THE M3GAN MOVIE SOUNDTRACK: FULL BREAKDOWN

What are the best new horror movies 2023? Well, M3GAN kicked off the year by slaying it at the box office, making well over $165 million worldwide – not bad for a film with a reported $12 million budget. M3GAN is a fantastic satirical horror with echoes of Child’s Play and The Omen, which follows in the ‘deadly doll’ footsteps of Chucky and Annabelle.

The M3GAN movie trailers use some killer tracks – the first deploys Taylor Swift’s ‘It’s Nice to Have a Friend’:

Whilst the second features the very on point ‘Dolls’ by Bella Poarch:

‘A Prototype Cyborg Doll With a Taste for Casual Slaughter’

What is M3GAN? As the Guardian says, it’s, ‘the ultimate prestige toy: a precision-engineered prototype cyborg doll with limpid blue eyes and the capacity to learn from and empathise with her “primary user”. She comes with a price tag that would buy you a midsized family car, a full gamut of judgmental tweenager eye rolls and a taste for casual slaughter. And right now, she’s a lifeline for her creator, robotics engineer Gemma (Get Out’s Allison Williams).’

Written by horror movie specialist Akela Cooper (Malignant, The Nun 2), and directed by Gerard Johnstone (Housebound), M3GAN follows an eight-year-old girl, Cady (Violet McGraw), whose parents are killed in a terrible tragedy. Her aunt, Gemma, designs a robot doll powered by artificial intelligence, the Model 3 Generative Android, to help care for her, and to help Cady with her feelings of loneliness.

Producers James Wan (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring) and Jason Blum (from Blumhouse, the production company behind Get Out, and franchise hits The Purge and Paranormal Activity) pitch M3GAN as ‘Annabelle meets The Terminator.’ To properly develop, the doll needs to ‘pair’ and sync up with a human, learning their speech patterns, behavioural traits and emotional needs in order to get close to them. Which is where Cady comes in.

But of course, as with other robot-centred stories such as I, Robot and Ex Machina, there’s a turning point where M3GAN decides that she doesn’t want to obey orders anymore. Increasingly protective of Cady, everything from a neighbour’s dog to a bully becomes a target for whatever M3GAN deems to be a threat to her.

The character of M3GAN is voiced by Jenna Davis, and physically acted by dancer and gymnast Amie Donald, who did her own stunts and helped to choreograph that dance. Their performances were blended with two animatronic puppets, used for dialogue and close-ups.

Go behind the scenes to find out more about the film, and how the character of M3GAN was created, with self-taught puppeteer Paul Lewis:

The M3GAN Soundtrack

The original score for M3GAN was created by LA-based, English composer Anthony Willis, previously best known for scoring the Oscar-winning film Promising Young Woman.

The score has to tread a fine line between action, horror and humour; Willis combines lush orchestration with electronic sound design that’s intended to convey the story’s superior tech element. For this, he used a vibraphone that’s manipulated to blur the lines between synthetic and organic sounds, describing the results as ‘hypnotic tech-wonder’ blended with ‘industrial tech-horror’.

Willis told Syfy.com that, ‘Right from the get-go, (director) Gerard Johnstone wanted to stay in the organic place as much as possible. The idea being that M3GAN, for much of the movie, is inhabiting the innocence of the child and the warmth of a guardian. And she’s so unbelievably vivid and real-looking, that it did make sense that she would be primarily organic [from a musical standpoint].’

Soloist Holly Sedillos adds ‘creepy, ethereal vocals’ to represent M3GAN discovering her world, and processing her environment. Jenna Davis as M3GAN also performs two songs on screen – ‘Tell Me Your Dreams’ which is a Disney-esque lullaby and ‘Titanium’, a cover of David Guetta and SIA’s hit.

There are plenty of anxious piano lines, combined with often dissonant strings to create suspense, together with a three-note theme foe M3GAN herself. And to reflect her epiphany of self-awareness, Willis needed to find just the right ‘cocktail of classic anvils, percussion, and brass’ that could seamlessly blend with ‘some featured moments for very aggressive synths.’

However, Willis also needed to establish a ‘sincere’ and ‘emotional’ foundation for Gemma and her niece Cady from the start. As he points out, ‘By the end of the movie, you’re either rooting for M3GAN — which is a little masochistic, but understandable, because she’s so cool — or you’re rooting for a resolution in Gemma and Cady’s relationship. So it was really important in that first act to establish some sincerity, sweetness, and sadness. The music in that first act also then becomes the thing that M3GAN herself picks up on and then ultimately embodies and develops.’

Here’s the full M3GAN soundtrack tracklist:

• Funki Headquarters
• A Message from Oregon
• Those Aren’t Toys
• Reluctant Guardian/Meeting Bruce
• Prototype
• The Perfect Algorithm
• On the Subject of Death
• A Hole in the Fence
• Calibrated Response
• Corporate Misdeeds
• Tell Me Your Dreams (written by Anthony Willis and Gerard Johnstone, performed by Jenna Davis)
• Attachment Theory
• Bully in the Forest
• Bad Boys Equal Bad Men
• Angel of Death
• Titanium (Sia Furler, David Guetta, Giorgio Tuinfort, and Nick Van de Wall, performed by Jenna Davis)
• Approximately 5 Feet Deep
• Detectives & Missing Data Reports
• True Guardian
• She’s Still Plugged In
• Departing Funki
• Megan’s Fantasy
• Workshop Duel
• Two Titans
• Model 3 Generative AN-droid
• A Message From Elsie
• Funki Redux
• Life & Death (Suite from M3GAN)
• Bruce’s Dream (Bonus Track)

Additional tracks which are featured:

• Purrpetual Pets (theme) – Madison Davey, Vaarin
• Furzeez (theme) - Madison Davey, Vaarin
• Not Your Hero – Emanuel Vo Williams, Cut One
• Deadly Valentine – Charlotte Gainsbourg
• Le Point Zero – Freedom Fry
• Burn the Breeze – Jaz Baz, Captain Black, Jacob Mullins
• Candy Man – Raphael Lake
• Let it Whip – Dazz Band
• It’s Trial by Fire – Raphael Lake, Eric Brooks, Camden Rose
• Walk the Night – Skatt Bros
• Red Candy Hearts – Alfred Jack
• Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive – M3GAN cast
• Silicon Chip – Basil Kirchin – this is the track that plays out over the end credits

New Doll, New Sound

Talking to Filmspeak.net, Willis revealed that he and director Gerard Johnstone didn’t want to emulate films like Annabelle and Child’s Play, but instead tried to do something original with the music:

‘Because it’s a new doll, how can we score it differently? Gerard was always drawn to very organic colours and slightly more sophisticated things than just going for the tech aspect, but more towards the psychology. I always gravitated towards vibraphone for the tech because it hangs out. It has an ambiguous territory between slightly synthetic sounding, a little sci-fi, and slightly industrial. There is quite a lot of vibraphone. It’s oscillating, almost like a synth-pop in the score, especially for M3GAN to process her environment.

‘It’s teetering on that line between being organic and artificial. When she goes down the rabbit hole into believing that she’s this real personality, the music pushes into a noir vibe, a sort of femme fatale vibe. That was the starting point, and it was a lot of fun.’

What Song Does M3gan Dance to in the Movie?

M3GAN’s moves have gone head-to-head with Wednesday’s in terms of TikTok memes. This clip is set to ‘Dolls’, which was used on one of the trailers, but in the movie, our creepy companion dances to an old disco track, ‘Walk the Night’ by The Skatt Bros.

Can’t get enough of M3GAN? You’ll be pleased to hear that there’s a sequel in the pipeline, currently titled, of course M3GAN 2.0.

Soundtracking the Screen

Looking for more inspiration? Check out our deep dives on the best films and soundtracks from the last year and some fantastic original film scores.