The real horror in M3gan is not the homicidal murder-doll. It's children

the entire film is about a woman who doesn't know how to relate to kids... and a homicidal uncanny-valley robot too i guess. It's very relatable.

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I went into M3gan, the new Blumhouse horror film, knowing that for some reason it was already an object of gay obsession. That’s basically all I knew.

I wasn’t too baffled by this. I’d seen the viral marketing TikTok dances, where M3gan the uncanny valley robot-doll danced in a sinister yet slay fashion through a hallway holding a machete, and assumed that was enough. Every gay who has ever danced in public wants to think they give this energy (when I dance I’m serving balloon man out the front of a car dealership).

If not that, then I’m also aware of the queer obsession with horror films (something I do not usually share because I am a SCARED BABY all the time), and assumed M3gan simply followed that same twisted logic.

she’s got dead eyes and a cute little outfit, she’s basically a brunch gay.

The writer of M3gan even ventured her opinion on M3gan’s gay cult status: “I actually asked one of my friends who is a gay man about that and he was saying this set-up is actually found family, where this little girl has lost her family, and she has to go live with her aunt,” she said. “Then this doll is also brought into the situation. That resonates for a lot of people in the gay community, the idea of found family.”

Politely, I think that’s ludicrous. The movie is very funny, and as a result, very camp. Inherently, it’s a camp act for a doll to murder someone while pop music plays. That’s probably all there is to it.

@r7rysm3gans dance ate, anabelle leave #m3gan #megan #fyp #pennynickeldime #horror #m3ganmovie #edit #aep #viral #fy

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But upon watching I found M3gan scared me on a deep and fundamental level, in a way that I think a lot of other queer people share. Not because I found M3gan herself unsettling (although I do), and not just because I’m scared of artificial intelligence (when the machine revolution comes, please remember I always say thank you to Siri), but because M3gan expertly captures the utter trepidation and terror that I feel about the concept of being responsible for children.

Those aren’t toys

*Spoilers for the film M3gan follow, don’t get spoiled*

M3gan is about a brilliant robotic toy designer who is also apparently an AI genius (lol, a relatable job) named Gemma, played gorgeously by Allison Williams from Girls. I’m not one to try and project queerness onto characters, but she’s basically given no canonical sexuality, is weird around kids, and wears a lot of flannel, so she was serving lesbian to me.

Gemma’s life is upturned when she gets custody of her niece, Cady, after a terrible car crash which claims the life of Cady’s mum (Gemma’s sister) and dad. The overwhelming emotion that Gemma gives us about this situation - about having the responsibility of a young child - is panic.

“I’m not equipped to handle this” she tells her only friend, who is also her subordinate at work. “I don’t even take care of my own plants”.

Gemma is a hustle-oriented, work-obsessed single millennial. She lives for her job, her house is immaculate and minimal, and she has no real emotional capacity to understand or deal with a child - and here’s the clincher, no real desire to do so. When Cady comes into her house, she immediately tells her to use a coaster for her drink, and tells her not to play with her expensive collectible toys. Her life is a certain way, and Cady is a lit stick of dynamite thrown into it. Hence the panic.

I’m not going to say that being terrified of the responsibility of having children is a universally queer experience. Certainly in my thirties I’m watching a large portion of my friends in queer couples have children, and I’m thrilled for them. I’m just saying it’s perhaps a relatable panic, as often the queer lifestyle/experience diverges from the traditional straight experience along that line of children and families. But there’s the whole queer arrested development thing, the second adolescence, the actual queerness of being LGBTIQA+ that’s a part of this. For me, for example, many of my straight friends had children in their mid/late twenties, got married, moved to the suburbs, and embarked on a lifestyle completely different to mine, separated by experience and geography. Neither option is better or worse, it’s just the reality.

I can’t really tell you the last time I hung out with a child. My sister is gay and doesn’t have children, so I don’t have any family babies to be a guncle to. So, as a result, I’m not really sure what kids are all about, and how to engage with them, and I vacillate between boredom of them as a concept (they cannot hold a conversation imho), and fear of the unknown. What do they want? What will they do when they’re around me? Is it up to me to stop them putting their hands in various fires?

I’m famous for once, after being introduced to my friend’s primary school aged child (I don’t really know how to work out children’s ages), asking him “what he did”, as if we were networking at a conference.

Why? because I panicked. And that panic is the horror that drives M3gan. Not fear of AI, not a cautionary tale about technology gone out of control, not a re-worked Frankenstein narrative. The panic of someone handing you a baby out of the blue and telling you to support its head. Me? But I am still the baby, I cannot be responsible for this.

M3gan is a coping mechanism

The character motivation to make a robot doll to handle an unexpected child makes sense to anyone terrified of having children.

But that terror is an interesting thing, because it’s so broad, and can come from many sources. For Gemma, she’s daunted by the specifics of that responsibility, she feels guilt and duty because of her dead sister, but she’s also loathe to give up her life. She likes working hard, she likes being unencumbered by distractions to her career goals.

You see, all through the film, that while she justifies her obsession with M3gan as doing it for Cady, and often espouses how much the doll has “helped” Cady with her grief, she spends most of the movie putting M3gan first, and reaps the career benefits. When M3gan first turns, when she kills the boy in the woods, you literally see Gemma only really become alarmed when she realises M3gan is missing from the toy table. M3gan is the solution, Cady the problem.

For me, the terror I feel about the concept of having children comes from the same place as Gemma. I like my life, and I like working hard. I have a trajectory, and goals, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let anything stop me from reaching them. Children, and the responsibility of having them, simply means you can’t put yourself first ever again. Obviously many many many people do both, there’s more successful people with children than not - but not all fears are justified. Most fears come from a place of worry and insecurity. People who go into having a child with a clear plan, a loving partner, financial stability, an actual desire to raise a kid, do much to mitigate this worry. Having a child sprung on you, like what happened to Gemma, is the stuff of nightmares.

Throughout the film, Cady is more terrifying to Gemma than M3gan is (at least until the end, when it gets violent). She’s able to deal with rogue AI much easier than a human child going through a traumatic experience, who has complicated needs and wants. Cady is the monster at the heart of M3gan - at least to Gemma, who is the character the viewer identifies and sympathises with.

But also M3gan is the monster at the heart of M3gan

That said, the actual murder doll is obviously scary in itself - but while the obvious clues are the murders and the uncanny valley features (which is used for comedic effect just as ably as scares), M3gan also draws on the scary aspects of children to be a sinister figure.

A lot of this is in physicality. The way M3gan does a lot of watching and scurrying, is very reminiscent of stories I’ve heard of waking up in the dead of the night to find your child in the darkness at the foot of your bed. “I threw up” vibes, but dialled up into horror. The majority of tension building shots are her standing still and looking at things, or out of windows.

uncanny valley be damned it’s scary when kids dont move

But it’s also about motivation. Children, from what I understand, are developmentally creatures of pure ID, who have to develop the ego and superego necessary to squash those primal, entirely selfish urges. Your ID motivates your most monstrous urges, and it’s why children basically only care about themselves. The way that we get the ego to moderate our ID is through the guidance of parents and teachers and society. M3gan, a creature of AI based ID, goes through a similar experience “learning” protocols and parameters from Gemma, who is meanwhile failing to impart similar guidelines to the actual child in her care.

The robot doll M3gan, when she finally snaps, is motivated only by her ID, the spectacle and terror of a child unrestrained by rules or conscience, given a titanium super strong body. She is scary because she is a child at their worst, a deadly tantrum, a force not even a full coven of Babysitters Club could restrain.

She’s also, incontrovertibly, the symbol of Gemma failing as a parent. Gemma is redeemed at the end because Cady sides with her against M3gan, because through this Gemma discovers how she’s been letting her niece down as a parent. However, despite this, the thing that probably terrifies many people, especially people with kids, especially people scared that they won’t measure up if they have kids, is that M3gan is above all else the consequences of failing as a parent.

Chilling.

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