By David Ryan.
As a follow-up to Zach Cregger’s horror drama Barbarian (2022), Weapons explores the recursive relationship between personal antagonisms and the erosion of civic trust, staging what Robin Wood identifies as horror’s central tension—the destabilization of the social order….”
With Weapons (2025), writer-director Zach Cregger leans on the themes of separation and grief—particularly the disappearance and exploitation of children—not only to allegorize social and cultural norms but satirize horror conventions. As a work of dramatic commentary on storytelling and filmmaking, Weapons is best interpreted as a quasi-allegorical effort, wherein individual psychodramas reflect broader cultural pathologies.
As a follow-up to his horror drama Barbarian (2022), Weapons explores the recursive relationship between personal antagonisms and the erosion of civic trust, staging what Robin Wood identifies as horror’s central tension—the destabilization of the social order through the irruption of repressed anxieties (Wood 28). In doing so, he contextualizes horror not as a mere spectacle of emotional contagion but as a diagnostic medium through which the necessity of social contracts can be dramatized.
Breaking Away: The Strain of a Social Crisis
Weapons centers on the aftermath of the sudden, early morning disappearances of seventeen elementary school children—all of whom are taught by one third-grade teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner). We are told by the narrator (Scarlett Sher) that at 2:17 a.m., the children rose from their beds and left their homes—running off into the night as if spellbound.
What unfolds is less a mystery than a representation of the social strains of a crisis. As Cregger illustrates the aftermath, parents grapple with their losses, the school becomes ground zero for public concern, and the teacher the focal point of suspicion. This social diffusion of parental fear and communal concern is understandable, and the film connects these contagions from the chaptered viewpoints of a handful of characters, all of which are framed by an unseen narrator at the start and end of the film.
This segmented approach serves the story well enough, offering a clear structure that both reveals character connections and illustrates the diffusion of suspicion and fear. The teacher accounts for the first chapter, and we learn how this crisis disrupts the natural ebb of her life; the second belongs to her initial antagonist, Archer (Josh Brolin), a father who doggedly works to find his missing son. The other viewpoints involve a troubled police officer Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a married man entangled romantically with Gandy; a self-marginalized addict and thief James (Austin Abrams), who runs afoul of Paul more than once; and a separate duo of the principal (Benedict Wong) and Alex (Cary Christopher), the remaining student from Gandy’s class.
In his more serious moments, Cregger deftly reveals how his characters inhabit overlapping social networks composed of intersecting sets and subsets, illustrating how emotional contagions spread across these networks. As the chapters progress, they visually dovetail and thematically interlock, and Cregger underscores how the chapters are distinct because each character resolves into different experiences.
To satirize his horror story, Cregger deftly uses many ironies. For example, the familiar narrative choice of retelling key events from different viewpoints not only serves dramatic irony but also highlights the privilege audiences have in knowing more than the characters. This repetition is iterative and illustrates how the disappearances impact each character; it also serves thematic points, one of which is Cregger’s own commentary on the theme of narrative frequency.
As viewers, not only do we see certain scenes retold, we repeatedly hear a comically delivered curse vocalized at key moments by different characters in their separate chapters (a phrase that punctuates situational irony for them); further, Cregger satirizes his own use of an often seen character in horror films (the antagonist’s archetypal name is graffitied on the teacher’s car, and the vehicle pops in and out of different chapters); and the frequently alluded to evidence (children running in the night, among others) abundantly points to who is responsible for their disappearances (simple to discern, just follow Occam’s Razor).
This kind of repetition functions as narrative mirroring, where recurring patterns and themes in horror storytelling reinforce audience expectations. From a mimetic standpoint, repetition reflects a core mode of learning and cultural transmission—especially in children, who internalize patterns, behaviors, and values through the repeated retelling of familiar tales, so again and again, children want stories retold because they seek the repeated pleasures from learning.
In this context, Cregger’s use of repetition implies that adult horror audiences engage with genre conventions in ways that are cognitively similar to a child’s learning—deriving satisfaction from the comfort of predictability and the recognition of the propriety of established narrative patterns—patterns that are handled poorly in the deluge of feeble and forgettable chiller thrillers (Clown in a Cornfield 2025, Heretic 2024, Longlegs 2025, Presence 2025, Wait Until Dawn 2025) but handled well here because though Cregger understands that recognizing sameness often brings pleasure, he also understands that what also brings pleasure are the variations and deviations that induce learning about differences.
More pointedly, Cregger grounds his satire in a set of stable horror ironies—shared, ritualized understandings (cliches, too) between storyteller and audience about the genre, such as: the setting of a smaller-town steeped in local norms, the belief that dreams yield important clues, and the ironclad rule to never enter a basement alone. Rather than lean on these conventions as stale stand-ins for suspense, Cregger satirizes not just the tropes but the unimaginative ways other filmmakers lean on them.
Trust, Security, and Moral Language
More interesting is how Cregger focuses on illustrating moral language within a framework of authority and consent. For example, his first effort Barbarian examines issues of trust and security among adult strangers in a world of disinvestment and decay. But there is more to the film than the criminal serialists lurking in the subterranean shambles of suburban Detroit looking for their next victims. Rather, the film focuses smartly on illustrating its primary theme, one where certain people have either lost the capacity to comprehend morality or never really possessed the competence to do so. We see these privations in the characters of The Mother (Matthew Patrick Davis) and AJ (Justin Long)—not to mention the barbaric serialist in Frank (Richard Brake).
Barbarian also focuses on how the exchange for security plays out in a world where the collective will is governed by a failing central authority. What Creggar creates is a beastly character of maternal instincts who learns behaviorally from lactation videos and from the incestuous practices of her serialist father. The result is that The Mother lacks not only a cultural framework and moral language to relate to her victims, but Creggar focuses on the conflictive differences between her and the more civilized virtue of the heroine Tess (Georgina Campbell).
In this conflict, Barbarian (2022) explores the breakdown of the social contract when individuals cannot rely on society for safety or truth, but they must rely on their own behavior, moral judgements, and cultural resolve. For example, Tess’s decision to trust the slightly off but decent stranger (Bill Skarsgård)—in a tricky context that tests the agreements of mutual respect and civility—turns out to be correct (as far as the film lets us surmise).
What is problematic for the characters is that the setting of the short-term rental poses significant dangers because the property is a trap. As the film descends into horror, it reveals how institutions—law enforcement, housing systems, community oversight—fail to uphold their end of the contract, leaving individuals to their own situationally improvised ethical systems to navigate danger. Ultimately, Barbarian critiques a society that abandons its civic duty to protect its cultures and peoples, showing that without trust and accountability, both the social order and human decency weaken, and these cumulative problems give cover to incestuous criminality.
In Weapons, the antagonist gains cover through her arrival at the home of distant relatives who are unsure of their exact connection to her. Their weak ties to extended family make them vulnerable, and their unquestioned duty to shelter a sick relative is exploited by their witchy occupier who enslaves Alex’s parents and coerces him to serve her plans. This weakness in family bonds is seen not only Gandy but in Archer who yearns to reconnect with his young son, the dislocated James, who camps in the woods, and the unfaithful Officer Paul.
Social, Moral, and Legal: the Proportionality of Contracts
The morality of social contracts has been a part of kidnapping tales since early antiquity, but the mass disappearance of children is often traced to the Pied Piper of Hamelin, a tale of a rat-infested German town that hires a mysterious stranger to resolve the infestation. The stranger agrees for a fee and lures (by sonic trance) the rodents out of town. Thereafter, the town breaks the contract, and in an act of disproportionate, retributive justice, the piper uses his tuneful flute to traffic the children out of the village—never to be seen again (save for one in Robert Browning’s version; the piper inadvertently leaves behind a “lame” footed child).
In this tale, the pied piper’s sense of justice is quite different than the problematic values of the town, and his revenge sends messages about the cause and effect between breaking your word (as contract) and dealing with totalizing losses. This disproportionality is at play in Weapons—where our inherent biases sympathize more with the captive kids and their families than with the life of the one witch who exploits them to nourish her longevity. Cregger underscores the thematic binary between innocence and exploitive criminality, and he knows that his audience doesn’t have to live in Central California to understand that innocent schoolchildren (and a bus driver) are worth more than the lives of the three gunmen who kidnapped and buried 26 children in a truck trailer for two days in 1976. Cregger presses on our innate sense to value and protect children and disdain those who exploit and harm them.
But rather than create a more complicated narrative by suggesting that the personal problems of the Maybrook characters made the kids more vulnerable to the witch, Cregger opts to rely on a simpler explanation by making the predatorially invasive villain a character whose probable ontology, knowledge-base, moral language, and agency are different (and more powerful) than the community (except for one other character).
Unfortunately, not enough is known about the witch (Amy Madigan) to understand her motivations beyond her self-serving malevolence. For instance, is she a supernatural being or is she human? Both? No doubt, her visit uncovers Alex’s hidden powers, for he is kin (her grand nephew, as we are told), and he manages to use her tools to counter her actions, but can non-kin use this knowledge, too?
On this storytelling level, the film suffers from a series of drawbacks. For example, the detective work that Archer and Gandy use to deduce the proximal location of the children strikes as commonplace detective work, so the fact that the police and FBI haven’t used this mapping method frames them dimwittedly (police failures are an important part of Cregger’s stories). Second, though Ring videos factor into Archer and Gandy’s ad hoc footwork, the fact that others have not offered their videos of the children trampling their lawns or running on their streets on a Next Door style of app omits how technology contributes to the virality of contagions—nor does this factor speak to how national media would be swarming the streets of Maybrook (they really don’t).
Third, though each storytelling character seems to engage in acts of self-harm (alcoholism, infidelity, drug use, etc.), the one character who appears to be steadfast is the principal. In his domestic life, he is shown to be in a stable, softly regimented relationship with his partner—an obvious point of satirical contrast to the norms of suburban Maybrook (not quite Mayberry), but the gratuitous manner in which the bewitched principal kills his partner doesn’t strike as satire. It seems oddly mean-spirited on Cregger’s part. However, considering the witch’s values, because the principal’s domestic life has little chance of creating children she can conceivably exploit, her spell may be especially cruel here.
Further, in one pivotal scene when Alex finishes stealing key items in view of Gandy, the fact that she fails to register this theft is improbable (not to mention poorly shot and edited). And what of the narrator? The one obvious focalization is that she opens and closes the film as a digressive part of her autobiography. In essence, although we are captive to her storytelling, Cregger couches this youngster in the realm of innocence, so she does not offer too many insights into the chaptered actions of the characters. Though using this child narrator seems like storytelling as an act of cultural play (the inverse of when adults tell children’s stories), Cregger uses this brief narration as a structural irony, where the storyteller knows little about the chapters because she appears to be retelling what she’s heard—gaining some cultural competence by telling this horror story to us.
Finally, the film earns its title not by the witch’s actions but by Alex’s spell that turns his classmates into witch-seeking missiles that track and consume the wicked hag (yes, an actual witch hunt). Thankfully, the witch doesn’t thrive on her wounds, so she perishes. Though there doesn’t seem to be any love between Alex and his mates (he seems to have been frequently bullied), her unsettling end tells us a few things: first, that Weapons follows the often-repeated archetypal inversion of Gretel pushing the Cannibal Witch into the oven and Jack cutting the Beanstalk, all taking down the villains to achieve cyclical justice.
Second, Weapons is different because the children’s innocence turns into devourment via Alex’s actions. Unlike Gretel and Jack, the children have no agency. They are spellbound weapons who serve Alex’s resistance. Third, Alex’s totalizing attack seems less redemptive and more of an authoritarian turn to combat a totalitarian force—a seemingly understandable choice based on the film’s terms. But perhaps Cregger is having more fun here, in that his ironically framed, satirical vision portrays mainstream horror audiences as entranced children bewitched by genre conventions, willing to devour any horror media—even oft-repeated tales of a witch wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting community.
The Social Contract of Films
Cregger’s two films—uneven, satirical, and jagged as they are—are efforts in search of an answer to the question: what is the relationship between storytelling and films? For Cregger, films are fertile, active sites where stories are created, told, and retold. Though films often are a creative assemblage of existing stories composed by storytellers, shaped by cultural codes, and focused on meeting audience expectations, films are also a performance of these constructs.
For Cregger, films are less a vessel for stories than a stage where cultures rehearse and revise its own narratives in dialogue with its audiences. This dynamic reflects a kind of social contract: one where filmmakers create new stories within recognizable conventions, and audiences gain pleasure by interpreting, affirming, or resisting these narratives. Ultimately, his films remind us that effective cinematic storytelling always challenges form and content, continually unfolding within the rhetorical tension between invention, repetition, and reinvention.
References
Browning, Robert. “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. May 8, 2006.
Wood, Robin. “Return of the Repressed.” Film Comment, July-August, 1978, pp. 25-32.
David Ryan is Academic Director and Faculty Chair of the Master of Arts in Professional Communication at the University of San Francisco. He’s published widely on rhetoric and film studies and is the co-editor of David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation (FDU Press, 2022).