The original Chucky

by David Benjamin

 

“Death’s gruesome face taunts:/ soulless eyes, crimson grimace. I really hate clowns.” 

― Katherine Applegate

 

MADISON, Wis.—Apparently, like its protagonist, the “Chucky” horror-film and TV franchise will never expire. I’ve just noticed promos for a new season of episodes featuring the further exploits of a homicidal boy doll who bears an eerie resemblance to disgraced football coach Jon Gruden. 

I’m a little jealous of Don Mancini, who created the character because my kid brother Bill and I lived with the original version of Chucky for years, but were too young and dumb to realize that we had—tossed akimbo on our unmade bunkbeds at 1022 1/2 Superior Avenue—the potential villain of seven lucrative scary movies and four years on television. I actually didn’t recognize this lost career opportunity until a conversation a while ago with my cousin Leslie. 

Leslie, for whom Bill and I babysat while his mom, Marce, worked a waitress job in downtown Tomah, lived in constant terror of Clowny Boy. 

A little history. Clowny Boy began life as a sort of mascot at the bar of the Carlton, a supper club in Tomah, Wisconsin. My dad, Big Bill, was the head bartender. Through a process I’ve forgotten, Clowny Boy changed residence from the Carlton to our bedroom. Although he was technically a doll, my big sister Peg recoiled at Clowny Boy. She would leave the room when Bill or I—emulating Edgar Bergen and Mortimer Snerd—struck up a conversation with Clowny.

Looking back, I understand Leslie’s dread in Clowny Boy’s proximity. Clowny’s head, hands and feet were hard rubbery plastic, but the rest of him, dressed in a sort of Raggedy Andy hobo costume, was cloth and stuffing. He had bulging red cheeks, a broad demented toothy grin behind swollen lips, black-pupiled eyes fixed in a malignant stare and ratty, matted yellow hair. Before his voicebox died, it emitted—whenever you thumped Clowny’s chest, a maniacal cackle. His huge four-fingered strangler hands were out of proportion to the rest of him, as were his simian feet—although these were eventually torn off during sibling combat. Clowny Boy was a formidable bludgeon because the dead voicebox beneath his bosom was a steel cube which with sharp corners. When swung with sufficient force, Clowny’s muted voicebocx could draw blood or leave Bill reeling on the fringe of concussion. After Clowny lost his feet in one of these brotherly knock-down drag-outs, my grandma Annie took pity, and replaced them with a pair of big soft Mickey Mouse clodhoppers. This rendered Clown only slightly less dangerous and lent him an extra frisson of deceptive cuteness.

Bill and I, inured to Clowny’s Ed Gein aspect, saw nothing alarming. It was Leslie’s traumatic memory of Clowny that made me belatedly appreciate the grinning fiend beside whom I had cuddled in bed for the shank of my childhood. Clowny was a significantly uglier version of the clown in Poltergeist who crawled out from under Robbie’s bed  and tried to wring his neck. Bill and I spent a major part of our youth consorting innocently with Clowny Boy long before Chucky’s revelatory debut in the film Child’s Play. Not only did Clowny predate Chucky, he also foreshadowed Stephen King’s nightmarish bozo, Pennywise. Bill and I were goofing with Clowny Boy even before Rod Serling served up Willy, the eerily hypnotic dummy who took possession of ventriloquist Cliff Robertson’s brain in “The Twilight Zone.” 

If you don’t count Red Ryder BB guns and four-inch molded-plastic Godzilla effigies, Bill and I grew up in an era before horrible toys. The dearth then of playthings that terrorize children probably explains Leslie’s fear. Clowny Boy, inadvertently, was a pioneer in this market. 

By now, of course, we have matured. Tolerance of terrible toys is a feature of 21st-century capitalism. Forget about Frankenstein Halloween masks and cap pistols. Kids can now settle in front of their Xbox or PlayStation armed virtually with .50-cal machine guns, flamethrowers, RPGs and nuclear beam weapons to commit casual, unspeakable war crimes, splattering hundreds, thousands of Commies, Nazis, Democrats and police, lions, tigers, bears and gorillas, Godzilla himself and armies of orcs, Crips and Bloods, illegal aliens and the scorpion-beasts of planet Zorg—all of these enemies dismembered in Hi-Def, eyeballs, bones and entrails exploding in bursts of believable blood and rainbow bits of brain matter. Technology has empowered little boys and girls to spend an entire childhood pretending to be murderers, mobsters and monsters. 

At the sight of Clowny Boy, such a kid could only giggle dismissively.

Of course, the most horrible toy of all is not a video game, nor the perfect AR-15 replica, nor even the real AR-15 that kids are removing from Dad’s bedside table and gunning down their sisters, brothers, classmates and teachers. The scariest toy in the current kid arsenal is a sliver of glass, aluminum and semiconductors in their hip pockets. With a click and a swipe, a mobile phone can transport the curious kid to extremes of real-life sadism more ghastly than any battlefield simulation. At his or her fingertips, the kid can access every permutation of pornography, perversion and pedophilia, performed live and in color by real people. This device also connects the kid 24/7 to other kids with whom he can conspire—with no adult even vaguely aware—to bully another kid into panic, shame, isolation, self-mutilation and suicide. Or, she can tune in—unresisting, addicted to her four-inch touch screen, hiding in her room—to be victimized by a merciless “social-media” lynch mob composed of “friends.” 

In a video game, a kid can crash a car in the Indianapolis 500. On a mobile, she can buy a car and charge it to her parents. Or buy a house! Or arrange a rendezvous with a dreamboat who, in his photo, looks exactly like People’s sexiest man alive. Who could resist? Who could be scared?  

I wonder, do we know what to be afraid of anymore? I get the sense that we’re not just whistling past the graveyard. We’re in the graveyard, standing on corpses that we don’t notice, can’t see, don’t even smell—because we’re staring at the phone, texting our BFF, watching a cat video, surveilling our kids on GPS, who are staring at their phones, texting their BFFs, watching a cat video, surveilling their classmates…

Maybe if I go to sleep, perchance to dream of simple, wholesome horrors past, Clowny Boy will crawl out from beneath the bed and clamp those awful fingers—lovingly—around my neck.