Blumhouse, as a studio, has a shotgun approach to cinema. They're seemingly willing to give the green light to any creator and any idea that comes across their desk. On one hand, that has allowed them to fund some of the most important works of the modern era. On the other, it leads to weird confusing projects like M3GAN.
After the long and painful death of parody cinema, it would seem easy to assume any film coming to the screen would avoid that label like the plague. However, the promotional material of a film like M3GAN starts to raise questions about the line between scary and funny.
The trailer for Blumhouse's M3GAN looks and sounds like an extremely well-funded parody of other horror movie trailers. The setup is fairly generic, a riff on Child's Play with a robotic doll that's the same size as the child it'll be terrorizing. It starts with a woman who unexpectedly gains custody of her recently orphaned niece. She's a brilliant and accomplished roboticist, but she now struggles to relate to a semi-close relative who she'll be fully responsible for over the next decade or so. To ease her child's loneliness, she introduces her new creation into the house. Things go well at first, but in the grand tradition of evil robot movies, M3GAN becomes a threat. When the horror aspects of the film kick in, M3GAN immediately loses whatever tension she was meant to embody. She drops to all fours to attack, does a funny Fortnite dance, and kills with found objects. And, it's all set to the tune of a comically slowed-down version of a 2019 Taylor Swift track. Should we be laughing?
The music really is the perfect capstone for M3GAN's trailer. Slowed-down versions of popular songs are the go-to hack producer's method of drawing attention to a movie trailer. The trailer arguably gets some bonus points for setting a fair amount of its dialogue to the song, really committing to the choice. The most obvious comparison point for M3GAN is the Child's Play franchise. That series, which has displayed impressive longevity over the decades, has a darkly comedic tone most of the time. Chucky, its main antagonist, speaks almost entirely in snappy one-liners. Multiple entries in the franchise are comedies with buckets of gore, rather than horror movies with a few jokes. The Child's Play series can almost act as a spectrum. But where does M3GAN fall on that graph?
It's very clear that M3GAN is operating on a level of camp. The idea of a robot that kills people is obviously well-worn. Ever since the story that introduced the word robot, a massive percentage of stories featuring humanoid machines see them eventually attack mankind. Sometimes the object of terror acts like a perfectly efficient artificially intelligent being, other times it has a fully formed personality. The creepy doll trope is just basic subversion of expectation. It's taking a child's plaything and making it scary. Is there anything significant about combining those two common horror concepts? Maybe a commentary on technology's impact on children? Could M3GAN be a metaphor for the iPad every baby grows up with nowadays? If it is, it isn't giving any indication of those themes in the trailer. Though there could be a deeper meaning to the film, it seems to be selling itself on the appeal of a campy sci-fi slasher.
Blumhouse makes a lot of horror movies. Many of them carry a very comedic tone alongside their jump scares and violence. Happy Death Day and its spiritual successor Freaky are arguable parodies that mock existing films by inserting slasher movies into their premise. The Purge franchise, arguably their flagship project, has a good bit of social satire between its horror scenes. In its trailers, M3GAN reveals two or three "scary" scenes, all of which are far funnier than they are frightening. Why does M3GAN get down on all fours to pursue her foes? Why does she have at least two dance scenes? These elements of the film read like jokes, but nothing else in the trailer carries that tone. Ironically, the trailer can only garner a reaction in a couple of moments, and those bits are much funnier than they seem to intend to be.
M3GAN seems like a film made up of a bunch of random ideas. It's reminiscent of sketch comedy. The film's director Gerard Johnstone has referred to ideas in the film as concepts that he and the writers thought was funny. There's no real way to imagine the moments in this trailer being anything other than hilarious when they're in the context of the full-feature film. M3GAN might be funny on purpose, but there's a long and fantastic history of horror films that are hilarious by mistake. Whether they're aiming for comedy horror or missing their mark, M3GAN could be a lot of fun.