James Wan's New Creepy Horror Villain Revealed By M3GAN Movie Poster
James Wan's latest horror film, M3GAN, shows off its creepy new villain in a fresh movie poster. The writer, director, and producer is known for such blockbuster horror films as Saw, Insidious, and The Conjuring. A featured characteristic of his films is the ability to not only create jump-scares from ghosts, possessed dolls, and demonic entities, but also the ability to weave compelling central characters throughout the narrative, and make audiences come back for several sequels to the original films where said characters and worlds are introduced.
Wan has story credit for M3GAN and is also producing alongside Jason Blum of Blumhouse Productions, Michael Clear, and Couper Samuelson. Allison Williams not only stars in the film, but is also acting as an executive producer, and Gerard Johnstone (known for Housebound) is directing. Wan's writing partner on Malignant, Akela Cooper, is returning as the screenwriter for this film as well.
Screen Rant is now able to reveal a poster for M3GAN which displays Wan's latest evil creation in all its glory. Although still clearly in the horror genre, M3GAN will add a sci-fi element to the film as it follows Gemma (played by Williams), a roboticist who creates M3GAN, a life-like doll that uses artificial intelligence and is marketed as being a child's companion and a parent's helper. Gemma decides to use the prototype of M3GAN in her own house with her recently adopted niece, a decision that will likely wreak havoc on both Gemma and her niece. The poster for the film shows M3GAN, the AI doll with a certain uncanny valley quality to it, creepily staring straight ahead past a person's blurred side profile. The poster for the film can be viewed below:
M3GAN is only the latest film to grapple with how AI in the form of a human-like figure may affect real human relationships. In the horror genre, there is the critically acclaimed Ex Machina in which Alicia Vikander plays a soft-spoken AI creation turned murderous in the hopes of escaping its lab. More recently in the drama genre there is Kogonada's After Yang, which tends toward a more optimistic outlook of AI possibilities, and the emotional connections that people may be able to develop with human-like AI models. Although not AI, Wan does have familiarity with horror films that center on evil dolls, as his past work includes the various Annabelle films that are within The Conjuring universe. Whether Wan will draw on techniques and themes used in Annabelle for this latest upcoming film remains to be seen.
With films such as Annabelle Comes Home and Ex Machina in the recent memory of viewers who have seen either, it will be a challenging task to create a film involving a sinister doll or AI villain that will still be able to surprise and scare audiences. That being said, Wan is a seasoned professional in the horror genre, and has experience working with Blumhouse, who have been a supportive production company of his past films. These factors, along with a cast that includes actors such as Williams and Ronny Chieng, may make M3GAN a film worth seeing in a growing genre that involves an AI which closely resembles a human. Viewers will have to judge for themselves whether M3GAN will make them sit on the edge of their seats as they did with Wan's past horror films when it premieres in 2023.