If you had wandered the set of the film M3gan 2.0 last year, chances are you would have stumbled into M3gan, the terrifying humanoid doll, staring lifelessly while she waited to be called for her next scene. Sometimes she would stand in the corner of the soundstage, says Allison Williams with a nervy laugh. "The dilemma is: do you turn her around so she's facing the wall, or do you let her face the room? In the sequel to the sci-fi horror M3gan, Williams resumes her role as Gemma, a roboticist who has become a crusader against rampant and reckless AI development after her creation – developed for her orphaned niece – became murderous. Acting opposite M3gan was unsettling, says Williams, speaking over a video call from a hotel room in New York. Sometimes she was played by the 15-year-old dancer Amie Donald, but often she was a robotic doll, animated by a small team. "When she's been working for a while, her eyelids can get sticky," says Williams. M3gan's handlers would paint lubricant on to her eyeballs with a brush and Williams would have to catch herself: "She's not flinching and for a second you're like: 'Ugh.' Then you remember: this is not a live thing." Still best known for her first role as Marnie in Lena Dunham's landmark TV series Girls, Williams has gravitated towards comedy-tinged horror in recent years. Her first post-Girls film role was in the Oscar-winning dark comedy horror Get Out. It and M3gan were relatively low-budget projects that became cultural phenomena – Get Out for its commentary on racial politics, M3gan for what it says about the dangers of AI (as well as the uncanniness of M3gan herself). Williams has long been interested in AI – she knows Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, who put her in touch with robotics experts when she was researching the role of Gemma. The film raises questions not only about the danger of rogue AI, but about the ethical concerns –including how we should feel about the "rights" of devices. "It's easy to imbue anything that has AI in it with humanity.

Horror movie powerhouse Blumhouse is getting into video games. The company behind hits like M3GAN, Get Out, The Purge and Insidious is opening a production and publishing division that will work on original horror games for PC, consoles and mobile. We do films, we do TV and there is this massive, growing segment in media and entertainment called gaming," Blumhouse president Abhijay Prakash told Bloomberg. "The space is hundreds of billions of dollars; we're in a great position to try and access it." As with the film side of the production company, Blumhouse Games will keep the budgets modest.

Not too long ago, chess-playing computers--the supervillain of many a human grandmaster--were as intimidating physically as they were virtually: bulky, sturdy, sleek, jet-black monoliths in miniature, programmed to crush chess hotshots instead of spurring evolution. Such megaminds, imposing as they were, were also christened with futuristic-sounding names: Mac Hack, Cray Blitz, Deep Blue. Having won the war against the human mind, these coding wonders are now a ubiquitous, and mostly embraced, part of today's chess industry. All of which is to preview the latest virtual robot to confound the greatest minds of our time and throw the entire chess world into pandemonium: a 1-point-ranked kitten named Mittens. Decades of wondrous progress and technological development have brought us from MANIAC to Mittens. Online bots have been a key part of Chess.com, with easy programs for training and instruction as well as bots meant to play in the styles of chess celebrities.

This weekend, I succumbed to the pull of all the meme-y marketing and went to the theater to see the surprise horror-comedy hit M3gan. I generally enjoyed it--the jokes are funny, the jump scares effective, the robot-centric plot a rather smart addition to our fresh new wave of artificial intelligence anxiety. It isn't the goriest or most frightening flick--the blood streams had to stay PG-13--but the steadily paced tension and the references to horror classics do their job fine. Yet, to me, the most chilling aspect of the movie doesn't come from anything you might expect: the offscreen murders, M3gan's deranged humanoid face, the pressures of capitalism. It actually stems from a deceptively insignificant 10-second scene that comes about halfway through the movie, in which the titular bot takes to the house piano. To be clear, I don't find this scene so viscerally terrifying for the piano tune itself (in the film, a solid instrumental cover of Martika's 1989 No. 1 hit "Toy Soldiers"), or for the overall menace of the moment, a turning point in M3gan's development.

The essence of genre is effects without causes--things showing up to fulfill expectations rather than dramatic necessities. "M3GAN," a science-fiction-based horror caper, provides a clever batch of these effects in this gleefully clever twist on the "Frankenstein" theme, and its director, Gerard Johnstone, seems to be laughing up his sleeve throughout. It's that very knowingness, the deftness with which the film gets a rise from viewers, which makes a good time feel hollow. There's a different, far more substantial movie lurking within, yet the virtues of efficiency, clarity, surprise, and wit that enliven the one that's actually onscreen leave its merely implied substance tantalizingly unformed. Allison Williams plays Gemma, a type-A robotics engineer with a big toy company in Seattle, Funki, that prospers by selling cheesily interactive furry toys called PurrPetual Petz.

If you grew up on Saturday morning cartoons, the opening of M3gan is like a Proustian madeleine in TV-commercial form, a gaudy, blaring 30-second spot for children's toys that promise unending hours of fun. And what follows next will be just as familiar: the sharp feeling of disappointment. The ad for "Purrpetual Pets" promises fuzzy computerized companions that will be tireless playmates for as long as you can keep them charged. The one we see 8-year-old Cady (Violet McGraw) playing with in the back seat, as her quarreling parents navigate a mountain road in a whiteout blizzard, mostly seems to make fart noises while prompting her to feed it simulated treats. Although M3gan eventually becomes a movie about a technology so successful that it surpasses both its creator's dreams and her control, it starts off as a reminder that, in the vast majority of cases, the promises that code could take on the functions of humans have either ended in failure or, just as often, a scaling-down of expectations.

For die-hards, no horror movie can be too scary. But for you, a wimp, the wrong one can leave you miserable. Never fear, scaredies, because Slate's Scaredy Scale is here to help. We've put together a highly scientific and mostly spoiler-free system for rating new horror movies, comparing them with classics along a 10-point scale. And because not everyone is scared by the same things--some viewers can't stand jump scares, while others are haunted by more psychological terrors or can't stomach arterial spurts--it breaks down each movie's scares across three criteria: suspense, spookiness, and gore.

Not a robot so much as a hi-tech Frankenstein's monster, stitched together with bits of Robocop and Terminator, but cheekily enjoyable just the same. This is a sci-fi chiller co-written by horror experts Akela Cooper and James Wan and directed by Gerard Johnstone. M3gan, or Model 3 Generative Android, is an eerily self-possessed blond tweenage girlbot, voiced by Jenna Davis, a state-of-the-art toy from the near future developed as a personal passion project by engineer Gemma (Allison Williams, from Get Out and HBO's Girls) to the exasperation of her highly stressed boss David, amusingly played by Ronny Chieng. To be properly developed, M3gan needs to "pair" with a little girl owner; she needs to sync up with an actual human, to learn her owner's speech patterns, behavioural traits and emotional needs, so she can be properly close with her. And Gemma doesn't have anyone to fill that post – until her nine-year-old niece Cady (Violet McGraw) is orphaned after a car crash and comes to live with Gemma, who must furthermore honour her late parents' wish that she is homeschooled.

With 2022 almost over it's almost time to ring in a new year of movies and one of the biggest projects being released at the beginning of 2023 will be M3gan. M3gan is the story of a robotic doll with artificial intelligence that serves as a protector to the child that owns her, but things go haywire and she begins killing. With the film releasing right around the corner we're beginning to see more and more from M3gan and now we have a brand new clip that shows off the doll horrific forest kill. You can check out the clip below! There have been rumblings that Anabelle and M3gan could go toe to toe in a battle of the dolls, but nothing has been official.