Way before Chucky, Annabelle, and M3GAN, dolls were a fixture of scary movies
“Like a lot of topics in horror whether it’s zombies or vampires, [doll movies] tend to run in cycles,” Kendrick says. “You have one breakout film and then you have a whole bunch that try to capitalize on that.”“AI is an interesting concept because AI is uncanny,” Kendrick says. “It’s intelligence that we recognize as kind of human, but not quite right. So if you put that into a doll, you now have the physical uncanniness of the doll combined with a psychological or intellectual uncanniness.
The reason why dolls are such great fodder for horror movies all comes back to this concept of the “uncanny,” Kendrick says. It’s the idea that something is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. “When something’s familiar, it’s generally comforting. Or we at least know it, so we have control over it,” he says. “But when an object or place is both familiar and unfamiliar, something’s not right, but you can’t put your finger on what it is. Dolls, especially the kind that tend to show up in horror movies, are always very lifelike, but not exactly. They come really close to looking human, but don’t quite get there.
That similarity is what makes them so creepy, he adds: “If you see M3GAN out of the corner of your eye, you might mistake it for an actual child for a second before realizing something is wrong.”found that the creepiness of dolls relates to the way our brains detect and pay attention to faces. According to the research, humans’ perception of life in a face is largely gleaned from the eyes. In turn, recognizing life in a face equates to recognizing there’s a mind behind that face.
“There are these signals that are telling our brain this thing is alive,” Thalia Wheatley, a cognitive neuroscientist at Dartmouth University who cowrote the study, toldTo make M3GAN as unnerving as possible, Wan said in commentary included in the film’s production notes that he and director Gerard Johnstone agreed that it should feel like a child’s plaything that comes to life. “To see it have a life of its own is what gives it that creepy, scary element,” he said.
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