The creators of M3GAN just shared the hilarious story of how the killer doll’s viral dance came to life
Dance sensation: The scene from M3EGAN that soon went viral when the trailer premiered back in October. (YouTube/Universal Pictures)
The creators of one of the internet’s newest gay icons, the murderous doll from upcoming horror flick M3GAN, have revealed how the now-iconic dance from the trailer came to life.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the film’s director, Gerard Johnstone, explained how the doll’s viral dance moment came to life – and it seems a lack of sleep played a key part.
“It was one of those crazy, sleep-deprived, 3am thoughts,” he explained of the dance sequence, which sees M3GAN spontaneously breaking out into TikTok-esque moves in a hallway while brandishing a large knife.
“Wouldn’t it kind of be funny if the soundtrack suddenly became real and M3GAN ended up busting a move to whatever music was playing,” Johnstone continued. “It was just something that everyone embraced and loved.”
The slasher film centres on lifelike robot doll M3GAN, who is created by Gemma (Allison Williams), a toy scientist to act as a companion to her young niece Cady (Violet McGraw) after her parents die in a car crash. But as Cady and M3GAN begin to form a close bond, the ‘Model 3 Generative Android’ turns out to be slightly more murderous than anticipated.
Allison Williams, who also acts an executive producer, also explained that the team even made memes internally to share after the trailer was released in a bid to increase the film’s viral potential.
“We had internally come up with memes to distribute, but we didn’t end up needing to deploy them, because people started making their own.”
As it turns out, even the creators couldn’t predict how wildly popular the trailer would prove to be, which spawned streams of hilarious memes and mash-ups and immediately bestowed icon status upon the killer doll.
“You can’t even dream that big when you’re doing something like this,” Williams continued. “That was just such an exciting day. It was proof of concept.”
Producer James Wan, who directed 2004’s Saw and 2013’s The Conjuring, also revealed the inspiration for the film.
“We joke that I get branded a lot as the killer-doll guy, but I’ve never technically made a movie about a doll that kills — it’s always possessed by some sort of evil spirit,” he explained.
“We thought it would be fun to do a movie that is basically Annabelle meets the Terminator,” referring to the possessed doll in The Conjuring and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg assassin.
The films generated even more amusement recently when a group of M3GAN dolls appeared at the film’s premiere with a choreographed routine to Taylor Swift’s “It’s Nice To Have a Friend”. Because, why not.
M3GAN will be released in theatres in the US on 6 January and in the UK on 13 January, 2023.
