Are the “Child’s Play” Movies Queer Cinema?

A mostly unironic delve into the gay doll movies that got progressively gayer.

The title of this article is one of those where the longer I look at it, the more I can only think “yeah, this is what I’m putting my effort into today”.

Anyway.

It’s taken me close to a decade to finally get through the Child’s Play series, doing so in no particular order. I was finally allowed to watch the first one around the age of 12, found the fourth one on Netflix when I was around 18, which reignited my interest in the franchise, and have since spent the past two years going through the others. Seed of Chucky was the one I got to last, for reasons that might already be semi-obvious, but that I will explain nonetheless shortly.

I’ve already written about this franchise once, here, wherein I made a defense to no one in particular about why I think Cult of Chucky (2017) is the best film in the continuing narrative. Since then, I’ve sort of come to terms with the fact that this is my guilty pleasure franchise; most of the movies in it range from mediocre to terrible, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hopelessly fascinated by it more and more as time passes. Through the process of writing this, I ended up buying the 7-film box set, even.