[Pride 2022] Final Girl and Slasher?: The Complex Identities and Sexualities of Chucky's Nica Pierce

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The queer sensibilities of the Child’s Play franchise are well-known: from creator Don Mancini’s personal reflections on sexuality and horror to the gender fluid character Glen/Glenda in Seed of Chucky and beyond, Child’s Play is inventive and inclusive. Nica Pierce (played by Fiona Dourif) is a particularly complex moment of representation of both queerness and gender dynamics in horror. 

Nica first appears in Curse of Chucky (2013), when she receives a special delivery of that very special Good Guy doll. In Curse of Chucky, Nica follows the classic Final Girl pattern, surviving Chucky’s attacks as friends and family are killed all around her. Nica has been paralyzed below the waist since birth (the result of Chucky stabbing her mother while she was pregnant with Nica). Nica uses a wheelchair and her mother infantilizes and desexualizes her, telling Nica that she’s incapable of taking care of herself and that there’s no way the delivery man was flirting with her (he totally was). But Nica proves her mother wrong, demonstrating bravery, ingenuity, and endurance as the horrors pile up around her.

Nica is one of the only survivors of Chucky’s slaughter and though she ends the film accused of murder and institutionalized, she remains defiant, taunting Chucky on her way out of the courtroom. Nica returns in Cult of Chucky (2017), where she once again has to fight against Chucky when he comes for her at the psychiatric institution where she is a patient, and this is where things get really interesting. For the bulk of the film, she resumes her Final Girl role, warning her fellow patients about Chucky only to be ignored as the carnage begins once again. But when Chucky begins separating his soul into multiple vessels, one of the vessels he chooses is Nica’s body. 

Chucky as Nica is a transformative moment. While Final Girl Nica is always on the defensive, once he inhabits Nica’s body, Chucky immediately goes on the offense, violently attacking Dr. Foley (Michael Therriault), the psychiatrist that has exploited and abused so many patients, stomping Dr. Foley’s face in with the same red high heels he had just used to fetishize Nica. In one sense, this is an act of empowering and violent justice, though the fact that Chucky’s possession erases Nica’s paralysis is is problematic, with this newfound able-bodiedness equated with strength, power, and ability, which are framed in direct opposition to Nica’s own fear and inability to save those around her as a Final Girl.

Chucky as Nica has swagger and sex appeal, seducing viewers with this performance of Nica’s biologically female body as a vessel for Chucky’s hypermasculine soul. When Chucky as Nica leaves the hospital to reunite with Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly) and her waiting getaway car, they kiss, adding another layer of queer representation and interpretation, as they can be externally read as two women, which builds upon Tilly’s famous role in Bound (1996) as well as negotiating the sexual possibilities of Chucky’s new physical embodiment. As they drive off into the night together, viewers are left wondering what this new queer dynamic might look like and what havoc the two of them may wreak together. 

This question is answered in the SyFy Original series Chucky (2021 - present), where Tiffany and Chucky as Nica have clearly been enjoying their time together, with lots of both sex and murder. When they are first shown in their hotel room together, they are kissing and touching one another, both dressed in sexy lingerie, and at least to some extent, performing this sexuality for their next murder victim, who is bound to a chair near the bed. Their dynamic between the two women is powerful, often playful, and dangerous, capable of turning from passion to abuse or violence at any moment. 

But there are some issues with Chucky’s soul maintaining a firm grounding in Nica’s body, which results in some slippage between Nica, Chucky as Nica, and Nica attempting to imitate Chucky to keep herself safe from Tiffany. There remains a problematic dichotomy between able-bodied Chucky as Nica and Nica herself, who is still paralyzed below the waist and loses her ability to walk when she regains her own identity and personal agency. There’s also Tiffany’s projection of her own desires onto Nica: while Tiffany sometimes fears and even hates Chucky because of the way he treats her, she has created an alternate frame of reality in which she and Nica are lovers and soul mates, telling Nica that “Sometimes when we’re together … I see you looking at me and I know it’s you. It’s not Chucky. It’s you and … I live for those moments. I want to have those moments all of the time” (Episode 6, “Cape Queer”).

Nica does not reciprocate Tiffany’s feelings but just as Tiffany often remains deferential to Chucky’s abuse and denigration of her, Nica doesn’t challenge Tiffany’s reading of their relationship, wanting to keep the other woman on her side to put herself in the best possible position for survival and escape. When Nica fails to live up to Tiffany’s fantasy of her, Tiffany exerts her control over the other woman, knocking her unconscious, tying her to a chair, and at the end of the series’ first season, amputating Nica’s arms and legs because she “couldn’t run the risk that Chucky would sneak back in” (Episode 8, “An Affair to Dismember”), though how this is likely to deter Chucky remains unexplained. (After all, if he’s capable of possessing a horde of Good Guy dolls, what would stop him from inhabiting Nica’s newly-altered body? And while Tiffany’s amputations may prevent Chucky as Nica from physically harming her, his emotional and psychological abuse of her are just as effective, if not more so). 

So who is Nica Pierce? The answer to this question is simultaneously simple and complex. If we read Nica as the hero/victim of the quintessential Final Girl tradition, she is a traumatized young woman who witnessed the brutal murder of several of her family members and friends, was pathologized and institutionalized, and then had her body taken over and relentlessly abused by her attacker. Nica does not consent to any of the actions perpetrated by or done to her body, of either sex or violence, adding another layer to her experience of trauma and exploitation. When she regains possession of her own body, she doesn’t remember what she has done or what has been done to her, but her body remembers and must absorb these experiences one way or the other. Reading Nica as Nica, her sexual relationship with Tiffany and her role in the murders - which are both presented as a spectacle for viewers - are yet another layer of abuse.

If we focus our reading on Chucky as Nica, Nica’s body is a vessel, much like the multiple Good Guy dolls that have held Chucky’s soul, which are also bodies that have been abused, crushed, burned, dismembered, and destroyed without having any lasting impact on Chucky’s identity or agency. This frames Nica’s body as disposable, something to be used and discarded when it has served its purpose, with no further consideration than the melted plastic and tattered overalls of Chucky’s former bodies.

In this incarnation, viewers are able to revel in the performative spectacle of the sexual relationship between Tiffany and Chucky as Nica, seeing two powerful and uninhibited women enjoying their bodies, their pleasure, and one another (which runs counter to previous representations of Nica in earlier films in the franchise, where she only overtly expressed romantic or sexual interest in men). Chucky’s possession of Nica’s female body also challenges Chucky’s hypermasculine sexuality to some extent, particularly when Chucky as Nica is telling his doll-self “You wouldn’t believe the amount of tail I get like this,” to which Tiffany adds “Dick too,” a comment Chucky and Chucky as Nica respond to with exasperation and uncomfortable silence. 

Finally, we can choose to see Nica as Tiffany does: subsumed by Chucky’s identity but still there, aware, and a willing, loving participant in her relationship with Tiffany. This interpretation blurs the lines between the two previous readings, synthesizing Nica’s identity with that of Chucky as Nica. However, this is also the reading for which we have the least support within the series itself: Nica is horrified when she comes back to her body to find carnage all around her and she is terrified of Tiffany, with no interest in a sexual relationship or a life together with this other woman.

While this reading has the least support, there’s something seductive about it, in creating a reality in which there is an intense, sexual relationship between these two powerful women and in which they have found kindness, empathy, and love with one another (even if that love is inextricably intertwined with violence and murder). Frankly, this is the horror world in which I would love to live, but it proves untenable, with the erotic connection between these two women sensationalized and the relationship between them ultimately exploitative and abusive, with Tiffany verbally and psychologically abused by Chucky as Nica, and Nica controlled and abused by Tiffany.  

Everyone in the films and the series has their own version of who they want Nica to be, their own reading of her body and identity, and their own needs that are projected onto her. Nica is a Final Girl, one who demonstrates her strength, ingenuity, and will to survive time and again, against all odds. For Chucky, Nica is a victim upon whom he can prey, though later she becomes a useful vessel, a body to be inhabited, abused, and exploited. For Tiffany, Nica is the loving and sensual partner she has never had, someone with whom she can imagine a future beyond Chucky. And for the viewer, she is all this and more: a Final Girl and a wonderfully deranged killer, straight and queer, heartbroken and heartless, an eroticized spectacle and an abiding mystery. 

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