DANCING QUEEN

MEGAN IS BACK, UPGRADED, AND READY TO SLAY. SFX MEETS THE CREATIVES BEHIND THE HORROR ICON'S RETURN

- WORDS: JACK SHEPHERD

THERE’S A MOMENT IN THE M3GAN 2.0 trailer when the dancing robotic sensation makes a proclamation. “Hold on to your vaginas,” she warns. How many other horror icons could announce their return with such immortal words?

“At every stage of developing the first movie, the goal was to contribute this icon to the horror lexicon,” Allison Williams, who plays mother Gemma and produces, tells SFX. “She’s a very specific kind of person. Chucky [from the Child’s Play franchise] is this brash, rude, mean, mass murderer in the body of this weird-looking doll, and Annabelle is just still and terrifying. M3GAN has her own vibe going on, and for people to embrace that so quickly, it felt amazing.”

Audiences not only embraced M3GAN, they chiselled her mannequin face into the Mount Rushmore of horror greats. She dominated TikTok for months, was spoofed on Saturday Night Live, the drag queen Jorgeous dressed as her on RuPaul’s Drag Race, and a legion of M3GANs flash-mobbed Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights. Chucky could never.

“I did not think it would become this kind of pop-cultural phenomenon,” says writer and director Gerard Johnstone. “If the sequel’s bigger and bolder, it’s because of the audience’s reaction to the first. To do a movie that was very small didn’t feel like we would be listening to the audience.”

TERMINAT-HER

Development on M3GAN 2.0 began shortly after the huge box-office success of the first, and while Johnstone initially felt some pressure delivering a sequel to an immediately beloved hit, he also saw the follow-up as an opportunity to do something unexpected: recontextualise M3GAN as a hero. In other words, to Terminator 2 "this bitch” (the trailer’s words, not ours).