The final episode of AIpril, M3GAN arrived in January 2023 as a modest Blumhouse horror release, and promptly became one of the most talked-about horror comedies of the year. On a budget of $12 million, it grossed over $180 million worldwide, spawned a franchise, and put a ten-second hallway dance sequence into the permanent vocabulary of internet culture.

Director Gerard Johnstone insisted from the outset on a practical-effects-first approach, and supervising puppeteer Adrien Morot built a suite of six or seven animatronic puppets capable of different ranges of movement — some with articulated eyes and heads, others with fully computerised motion control. The defining creative rule was simple: animatronic when still, performer when moving. That performer was Amie Donald, a ten-year-old New Zealand national dance champion and brown belt in karate, who wore a static silicone mask on set that was later replaced in post-production with a digitally animated face by Wētā Workshop. The result is a character who occupies the uncanny valley not as a technical failure but as a deliberate aesthetic strategy; M3GAN is unsettling precisely because you can never quite be sure what you're looking at.

M3GANs design decision had downstream consequences the production could not entirely have anticipated: audiences, particularly on TikTok and in queer communities, embraced M3GAN as a style icon. Universal's chief marketing officer Michael Moses identified the hallway dance sequence, performed by Amie Donald, and utilised TikTok dance trends and built the campaign around letting it spread organically rather than manufacturing a formal challenge.

M3GAN is a genuinely well-crafted piece of genre filmmaking, with a practical effects philosophy rooted in old-school puppetry and a central performance of remarkable physical intelligence, which makes it fun and accessible, but also threads together anxieties about outsourced parenting, emotional dependency on technology, and the ethics of designing companion AI for children — themes that give the film considerably more thematic density than its campy surface might suggest.

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