The tweenage terror that drives M3gan

M3gan murders, but that’s not what makes her scary. I’m a huge baby. I know this about myself, and have for the most part accepted it: I know that I can’t handle rollercoasters, that heights are iffy at best, and that if there’s a popular horror movie all my friends are going to see, I will be delving no further than its Wikipedia summary. Luckily, I don’t have to resort to that last measure for M3gan, a film about a murderous AI-powered doll which my colleague Alex Abad-Santos has [written hilariously and incisively about](. He describes the real horror at the heart of the character M3gan (a name I’ve mentally been pronouncing “em three gan”); how it’s not so much her homicidal tendencies that make her a chilling figure, but her ability to grok more about the world than the adults around her would like her or her young charge to know. “On the surface,” he writes, “M3gan is a horror movie about a murderous, rogue AI, but it’s also an hour-and-30-minute camp meditation about how a pretty white girl best friend can be one of the most terrifying things in American life.” As someone who, not to brag, also attended eighth grade, that sentence struck more fear in my heart than a dozen Wikipedia pages could contain. —[Alanna Okun](, senior editor   M3gan is about how scary a tween girl can be [an image of M3gan]( Universal Pictures My favorite way to terrorize my former coworker and current friend is by asking her what will happen when her two daughters — 7 and 4 (their ages, not their names) — eventually become pre-teens. “Are you dreading it?” I texted her over the holidays, my first instinct after receiving her holiday card. In the photos everyone is smiling, having a fantastic time. “1000 percent,” she wrote back. Speaking as a former child and person of eighth grade experience, her fear is warranted. Tantrums, mood swings, and bad behavior all get bigger (and worse) when kids become 5-foot sentient beings. Making everything more terrible, kids are also surrounded by other kids, all of whom are testing the new limits of their own autonomy. And at that age, I did not fear death or injury the way I did the hot glare from a trio of preternaturally cool girl best friends in my Catholic grade school (I’m not going to name those girls because maybe deep down I’m still terrified of them). Their friendship was largely and likely based on the coincidence that they all hit their puberty growth spurts at the same time. And not only were they almost adult-sized, they all had older sisters they siphoned forbidden secrets out of, like how one of our teachers may or may not have had a glass eye, or how the eighth grade trip to Catalina Island would require each cabin (one for boys and one for girls) to share two showers, or that flashing the “peace” sign during mass was actually much cooler than shaking hands. [Those girls told us things about the real world that our parents wouldn’t.]( And if our parents weren’t going to tell us the big truths these girls had revealed, my classmates and I started to wonder what else our families were keeping from us. Those girls were my M3gan. On the surface, M3gan is a horror movie about a murderous, rogue AI, but it’s also an hour-and-30-minute camp meditation about how a pretty white girl best friend can be one of the most terrifying things in American life. It’s Sydney Sweeney’s portrayal of Olivia in the first season of The White Lotus or the tweenage girls who gave millennial’s inevitable obsolescence a demeaningly cute name: “cheugy.” It’s Regina George or Heather Chandler, references that tweens would call vintage (or something unintentionally meaner) once you explained to them that there was once a movie called Mean Girls and another called Heathers. [Read the full story »](  [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( Prince Harry’s Spare is a sad and self-indicting portrait of royalty on the brink The press is the villain but there are no heroes in Prince Harry’s new memoir. [Read the full story »](   Job interviews are a nightmare — and only getting worse Employers are constantly finding new hoops for candidates to jump through. [Read the full story »](   Support our work We aim to explain what we buy, why we buy it, and why it matters. Support our mission by making a gift today. [Give](   More good stuff to read today - [Bed Bath & Beyond and bankrupt?]( - [How Andrew Tate sells men on toxic masculinity]( - [The horrifying revelations of the Idaho student murders]( - [Want to improve your memory? Try these unexpected tips.]( - [The ultrarich are getting cozy in America’s tax havens at everyone else’s expense](  [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( Manage your [email preferences]( or [unsubscribe](param=goods). If you value Vox’s unique explanatory journalism, support our work with a one-time or recurring [contribution](. View our [Privacy Policy]( and our [Terms of Service](. Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 12, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2023. All rights reserved.