Weapons is not a good movie

There’s a moment in Weapons when Josh Brolin’s grief-stricken character Archer, during a dream about his disappeared child, has a vision of a giant automatic assault rifle appearing in a storm-cloud above his neighbourhood. While this film’s first-act dream-sequences are otherwise excuses to shoe-horn in jump-scares, this one shot provides the clearest evidence that the film endorses an interpretation that many critics have read into it: It is a horror flick, about a classroom of children who mysteriously disappear, leaving a town shocked and searching for answers, that is really a story about school shootings.

So what does it have to say about school shootings? Honestly, I have no idea. After the story’s progress is strategically delayed by continuously backtracking to show multiple characters’ perspectives (a technique that feels inevitably nineties-indie-coded – like Pulp Fiction, Go, or Magnolia) we finally arrive at our explanation, which is (minor spoiler): A witch did it. What the details of this witch’s arrival in town (she’s apparently a character’s ailing aunt), or motives (apparently she wants an army of zombie kids to augment her power or something?) have to tell us about the causes or responsibilities or meaning or solution of school-shootings, I am at a loss to figure out.

So, should it matter that there’s no clear message to this film?

I didn’t originally want to write about Weapons, the second horror feature written and directed by former comedian Zach Cregger (a founding member of early-Internet sensation The Whitest Kids U Know), whose first go was 2022’s Barbarian. This movie had outsized buzz even before it went to camera – the script occasioned a bidding war so fierce, it led to Jordan Peele firing the managers of his production company when they failed to secure its rights – and the buzz carried over into a rapturous reception upon release this past August, both at the box office and in generally-glowing reviews and commentary. I thought that would die down soon enough, but with it now turning up on end-of-year lists – Sight and Sound just named it their top movie of the year – and in awards-season chatter, it appears that we are far from done with hearing about, and throwing laurels at, Weapons. So, here we are.

You’ve likely encountered the term ‘elevated horror,’ which entered common currency around 2018-2019. It’s become a way to group together various horror titles from the past decade (think of 2014, which saw the releases of It Follows and The Babadook, as Year Zero) that have A24-style cinematography and are openly About Something: usually family trauma or grief, sometimes feminism or racism. The directors most associated with ‘elevated horror’ are what you could call the Big Three: Ari Aster (Midsommar), Robert Eggers (The Witch) and Jordan Peele (Get Out). But, I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know.

Now, I’m not the only one who finds the term ‘elevated horror’ kind of nauseating; it implies that the genre needs elevating, that it’s starting from a debased position. This plays into the stereotype that horror is less-than-cinema, that, like pornography, it exists to simply elicit a reaction, an animal response, and therefore does not inspire contemplation and revelation in the same way as other types of narrative film, which presumably play out at eye-level and therefore require no further elevation to warrant consideration.

Of course, this is horseshit. If anything, horror is the most purely cinematic popular genre of film, because it delves beyond storytelling and recognizable human scenarios, and musters irreal situations, images, and sounds that push past our interpretations and into our nightmares, probing anxieties beyond what can be verbally expressed, or directly experienced in waking life. Horror films that telegraph neat interpretations – The Babadook is about grief, Get Out is about racism – are easily digestible to viewers unused to horror, but this clarity often comes at the expense of the mysterious richness you find in great horror. You can always find ways to interpret horror, like any good art, as being about any number of resonant topics that interest you: Dracula is about the persistence of aristocracy in the modern world, fear of immigration, and sexual insecurity; The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is about the Vietnam War, the cattle industry, and the political abandonment of rural America. But Dracula and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are also simply about Dracula and a chainsaw massacre in Texas: they’re concrete myths in and of themselves that resonate without gesturing outside their world; they don’t have central characters confronting a specific issue that directs the audience how to read the film. Rather, their stories and imagery open onto on a miasmic black pit of fear and fascination that these related topics can help us access, but which topics don’t enclose the full scope of. By contrast, so-called elevated-horror’s penchant for providing a baked-in interpretation can have the unintended consequence of pruning alternate interpretations, which limits rather than widens the scope of the films’ impact.

Now, there are signs the movement is moving beyond this crutch. Robert Eggers, the Big Three director most in thrall to dreamlike visions that insist on existing as themselves, recently provided a version of Nosferatu that, while pretty expressly about sexual-assault and grooming, nonetheless operated as a totalizing nightmare open to diverse interpretations. And Jordan Peele recently outdid anything else in the Big Three’s collective catalogue with his fascinating Nope, in 2022. It’s stuffed with signifiers hinting at possible interpretations, but this time Peele buried the keys, and forced the audience to figure it out themselves, in their own way. The result is a movie that, although cinematically alive with Spielbergian thrills and charms, has the dreamlike quality of a haunting riddle that could mean many things.

Weapons, in contrast, falls on the wrong side of both Get Out and Nope, if you want to compare it (and why not? Peele and Cregger both emerged from the world of sketch comedy before becoming horror auteurs). It neither provides the audience with a clear reading of its meaning as in a solid ‘elevated-horror,’ nor does it evoke the mysterious all-meaning miasma of true horror.

It gestures to a clean interpretation – the giant assault rifle! – but, unlike a crystal-clear text like Get Out, makes no sense when you try to discern what it actually has to say about its apparently-intended subject. Like, yes, we see a town riven by mistrust and division, but is that what causes the kids to disappear? No, the true threat – Amy Madigan’s witch character, Aunt Gladys – was invited by well-meaning parents who trusted a distant relation. Is the message then a conservative one, that we should be suspicious of one another and maintain divisions, lest evil seeps into our communities? That doesn’t strike me as a likely intended reading, and it would seem to be contradicted by the way that Josh Brolin’s Archer needs to overcome his suspicions of outsiders to team up with Julia Garner’s Justine in order to crack the case. The interlocking-narrative structure might seem to want to say something about community and interdependence, but there are too many mixed messages for it to come off as anything but a gimmick distracting us from storylines that are a little boring on their own merits. Like with the motives of Aunt Gladys, it feels near impossible to decrypt any of the text into a clear reading about school-shootings that would justify the use of gun-violence imagery as anything more than an empty prop: Something to score meaningless points with an audience now tricked into thinking the film is About Something.

So, fine, it’s not a strong ‘elevated-horror’ text. But, it’s not ‘true horror,’ a concrete nightmare rich with possible interpretations, either. If there is a strong horror-movie moment in the whole film, it’s a bit where Justine is asleep in a car, and a zombiefied other sneaks in behind her. And that moment is good! But, like the jumps-scares in the dream sequences, it’s simply a cheap gimmick, not a fount of rich, meaningful dread. Because, aside from jump scares and this smidgen of suspense, what are the actual scary horror elements in Weapons? Just that Aunt Gladys has a creepy smile and is old and wears bad makeup? (As a sidenote, Aunt Gladys’ appearance is oddly similar to the villain in Longlegs, played by Nicolas Cage in a sort of awful drag that, if you want to be ungenerous, you could call a kind of nasty trans-face, and it risks feeling similarly puerile-slash-offensive: feminine accoutrements on unattractive aging bodies are spooky, I guess). The delayed-gratification of the chronologically-disjointed structure is also disguising the fact that there’s nothing very scary or interesting about the story at all. Cregger seems to realise this: when he has to summon important moments in this erstwhile horror tale – like when the zombified principal is sent running across town to attack Justine, or when the children turn against Aunt Gladys – he stages these as comedy scenes instead.

The audience is therefore provided with lots of suspense and occasional gags and bits of shock to keep them entertained, but there’s actually not a whole lot of horror going on. The cynical gesturing towards a Big Issue beyond the text, a gimmick stolen from the decaying corpse of ‘elevated-horror,’ tricks us into thinking the material is resonant. And the supernatural elements, combined with the mystery created by avoiding the explanation as long as possible, trick us into associating it with the rich sensations of true horror. But this is all just stringing us along, making us feel like we’re watching something, when really we’re not watching much of anything at all.