CHILD’S PLAY: Persistent Hitchcockian Effectiveness
MGM/UAEven though Chucky’s popularity has tapered off significantly over the years, his character is nothing short of iconic at this point. It is safe to say that his unkempt ginger mane and baggy Good Guy apparel are just as recognisable as Jason’s mask or Freddy’s glove are. But it wasn’t always like that. Chucky didn’t arrive at the scene like a champion and fold itself effortlessly into the fabric of popular culture. In fact, the original marketing materials, such as trailers and posters, tried their best to hide Chucky from public view. Thus, his origins as a pop-cultural staple were much more understated and rooted in appreciation of the master of suspense himself, Sir Alfred Hitchcock.
One of the most often cited reasons why Child’s Play was such an effective horror film had to do with the idea of using a possessed doll as a villain. Fans of the series would often recount traumatic episodes from their childhood when – having seen the film – they would develop an irrational fear of dolls and continue to have nightmares for weeks on end. This is a natural extension of a discombobulating phenomenon concerning dolls in general: they are made to look like lifeless children, which is something human brain finds hard to parse. Therefore, deliberately breathing life into an object that already occupies an eerie place in the human psyche was bound to be fundamentally successful. According to Don Mancini (who wrote the film), this idea was what drove him to invent the character of Chucky in the first place.
However, this concept – central to the effectiveness of the film as it is – is fully capitalised upon only towards the ending of the film. In fact, Chucky comes alive on screen exactly at the halfway through the story when Andy’s mother (Caroline Hicks) threatens to throw him into the fireplace. Up until that point, Child’s Play is relying on much more classical tools to generate thrills: suspense and dread. This is likely the influence of Tom Holland, who was attached to the project as a director. He came off the heels of his debut Fright Night, which was already gaining notoriety among horror fans and what he brought to the table was his own deep love of Alfred Hitchcock; he had, after all, penned the script to Psycho 2 before making a move to direct films.
Therefore, the first half of the film relies on very simple, yet cunning, manipulation of the audience. They are shown in the opening scene how the character of Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif), shortly before dying, performs a voodoo ritual on a doll found in a shop. The viewer is only left to assume the ritual was successful based on a mental extrapolation: if it wasn’t successful, the film would end right there, so – ipso facto – Charles Lee Ray must have been successful in what he was doing. This piece of nuance is easily omitted because the film is now seen through the prism of the entire series that followed and is more of an origin story than anything else. However, in 1988, Chucky wasn’t an icon yet and the filmmakers were purposefully generating ambiguity to gaslight the viewer while staging an effects-laden final act.
Consequently, the film doesn’t introduce the concept of a possessed doll, per se, but rather leverages the aforementioned irrational fear deeply embedded in the human psyche and forces the audience to wonder whether Chucky is actually possessed or not. This is massively helped by using the character of Andy (Alex Vincent), who is just a few inches taller than his doll and – conveniently enough – is wearing the same outfit as Chucky when the first murder takes place. The filmmakers don’t necessarily try to engineer a twist by turning Andy into a bona fide red herring because there is enough evidence laid out in the narrative to convincingly pin the crime on Chucky. But the audience never sees the doll move. All they see is a point-of-view perspective of someone small and an occasional blurred glimpse in the background, which is enough to plant a little seed of doubt and imagine that Andy might be the killer after all.
By the way, this is how Child’s Play was originally conceived. In its initial draft titled Blood Buddy, which was designed to function as a genre satire of consumerism, the doll was supposed to be a manifestation of Andy’s pent-up anger at being abandoned by his father. Although this notion was completely excised in subsequent drafts, it is imaginable that the red herring of Andy being the suspected killer is at least partially a vestige of that early incarnation of the narrative.
Nevertheless, as the film progresses, the viewer is allowed to get ahead of the characters in the knowledge that Chucky is, in fact, alive. It’s hard to refute the floury foot prints matching the doll’s shoes as well as one or two instances when his eyes move ever so subtly. Again, this is a thoroughly Hitchcockian device akin to the prototypical scenario involving a bomb under the table. In it, the camera would show people sitting around a table before moving under it to show the ticking bomb and then right back up to catch up with the conversation. This way, the viewer knows there is going to be an explosion but the characters don’t, and this realization builds organic suspense in the scene as the audience hopes the characters will find out their lives are in peril before it’s too late. The circumstances are similar in here as well. Both the viewer and Andy know the doll is alive, but everybody else does not. In fact, as they continually throw the doll around and angrily refute Andy’s claims Chucky is not just a doll, the viewer is left in suspended animation, waiting for the doll to come alive and prove Andy is telling the truth.
But the filmmakers use this device like a rubber band of suspense and stretch it to its absolute limit. Despite ample opportunity to stage the big reveal at any point in the first half of the film, Chucky remains lifeless . . . until that pivotal scene right in the middle of the movie where Andy’s mother is all alone in the apartment with Chucky. She sits the doll down on the sofa, goes to the kitchen and inspects the box the doll came in. The camera captures both her in the foreground and Chucky in the back, sitting there like a pillar of salt. Eventually, batteries fall out of the box and the filmmaker allows her to realize that Andy has been telling the truth. Now she knows and Chucky knows she knows. This is where the viewer also begins to expect a certain pattern of events, like the doll moving or disappearing when the camera pans away. But it doesn’t move an inch. The woman then walks across the room, picks up the doll, turns it over and opens the battery compartment to check if Chucky has been working without them this whole time. This would have been the perfect opportunity for Charles Lee Ray to take over, but the rubber band of suspense is not released fully just yet. The doll makes a noise and Andy’s mother drops it to the floor, startled. Inexplicably, Chucky rolls under the sofa, which offers yet another opportunity to either cash in on the viewer expectation of a jump scare carried over from countless other horror movies, but the film, again, chooses to keep the band of suspense stretched. Only after the doll is picked up, shaken and threatened with a fiery treatment, its eyes widen and special effects are allowed to take over. But it has to be said unequivocally that the entire scene preceding this big reveal is a masterclass of Hitchcockian skill in building, maintaining and release of suspense rooted heavily in subversion of audience expectation.
Admittedly, the entire tone of the film changes from that point onwards because the viewer has been acquainted with Chucky in his fully functional form. Manipulation is, for the most part, rendered impossible and the focus promptly shifts to leverage Chucky as an out-and-out villain of the story. Thus, any Hitchcockian sensibilities are dialed down and relegated to more subtle aspects of visual storytelling, such as musical cues and visual nods lifted from Psycho. At the same time, Child’s Play transforms into a play on The Terminator and becomes a thrilling chase with the characters of Chris Sarandon and Catherine Hicks developing symmetry with Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor. After all, they are faced with a seemingly unstoppable force – a man-made creature with a will of its own – which also seems to be completely indestructible.
These parallels to James Cameron’s film cut progressively deeper as the narrative slowly reaches its climactic conclusion. The synth score becomes eerily similar to Brad Fiedel’s and even certain shots, especially towards the end of the film, are seemingly made to match the showdown between Linda Hamilton and the terminator in his iconic final form. However, one could potentially fish out even more nods to other staples of the genre, such as shots lifted from The Shining and Halloween, which only serve to reinforce the assertion that Child’s Play is way smarter than some would be prepared to give it credit for. It is not just an origin story to an iconic villain who went on to haunt nightmares of adolescent viewers who stumbled upon this film while perusing their local video rental stores. It’s a bona fide love letter to one of the most influential voices of the genre, Alfred Hitchcock, and a tip of the hat to an entire array of potent works of cinema. Although the series it spawned quickly devolved into self-parody and eventually became a barely smouldering genre curiosity with hermetic fan appeal, its progenitor was in a league of its own and should be remembered as such.
