Chucky’s Don Mancini on Season 3’s White House Frights
By Cheryl Eddy
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.
