'Weapons' is Scary, Goofy, Gory, and Wildly Effective
Zach Cregger's follow-up to 'Barbarian' is more confident and coherent without sacrificing his offbeat charm. Who needs to "elevate" horror when you can just do it really well?
Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the late aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.
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Quick Plug: A Premature Eulogy for Howard Stern’s Satellite Show
News broke this week that SiriusXM might not renew Howard Stern’s contract. In light of that, I wrote a premature eulogy for Howard Stern on satellite for GQ. I tried to explain why I spent my formative years as a religious listener (Eric the Actor, Crazy Alice, Richard and Sal’s Prank Calls, etc) and why Stern aging into a centrist cat-dad is perhaps a surprising trajectory, but in light of the alternatives possible the best we could’ve hoped for.
‘Weapons’ (2025)
There are essentially two components to every horror movie: “something weird is happening here” and “getting to the bottom of the weird thing happening here.” The first part is easier delivered than the second, but a lot of horror movies don’t even make it that far. Extra credit to any horror premise that doesn’t involve a haunted house, creepy little kids, demonic possession, or scary clowns. (True, sometimes a compellingly weird thing is happening in the first two acts of a horror movie, only to reveal that it was actually demonic possession or a creepy clown all along—see: Longlegs, which set a mood beautifully even though it ultimately ended up being about… demonic possession, an evil clown, and creepy little kids1, the full horror film trifecta!).
Even horror movies that set a mood and tease you enough to care can fall apart when it comes time to start revealing secrets. And sometimes the weird thing happening is so compelling, and the explanation so successfully delayed, that we don’t even mind an incoherent or unsatisfying denouement. Steven King has made a career out of such stories, even poking fun at his own bad endings himself (in IT: Chapter Two King cameos as a bookstore owner who says his own stand-in character can’t write good endings).
Likewise, Zach Cregger’s 2022 horror debut Barbarian was so offbeat, so unexpected, so bold and visually well-crafted that it managed to be memorable without entirely holding together as a coherent movie. Just being able to make a jaded audience say “wtf?” for 70 or 80 minutes counts for a lot.
If Barbarian was a nice tease that there might be a new talent working in the horror genre, Weapons is the confirmation, a more focused and satisfying yarn that manages to retain the balls-out charm of its predecessor. Written and directed by Cregger, who got his start as part of the Whitest Kids U’ Know comedy troupe, Weapons is yet more evidence for my theory that comedy guys should direct all the horror movies and horror guys should direct all the superhero movies.
An unseen child narrates Weapons’ opening scene, explaining that one day, all but one of the kids in Ms. Gandy’s third grade class just vanished. Various Ring cameras around town recorded them the night before (thank you, Mr. Bezos for this plot device), abruptly fleeing their beds and out their doors en masse at exactly 2:17 am, their plump little arms spread wide in an identical, paper-crane-like postures with faraway looks on their faces, as if running towards something with a purpose. (Does that make Weapons technically a creepy-little-kid movie? Possibly).
The rub is that the whole town of Maybrook, PA is now living uneasily in the aftermath of this mass traumatic event. Weapons probably owes a debt to The Leftovers for this up-and-vanished plot device, though to its credit I didn’t think of the parallel until I sat down to write the review. And anyway, Cregger could do a lot worse than borrowing from one of the best TV shows of the last 15 years. In any case, no one in town knows quite what happened and they’re all thinking magically, conspiratorially, suspiciously—especially about the teacher whose whole class vanished, Justine Gandy, played by Ozark’s ramen-headed anti-ingenue, Julia Garner.
Other characters in the drama include Justine’s supportive-but-world-weary gay boss, played by Benedict Wong; her luxuriously mustachio’d cop ex-boyfriend Paul (Alden Ehrenreich); an angry dad who is convinced Justine has something to hide, played by Josh Brolin; Alex (Cary Christopher), the only little boy in Justine’s class who didn’t disappear; and the town’s Wile-E-Coyote-esque crackhead vagrant, James, played by Austin Abrams, who is currently in a dead heat with Clifton Collins Jr. in Eddington for the year’s most memorable portrayal of a homeless guy (Abrams’ character being funnier than Collins’, if less haunting).
