This entire article is a spoiler of “Weapons.”
“Weapons,” the new horror movie from the writer-director Zach Cregger, is chockablock with talismans, assassins, spells and speed racing humans-turned-hell hounds. What does it all mean?
A quick recap: “Weapons” examines what happens in an American town after all but one child in a grade school class disappears overnight, leaving behind the kids’ bewildered teacher, Justine, (Julia Garner), the surviving student, Alex (Cary Christopher), and the despairing parents of the missing, including Archer (Josh Brolin). Amid the chaos enters Gladys (Amy Madigan), a witch with a nefarious plan.
Discussing Cregger in her review of “Weapons,” Manohla Dargis wrote, “He has a talent for both creating and maintaining an ominous mood, deploying a classic approach to freaking out audiences by suggesting the very worst (things seem bad!) and delaying the reveal (they are!)”
Cregger declined an interview request to talk about spoilers from his film, so let’s take a swing at theorizing what might have inspired him.
Time Crawl
Cregger patiently paces his scares and revelations, as he did in “Barbarian (2022),” which built dread by plucking nerve after nerve before its harrowing what’s-in-the-basement reveal.
In “Weapons,” Cregger is equally patient with timing. But he’s deliberate about time — a time, actually. The only clues to what happened to the kids come from camera footage of all 17 of them individually running from their houses starting at 2:17 a.m., their destination a mystery until they reappear, still and menacing, in a darkened basement. (Long live the Cregger Basement!)
A set time as a signal of doom has a long tradition in horror, from the “Four O’Clock” episode of “The Twilight Zone” to the 1980 slasher film “New Year’s Evil.” But why 17 kids? Why 2:17 a.m., other than it being prime time for a witch to beckon prey? Not even Cregger seems to know. “It just had to be some time,” he told an interviewer.
The Witch
Cregger weaves his characters into a story about collective trauma and communal mourning that’s so sprawling it would make Paul Thomas Anderson shout amen. As the threads unravel, we learn that it’s Gladys who summoned the kids, storing them in the dark to feast on their youth. At one point we see Gladys nearly drained of life, her sagging face framed by sickly hair like that of the title woman in “The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch,” Noriaki Yuasa’s 1968 dark fairy tale.
With Madigan’s character, Cregger called on the hag version of the pop culture witch — more “Rosemary’s Baby” Ruth Gordon, less “Wicked” Ariana Grande. Gladys looks like the gorgon love child of Bozo the Clown and the Wendy’s logo, and dresses as if she shops the ’70s aisles at vintage stores, decked out in “Electric Company” colors and wearing a severely parted copper red wig.
Gladys’s style makes sense: If she’s an ancient sorceress who’s resurfaced in a modern America, she’d want to blend in with age-appropriate clothing. But she fails, spectacularly, a compliment to the craftiness of the costume designer Trish Summerville.
Conjuring in Overdrive
Spells are typical movie witch stuff. But Gladys doesn’t do long-game spell work, like that of the weird sisters in “Macbeth.” Once she snaps a twig entwined with hair, Gladys instantly turns her victims into bellicose assassins under her command. Unlike Justine, Gladys is a woman with the power to resolve threats and uncertainty by obliterating their source.
One of the film’s most skin-crawling scenes happens when she forces Alex to watch his parents suddenly pierce their faces with forks, like they’re feverishly cooling off Hot Pockets.
Another victim is Marcus (Benedict Wong), the milquetoast school principal. In a jaw-dropping scene, Justine spots Marcus careering from afar before he pounces on her, the blood across his cheeks and his fright-wig hair giving him the look of a drag queen on the losing end of a bar fight.
Cregger’s crackerjack makeup team makes dime store gore look terrifying, reminiscent of the racoon-eyed kiddos who spooked “Here Comes the Devil (2013),” Adrián García Bogliano’s weirdo possession film.
When the kids finally get freed from Gladys’s clutch, they take revenge by bursting through windows, speed-racing across landscaped yards and descending on her with flesh-ripping force — a Lunchables-age mirror of the young mob that attacked and devoured poor Sebastian Venable in “Suddenly, Last Summer.”
Arms Runners
Horror movies aren’t exactly known for having defined movement vocabularies. But don’t be surprised if this Halloween you see horror geeks booking around with their arms outstretched the way the kids do in “Weapons.” It’s an odd juxtaposition of form and speed — as if the zombies of “28 Days Later” studied Merce Cunningham’s “Beach Birds” — making it a singular and signature motif.
Maybe Cregger emphasized arms in this formation not just because it looked cool but because he wanted to underscore more dangerous arms, like the giant rifle that Archer sees floating over a house in a dream. When Justine finds her classroom devoid of life, it’s a chilling tableau, an aftermath of what weapons can do.
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