Chucky’s Don Mancini on Season 3’s White House Frights

Chucky wraps up the first half of its third season tonight before going on hiatus until next year—but the episode, cheekily titled “Halloween III: Season of the Witch,” offers a perfect end point. io9 got a chance to talk to Chucky’s creator, Don Mancini, to learn more about season three’s themes and what’s to come.

Cheryl Eddy, io9: What inspired the Washington, DC setting? Was it intended to capitalize on election anxieties or was there something more going on?

Don Mancini: Well, it was partly that—in the sense that the White House in our culture now is a source of anxiety. I think regardless of where you are on the [political] spectrum, we’re dealing with unprecedented political anxiety in public life. So we knew that just putting Chucky into that was potentially interesting. But I’ve actually been very interested in haunted White House lore for a long time and done some research on it; even separate from Chucky, it was just something I’d been really interested in. I love ghost stories and haunted house stories, and I thought the White House [has] such interesting potential for one that hasn’t really been dealt with much. When it came time to find a new realm for Chucky, I felt like, “Well, why don’t we can just do it with [this season of the show]?” It also has the virtue of challenging our teenage lead characters, because after having dealt with Chucky for two years now, they’re of the subset of Chucky franchise characters who know the truth about Chucky. They know what he’s all about… and they know that they want to kill him.

So putting him in the White House, which is the most secure house in the world, that gives these characters a unique challenge … it’s not the same as like, “Oh, let’s just go down the street and crawl in the back door.” It’s a lot harder. They have come up with a plan. You get a taste of this in episode three during the montage when they’re making their costumes—which the payoff [for] comes in the episode this week. We thought of it almost as like an Ocean’s 11 type of situation where it’s this methodical, kind of tactical plan to get in there.

io9: The kids are all about social media this season. Was that just a reflection of reality for teens, or were you aiming to make a bigger statement with that?

Mancini: It’s basically just reflecting the teenagers’ world. Also, on a creative level, the social media posts are interesting formal ways to tell a story. I knew that I wanted to spend a lot of, especially in the first episode, [time] introducing the new characters in the White House realm, all of the characters that are new to the story. We needed an interesting creative shorthand to inject the teenage leads into that and have them really pop as characters, even though they didn’t have as much screen time in episode one. So their social media posts became very helpful in that way, as a stylized expression of where their heads are.

io9: This season the show addresses what might be the absolute greatest horror: the horror of aging. What made you want to explore that through Chucky as a character?

Mancini: The mirror. [Laughs] The mirror and my birthday; I turned 60 this year. So I think it’s partly personal. Some friends of mine, actually—and not just this season, but in seasons past and in the movies—have pointed out to me, “You really do damage to the human head and face a lot!” I went, “Huh, I do!” I figured, in the most horror armchair-detective figuring-out-what’s-going-on [way], that this is [how I’m] dealing with getting older. There’s something that was really appealing to me to explore [that] for Chucky, him being now like a 35-year-old horror icon who has presided over his reign of the horror subgenre of killer dolls for a while now, but in more recent years is having to deal with challengers to the throne, like M3GAN and Annabel and the Boy or whatever. So I thought that is something that’s really interesting, and gives [the voice of Chucky] Brad Dourif also some meat to chew into. We always try to base the stuff on really identifiable shit, like how do you deal with your waning relevance in the culture? How do you deal with facing down mortality, like real mortality? What does that do to you? In the case of someone like Chucky, it might just make them more dangerous, because a lot of people who are faced with mortality, they get angry.

io9: This season we get Jennifer Tilly/Tiffany Valentine doing a women-in-prison adventure. Was that something you’ve long been hoping to include in the series?

Mancini: From season one, I knew I wanted to do season two as her sins coming finally to haunt her. And the notion of “Jennifer Tilly,” the “celebrity” that exists within our world, being on the run from the law for multiple murders just seems really funny. I knew that putting Jennifer into the women’s prison genre just seems like a no-brainer in a way, because of the camp elements, because of the slightly exploitation aspects of that subgenre that I think is part of the DNA of our franchise. It can be really fun if done carefully and with love, which is what we’ve tried to do. I was also really inspired by a movie from 1960 with Susan Hayward, I Want to Live, that Robert Wise directed. It’s a true story about this woman on death row, and the sort of clockwork countdown to the Green Mile and all of that. And I thought doing that with Jennifer Tilly just seems really fun.

io9: Was the decision to split the season up in two parts due to the strike? Did you have any flexibility in figuring out the ending point, seeing as how—no spoilers—episode four ends on such a perfect moment?

Mancini: That was just a happy coincidence. Yes, splitting the season into two parts was because of the strike. First we were impacted by the writers’ strike. We had to finish all the scripts by May 1 before writing went out. After that, we couldn’t do any writing. So then when we saw that the SAG strike was likely, we talked to Universal. Universal’s position was that because Chucky has such a increasing presence for them, for NBC and Comcast and the parks during October, during Halloween season, that they wanted something new to air during October. So we then put all of our efforts and time into finishing the first four episodes to make sure that they could air each of the four weeks in October. It was designed to be [that] the fourth episode, which airs October 25, is a Halloween episode. We did that by design, but it was just happenstance that it does end with this, you know, quite cliffhanger-y moment. So that worked out well.

io9: We got an Andy cameo this season, but it was a Chucky dream. Will season three be bringing back more legacy characters? Is there anything you can tease about the second part of the season?

Mancini: Could be. Stay tuned. Could be!

Watch the Chucky midseason finale tonight, October 25, on Syfy and USA; it’ll be available tomorrow (with the rest of the episodes so far) on Peacock. The rest of season three arrives in 2024.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

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