Just north of Magic Mountain’s roller coasters, hidden within the vast, anonymous industrial parks of the Valencia neighborhood of Santa Clarita, California, lies the secret lab where the murderous doll M3GAN was born.

“Born” is putting it a touch dramatically — but only a touch.

Though she has taken on a prankish life of her own since the 2022 runaway horror hit made her dance moves iconic, M3GAN is a product of several teams, primarily the animatronic makeup and design company Morot FX Studio, but also a human actor, 15-year-old Amie Donald, several puppeteers and a swarm of technicians performing in concert like a group of modern dancers.

And while the nondescript row of beige offices doesn’t scream “secret lab,” that’s not far off either. Just the other night, Christian Bale was here, testing out some face-changing prosthetics for his forthcoming role in “Madden,” about the Oakland Raiders football legend. Nicolas Cage dropped in a day earlier.

“You want a popcorn?” asks Adrien Morot, 54, the shop’s proprietor. It’s a Saturday in April — the only available time he has in a typically job-crammed week to show off some of the new work he has done on “M3GAN 2.0,” due in theaters June 27.

There’s a noticeable pride Morot takes in providing a tour: a two- level office crammed with shelves of scowling latex heads, furry creatures and a pair of giant gators overlooking it all. There are posters for horror movies like Eli Roth’s “Thanksgiving” as well as more elegant gigs: Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!” and the Bale-starring “Vice,” for which the actor was transformed into Dick Cheney. (Morot’s task: turning Steve Carell into Donald Rumsfeld.)

Scattered pizza boxes left on workbenches lend to the air of dorm-room fantasy but Morot is quick to open one up: no leftover slices, only delicate pieces of fabricated skin applications. Pizza boxes are perfect for those.

“I have to admit that, especially for somebody like me that grew up just doing this — this was my hobby, really — there’s never a day where you don’t come into the shop feeling: This is so cool,” Morot says.

Also picking her way through the shop is Kathy Tse, Morot’s longtime creative partner and wife. “Because we have good chemistry — we have trust — we work well together,” Tse, 44, says. “That is so important when you are under duress, under stress. And because of that, they always end up calling us back.”

Hollywood has called back, noticing them in a big way. The Oscar they won for the fleshy organic work they did with Brendan Fraser on “The Whale” is nowhere to be seen. It’s in a closet somewhere, Morot admits, sheepishly.

“Winning an Oscar has never been in the list of accomplishments that I was seeking, truly ever,” he says. “My only goal that I was really dying for was to have one of our creations on the cover of Fangoria magazine. That’s the only thing.” (They line the shop’s business office.)

“M3GAN 2.0” is exactly the sequel fans will be wanting. It embraces the essential ridiculousness of the concept — a vicious AI in the robotic body of an upset tween — as well as the folly of tech bros who fail to heed some fairly obvious warnings.

It’s more of a comedy. The laughs are constant (yes, M3GAN sings another of her awkward songs). Also, reading the room, the filmmakers realize that audiences have come to love her and want to root for her. To that end, she has been turned into something of a force for good, drafted into doing battle against a military-grade AI called Amelia, also built into the body of a young woman.

At the shop, Morot and Tse set up two full-size M3GANs, one from the first movie, another from the upcoming film, the latter more muscular and several inches taller. That change was motivated by the realities of their human actor.

“Amie, she keeps growing so quickly and, within a year, grew over two inches,” Tse says.

Says Morot, “She is such a joy to work with — a real trouper. And I think that everybody was enamored with her, and it just made sense to bring her back in the second movie. So I think that the script was altered or adapted to make sure that she would fit within the story.”

When M3GAN is running or doing one of her viral swirly-arm dances, it’s performed by Donald, an actor from New Zealand, wearing a mask designed by Team Morot. But when it’s a medium shot or close-up, audiences are seeing an animatronic puppet operated by several people. Usually, Morot is working the mechanisms in the eyes and lubricating them — he can speak excitedly at length about “eyeball pivot” — while Tse is manipulating arms and doing a fair amount of hand-acting.

“In my naiveté, I never quite understood just how much this was basically an elevated Muppet movie,” says “M3GAN” director Gerard Johnstone in a phone interview. He remembers learning about Morot and Tse’s skills in 2019 before the pandemic hit and being convinced by their commitment to lifelike illusion.

“I found that hugely inspiring,” the director says. “I thought, ‘Why are we making something that looks like a toy when these guys can make things that look human? Wouldn’t that be really fun if we went further into the uncanny valley than we’ve ever gone before?’ And Adrien and Kathy were the perfect people to partner up with on that.”

It’s not lost on Morot and Tse that their specialty has come to represent something increasingly rare: an actual craft with an emphasis on real-world tactility in a moment when digital spurts of blood are becoming the norm. Prosthetic makeup effects have become a last stand, a bastion of the old ways.

“This is a massive extinction of the entire movie industry,” Morot says, alarmed. “We’re losing the human process behind it. That’s going to be a tragedy because we’re going to lose the communal experience of movies. We’re already there with all the streaming platforms and YouTube, where people are all on their own, silo- watching. There’s no longer the watercooler discussion about what show is in right now because everybody’s watching their own thing.”

Tse strikes a more pragmatic tone. “I think you have to in a way embrace it,” she says of AI. “Some parts of the industry will unfortunately lose work, but then you’ll have to find your way into another area.”

“M3GAN” and “M3GAN 2.0,” for all their enjoyable sci-fi nuttiness, are expressly about these questions of AI’s prominence. They may be horror movies with training wheels, but they’re also teaching PG-13 audiences to maintain a healthy skepticism about the future. Their lineage goes back to “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the prescient 1970 nightmare “Colossus: The Forbin Project,” about two AIs that take over the world’s nuclear arsenal, a plot that reemerges in “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.”

“The reason I did ‘M3GAN’ was out of frustration as a parent,” says Johnstone. “I was bringing my children up in this age of devices and trying to figure out where the balance lies and seeing everyone around me kind of accept it and thinking, ‘Wait, there’s got to be a middle ground here. Why aren’t schools having a conversation?’ ”

If Morot and Tse end up making AI palatable for a younger generation, with M3GAN as their mascot, they’re at least doing it the old-school way, with tools that inspired them from the start. At the shop, they brought out a mechanical head — the first doll they built (just without the skin). It has a rather large speaking cameo in the new movie: an unsettling scene about rebuilding in an underground bunker and saving the world before it’s too late.

“We were lucky,” Tse says — by which she means, lucky that they saved this prototype for the moment. The glistening jawline and lidless eyes are giving unmistakable Terminator vibes. Morot cradles the head, still that boy dreaming of Fangoria covers.

It’s the kind of thing you hold onto in a secret lab in Valencia.