When the first M3GAN movie made its way to theaters in January of 2022, I thought I was in for my latest trash baby classic. A silly concept for a PG-13 horror movie that would bring some camp back into the ‘living doll’ subgenre after a decade of Annabelle’s dour reign, with some obviously intentional comedy chops. What I didn’t expect, and perhaps I should have, was that M3gan would become the latest addition to the nu-camp canon.

I like to call nu-camp basically anything that feels like it was designed to go viral in gay social media circles. The antithesis of camp in one important fashion, nu-camp arrives immediately seeking its audience through ironic or unconventional marketing whose goal is to make the ideal consumer feel as if they’re in on a joke predicated on participating in commerce and culture. Nu-camp is deceptive, attempting to breach a skeptic’s defenses by assuring them that they know they’re selling you something, in the hopes that you’ll buy it anyway1. I see nu-camp as having sprung out of a desire for marketers to capitalize on Weird Twitter: a second wave of postmodern advertising following the fork in the road after all of the weird ideas in the commercial business (the Cadbury "In The Air Tonight" gorilla, or the PS3 robot baby for example) began bringing diminishing returns. The other bend in this road is dryly delivered celebrity endorsements or cast reunions (see the recent Suits ensemble T-Mobile ads) or commercials that are basically short films so generic you can only occasionally tell what’s being sold, the ad read and logo presentation the punchline of an otherwise dramatic affair (see the Chevrolet "A Holiday to Remember" ad as an example.)

I mostly felt embarrassed watching people adopt M3gan as a gay icon during the first movie’s press run, but in a way I could ignore. I thought the movie was fine, not as much campy fun as I was expected, and I could ignore people and publications who I thought were being annoying about it. But my god, the marketing campaign for this new movie makes me fume thanks to a combination of classic nu-camp signifiers and one move I find particularly in bad taste: M3gan is here to protect the dolls. The fictional character got a cover profile in Attitude, the UK’s biggest queer magazine, where among bad jokes about killing co-stars and snark about being so beloved by The Gays, M3gan takes a moment to get serious and let us know she’s extremely politically conscious.

“To my beloved Dolls: you are radiant, revolutionary and real. Your existence is not a debate, and I will use my platform to amplify your beauty and power.”

Fittingly, this reads like a caption on an Instagram post with a perfect two-sentence length that’s caption and infographic ready. M3gan has also been up to classic (read: tired) Weird Brand Twitter shenanigans to get people hyped, and frankly all of this reads as incredibly hollow and phony.

Especially given that writer-director Gerard Johnstone is straight and that Blumhouse’s real attempt at making a trans horror film with They/Them was a muddled mess that got shipped straight to streaming, we can ask much more from our gay media than what we’ll get from Jason Blum and his ilk. Nothing about M3gan is camp, and we shouldn’t be treating it as such. They’re cheap PG-13 horror movies for people who don’t like the sex scenes in The Terminator or the legitimately funny nuclear family satire of the later Child’s Play films. Films like Bride of Chucky, Seed of Chucky and even Freddy’s Revenge go farther in making the awkward liminal space in emergent states of being that carry us into newfound queer lives into textual moments of characterization, stories that use the horror genre to portray this liminal space as a danger when the world doesn’t accept some fundamental part of your being. M3GAN possesses no such uncertainty or complexity in its titular character’s state of being, the character’s motives so clear that the first act of the film feels cinematically inert thanks to its contradictory visual treatment of the at-first-innocent doll as an immediate source of unease. Dramatic irony is one thing, waiting far too long to deliver the goods is another.

The gays can do, make, and celebrate better things than M3GAN.