happy to see the news of their return and my heart was at peace after seeing that openly non-binary actor Lachlan Watson had been cast to play the twins a la The Parent Trap. Their performance as the twins deserves every praise possible and a plate of cookies as a thank you for what they brought to the character.
In an interview with website Them, Watson talks about how they were about to bring their experiences and expressions as an out non-binary person to the characters of Glen and Glenda and I would be lying if I said that it didn’t bring the same smile to my face as when doll Glen said “Can’t I be both?” all those years ago. Watson had been pushing back the usage of the terms “masculine” and “feminine” to describe Glen and Glenda, pushing to break them out of the binary boxes, saying that eventually, “we threw out [the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’], and I came up with different ways to describe them, which is that Glenda is more ‘glam’ and Glen is more ‘grunge’.” And, goddammit, that just clicked for me. “There is no Dana- only Zuul.” There is no gender- only vibes.
At the end of season 2, the pair went back into their original doll and became GG (back to being voiced by Billy Boyd) then of course I was bummed when season 3 only had GG speaking vicariously through Nica (Fiona Douriff). At the time I’m typing this, Chucky fans are still in limbo about the future of the series as #RenewChucky continues to trend. The potential for Chucky, Tiffany, AND GG dolls to reunite hangs in the balance. Maybe once this blog post goes up we will have some good news? Fingers crossed.
The horror and sci-fi genres have always been queer and they’ve always been trans,even if those characteristics weren’t always front and center (i.e. Frankenstein and half of the Universal Monsters, we could go on and on). We’re getting more and more openly queer and trans characters from major studio releases, like Mindy in Scream and Danny in Evil Dead Rise, to direct-to-streaming camp goodness like Tubi’s Slay. It’s so reassuring that down the line other questioning kids can find characters to click with and look to to find themselves.
When I went back to the draft of this blog post in my notes app, it was dated back in the spring of 2023. It was being drafted for Pride 2024 posts that I eventually withdrew from. My brain for writing was essentially non-existent. This blog sat dormant for about a year and a half. I had done a few guest spots and helped with research on a few podcasts (shout out Good Mourning, Nancy and Creepy and Geeky) but what I had started solely for myself was suffering immensely.
It boils down to doing what you want for yourself. Gender, sexuality, blogging, podcasting, doing things for you. As Chucky and Tiffany fight over Glen being a boy or a girl, they shout at them, “What about what I want?” It’s easy to forget yourself sometimes, unfortunately. It’s hard to take time for things that make you happy or things that make you you when a lot of your energy can be used just to survive, especially in recent years.
It almost feels odd thinking that this piece of writing sat in waiting for a year for a movie that was about to turn twenty years old. Maybe it’s a weird synchronicity that I felt the want to pick this bit in particular back up and it fell during Pride month during the 20th anniversary year for Seed Of Chucky. Who knows? C’est la vie.
Maybe feeling comfortable in my own skin will be a lifelong task, but maybe I can at least work towards things that bring me even the slightest bit of happiness more for my own sake. I can compile lists of ideas and piles of books like Henry Bemis but if I wait too long my glasses will most likely break (yes, I will squeeze in a Twilight Zone reference at any possible chance).
I feel like one of the biggest and best contributions the horror genre has made to life is essentially the formations of communities or the “horror fam”, as it’s known on social media. Some of my best memories are wandering horror cons or curling up with my boyfriend/life partner and having pizza and watching horror movies or discussing potential horror-themed tattoos to add to our sleeves. Watson really summed up the feeling of the Child’s Play franchise in their interview with Them by saying, “You watch Chucky and you feel like you’re in on this huge inside joke. And it just fills you with this feeling of being a part of something.” So, thank you to Don Mancini and Seed Of Chucky for knowing me and seeing me before I knew myself; between gender, sexuality, and love of queer campy horror.
Frankenstein University 