Not one. Not two. Not even three. But SEVENTEEN total children, all from the same class, suddenly go missing on the same night at the same time. All but one child. You can’t help but wonder: Why?
This is the premise of Weapons, a horror-mystery film written and produced by Zach Cregger, released earlier this year. I watched this movie with some friends a couple of months ago in theatres, and although it wasn’t the scariest horror movie I’ve seen, it’s definitely up there with one of the most confusing I have witnessed. It’s one of those movies you watch with an eyebrow raised the whole way through.
Here’s my take:
I initially heard about this movie through TikTok. I’ll admit, the thing that intrigued me the most was the eerie advertising the marketing team put out for this movie. Clips were circulating of kids running down a dark, empty street, their arms spread out in a T-pose, with absolutely no audio. They were expressionless, running as if they were programmed to do so. If this itself wasn’t creepy enough, Warner Bros Media Corporation created an entire in-universe news website specifically designed to report on the 17 missing children in the town of Maybrook. The website was named MaybrookMissing.com, and it pictured fictional news reports of the case and even hinted at a subtle connection to the horror film, Barbarian, also written by Zack Cregger.
When I finally got to watch the movie, I was a bit underwhelmed and slightly confused. The whole premise of the movie is that there’s this mass disappearance of children, all from the same classroom, and the community can’t help but be suspicious of the teacher in charge of the classroom. They are especially suspicious of the only child that did not go missing. It is later revealed that this kid is the sole reason the other children went missing. His benevolent aunt, Gladys (Amy Madigan)—a witchy woman with strange voodoo-esque abilities that allow her to control the children and weaponize them for violence whenever she pleases—was the one pulling the strings. All the missing children are hidden in her basement, under her trance, until she decides they should attack. If it wasn’t obvious, the movie is centred around abuse—an immoral case of older generations weaponizing children for their own benefit. Fear and manipulation are utilized by Gladys to silence her victims and make them bend to her whims. This can be seen with both Alex (Cary Christopher) and the hypnotized kids from his classroom. No matter how you look at it, she took advantage of both parties: Alex, by threatening the livelihood of his hypnotized parents, making them stab themselves with forks if he didn’t do what she says, and the missing children, all of whom she put under a spell against their will. This is a powerful metaphor, but honestly, they could have used it more effectively. The movie came off more satirical than scary. I believe the main reason for that was the undeniably silly way the kids (and weaponized adults) ran with their arms spread out like a bird, the random explicit scene with the teacher and the cop (coupled with the cop’s messy marriage), and the cheery music for some of the tense scenes. Overall, it’s not a bad movie by any means. But I think they could have done more with the “children being weaponized” concept, when looking at it from a traditional horror lenses.
