Monsters Can Be Anything
In 1988, Don Mancini wrote a scary story and David Kirschner produced a movie related to the story Mancini wrote; the movie is called, “Child’s Play” and in this movie the character Charles Lee Ray aka Chucky was first introduced. There is more than one movie and each movie has different storyline. The articles, “Why We Crave Horror Movies” by Stephen King and “Monsters and Moral Imagination” by Stephen T. Asma describes us fearing things and how it affects us in different ways. A monster that has been feared and created fears is Chucky. Chucky is a doll from a company called “Good Guys”; the doll has orange hair, blue overalls, and a striped shirt. Even though he’s a small doll people still fear him because he has the power to perform voodoo magic on anything or anyone and Chucky can represent the fear of death and the unknown and they’re both known as psychological fears.
Chucky isn’t physically scary because he’s just a doll that children want to play with and looks innocent when he’s calm but when he’s alive and ready to attack his face changes into a more realistic one . No matter how much the people in the movie tried to destroy the doll, the soul will still be floating around or remind in the body of doll no matter how ugly it gets, the doll will always recover itself and that’s why in the last movies he becomes more creepier with his scars and stitches. Children in that movie loved the doll and knowing that any doll can be the one with the serial killer’s soul is scary. In the first movie, Chucky is gifted to a little boy named Andy and he loved it because it was popular at that time but when Chucky killed his babysitter he realised that the doll has life and he tried to tell people but no one believed him; only his mother believed him and she tried to get some help before Andy gets attacked by Chucky but nobody believed her until they actually saw the doll take action.
People are scared of Chucky because of the things he has done which is kill people and also because the people never know where the serial killer’s soul can be, so he can’t die because the people in the movie don’t know where the soul is and Chucky can also do voodoo magic which means he can transfer to anyone or anything else. People fear dolls because of the movie “Child’s Play” and now they have a mindset that dolls can used as a weapon or threat to anyone. But then again many people do like the movie and are interested . For example Asma states, ”Monster stories and films only draw us in when we identify with persons who are being chased…..”(Asma 2). So he’s saying that we if think about the same situation from the movie and put ourselves in actors shoes then we start to believe that it can somewhat be real and that’s how fear is created because people can keep thinking that their in that situation and if they see or hear something familiar from the movie, they’re gonna assume that the monster aka Chucky is going to attack them. Now that’s the mindset of seeing a situation and wanting to be in it but once you’re in it, you think you can never get out and makes you think about things differently.
The fears about Chucky are much more than the doll’s actions and appearance; Chucky represents the fear of death and the unknown which are psychological fears. Chucky can represent the fear of death because we as humans don’t know when it can come to us and we fear that if we can die it’s because a doll is attacking us; even though it’s not true, we start to forget about everything else and just focus on living because we don’t know how much time we have left and also we start to forget about reality. He also represents the fear of the unknown because you will never know when something is odd til you least expect it, like when Andy found out the doll was crazy but yet no one believed him; people have to see to believe. But a movie like Child’s play can help us find ourselves and make us find out things we didn’t know about ourselves. In the article, “Why We Crave Horror Movies”, Stephen King states,”It may be that horror movies provide psychic relief on this level because the invitation to lapse into simplicity, irrationality and even outright madness is extended so rarely”(King 1). So he’s saying that we still watch scary movies because for some of us we use it as a coping method and also it lets us forget about reality for a while.
Why are we still fascinated by Chucky ? The fact that he’s in a dolls body and can create so much damage; also that he can’t die because no matter what happens will still be a soul and he is able to transfer himself in anything he wants with his voodoo magic. So you can never know where his soul is at. If you were to have him he’ll probably want to put his soul into your body but that’s only the movie or can it actually happen ?
