'Morgan' Might Give You Nightmares

After Eleven from Stranger Things burst onto our screens and into our hearts, it seemed like audiences couldn't get enough of extraordinary little girls doing creepy stuff. Luckily, while we wait with baited breath,for Stranger Things Season 2, we have another creepy child to fill the void. In Morgan, Anya Taylor-Joy plays the titular character, a girl who was created and raised inside a laboratory. But unlike the kind, curious, and heartfelt nature of Eleven, Morgan seems to be a made of a different breed — a more terrifying one complete with superhuman abilities. Morgan is a scary movie, and unlike Stranger Things, the events within it are far from just some innocent sci-fi fun.

More sci-fi than horror, Morgan, which hits theaters Sept. 2, hinges on the audience's interest in Morgan as a girl born and raised in a lab, who has special, horrifying abilities. If the Morgan trailers are any indication, the title character doesn't seem to use her abilities for good, but to hurt others and pretty much go crazy. It's a truly scary-looking film, but what will hit audiences hard is likely not the actual frights, but the more realistically unnerving elements of its subject matter. In Consequence of Sound's review of the film,, Randall Colburn wrote, "Morgan isn’t hard sci-fi. It isn’t trying to solve the questions that have suffused the genre since its inception. Rather, it couches those ever-more-timely concerns in scenes of high action and affecting character connection." While there is physical bloodshed, it seems that Morgan is leans more toward sci-fi than the horror genre, and will give you nightmares for a whole different reason than you might expect.

Morgan will certainly freak you out about science and technology, as it battles with the age-old sci-fi idea: what happens when man tries to play God? We've seen this trope a million times in movies like Jurassic Park, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Ex Machina, and Splice. In these films, scientists try to create humans or hybrids or artificial intelligence in labs and then, naturally, because they haven't thought it all through, their experiments rebel against them. This time, the experiment happens to be a girl with superhuman powers who rebels against her oppressors. Pretty interesting stuff.

Essentially, Morgan is more entertaining than scary, and I doubt it will give you major nightmares. Scaredy cats, feel free to check this one out — but be warned, it might make you think twice about how you use technology.

Images: Giphy; 20th Century Fox