Long before Gerard Johnstone's "M3GAN" graced the silver screen, the killer android doll was already going viral for her eerie, inhuman dancing. The new horror-comedy outing is directed by "Housebound" helmer Gerard Johnstone, as well as being the latest collaboration between "Malignant" screenwriter Akela Cooper and producer James Wan. In the excellent new film, young Cady (Violet McGraw) loses her parents in a tragic accident, and comes to live with her brilliant but unprepared roboticist aunt Gemma (Allison Williams). Gemma gifts Cady with her newest invention, M3GAN, an innovative android meant to be a lifelong friend.

The problem with this scenario is that M3GAN takes her charge to care for Cady far too seriously, and she hunts her way through perceived enemies of the kindhearted but grieving young girl. One particular scene, the most viral of the bunch, involves M3GAN menacingly dancing down a hallway en route to handling her newest batch of foes. In an interview with /Film, Johnstone explained the origins of that memorable scene. While the murderous hallway dance was novel, its origins stemmed from the organic character arc of M3GAN herself, so the rest of the team easily got on board.

1, 2, M3GAN's Coming For You

Strangely enough, that key hallway dance number wasn't originally in the script for "M3GAN." Johnstone "just kind of snuck" the scene in, and the film's other creatives easily embraced it. Speaking to /Film, Johnstone explained that, "strangely, I think everyone was on board from the get-go." Of course, movies go through a lot of shaping as they proceed through successive iterations of the script, improvisations and on set problem solving, and the post-production process, but the hallway dance number was never touched. Johnstone elaborates:

"You get a lot of notes about story things and, 'Will this makes sense?' and 'How are we going to do this?' But the dance, weirdly, stayed under the radar for a long time. I think everyone just thought it was a really fun, exciting, new idea."

When the time came to shoot the now infamous sequence, "they were already having so much fun with her character that it just felt like the natural next place to take it." And so, M3GAN went from TikTok dances with her young charge to becoming a robotic dancing fiend, with her inhuman movement patterns playing a major role in securing her place as an unsettling new horror icon.

"M3GAN" is in theaters now.

Read this next: Horror Movies With Unconventional Monsters

The post M3GAN's Hallway Dance Scene Felt Like a 'Natural' Step For The Character's Journey [Exclusive] appeared first on /Film.