“I think [horror] is one of the few theatrical avenues right now where you can be surprised,” writer-director Zach Cregger said in an interview about his new mystery-horror film, Weapons. Because horror budgets typically run small, filmmakers have freer rein to play with the form. Cregger’s sophomore effort, even more so than his hit debut, Barbarian (2022), takes joyous advantage of that freedom. The risks were justified: Weapons grossed $43 million on its opening weekend, and makes contrarian points about “monstrous” female power that evoke theorist Camille Paglia.
Set in the fictional small town of Maybrook, Pa., Weapons opens with 17 children from the same third grade classroom running away from their homes at precisely 2:17 a.m., and vanishing into the night. The next morning, teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) is startled to find only one student, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), in her classroom. The story then unfolds in nonlinear, overlapping vignettes, a structure Cregger patterned after Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999).
The first vignette belongs to Justine. An angular, frizzy-headed woman in her early 3os, Justine has a history of professional misconduct (hugging a student—gasp), alcoholism, and promiscuity — making her an easy target for a grief-wracked community desperate for answers. The townspeople’s suspicions send her into a booze-fueled spiral of paranoia and depression. Partly because she loves her students, and partly to avoid being scapegoated, Justine sets out to unravel the mystery.
Her persecution intensifies when an unknown harasser beats on her door at night and paints “WITCH” in red on her car. This is clever misdirection: Cregger elicits our sympathy for a wrongly maligned woman so we will prematurely discount the possibility that an actual witch is behind the children’s disappearance. The real threat emerges when Justine fixes upon Alex, the sole remaining third-grader, as the likeliest source of information. Snooping around his house, she spies Alex’s parents through a crack in the newspaper-plastered windows. They’re sitting on the couch, catatonic, the home in disarray.
Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) is on his own quest to save his son, Matthew, one of the missing children. At first, he suspects Justine (it was Archer, we learn, who vandalized her car), but circumstances compel the two to join forces, and they become the emotional heart of the story. Archer confirms Justine’s suspicions when he learns from home CCTV footage that all the children ran from their front doors in a straight line, converging on Alex’s house.
Vignettes foregrounding other characters bring us nearer to the truth. A homeless tweaker named James (Austin Abrams), spars hilariously with Justine’s policeman ex-boyfriend Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich). A plotline centered on Maybrook Elementary School’s principal, Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong), is alternately amusing and terrifying. It’s James, while burglarizing the Lilly home, who is the first to lay eyes on the children: locked in the basement, catatonic like Alex’s parents.
Finally, Alex’s vignette gives it to us in full: his gravely ill great-aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), who had come to stay with the Lillys, presumably to die, turns out to be a witch who uses blood magic to take over her victims’ bodies and feed on their life force. When Alex’s parents prove too paltry a meal, Gladys forces him to retrieve personal items from each of his classmates. With these she performs a ritual giving her control over the children, and summons them to the Lilly home at 2:17a.m.
Cregger’s writing is magnificent. Each successive vignette scratches our itching questions in unexpected ways, illuminating ambiguities of character and situation, the narrative pace accelerating as the gestalt comes into focus. Allusions to Stephen King tease where the plot is headed and clue us in to its meaning. Gladys appears in Justine’s and Archer’s nightmares in garish makeup reminiscent of It’s Pennywise the Dancing Clown, perhaps the most famous contemporary devourer of children. “2:17” recalls Room 217 of the Overlook Hotel, wherein young Danny is assaulted by a rotting crone who attempts to absorb his life force (Stanley Kubrick, in his movie adaptation, changed the room number to 237). Justine’s alcoholism also evokes The Shining, as does a scene when Alex’s rampaging parents poke their heads through holes in a bathroom door.
“Gladys … rather transparently represents the monstrous feminine.”
Some viewers, primed to look for progressive undercurrents by Barbarian’s portrayal of a #MeToo abuser getting his comeuppance, will be tempted to read Weapons as a school-shooting metaphor. At first blush, this is a plausible interpretation. School shootings are the nearest real-life analogue to the disappearance of a classroom of kids, and parents are as powerless against them as the parents in Maybrook. Even the kids’ body-language while running—arms outstretched like the “napalm girl”—recalls the suffering modern weapons inflict on children. During a nightmare, Archer sees a colossal AR-15 suspended like a dark beacon over his home, “2:17” glowing on its barrel like numbers on a digital clock. Is this meant to evoke the weapon favored by school shooters?
A more nuanced reading, one that gives proper weight to Gladys’s characterization, however, shows school shooting to be a thematic red herring, overshadowed by another theme from Barbarian: the monstrous feminine.
Camille Paglia famously reads the history of Western culture through the opposition of Apollo and Dionysus. The masculine Apollonian principle, with its love of mathematical reason and lucid distinctions, seeks to tame the feminine Dionysian, the fecund undifferentiation from which all life springs and, inevitably, returns. Paglia has written: “What the West represses in its view of nature is the chthonian, which means ‘of the earth’—but earth’s bowels, not its surface.” The symbol of the Dionysian (or chthonian) is the Great Mother, a primordial figure of myth who births her children only to devour them. She recurs in myths in various forms, some emphasizing her nurturing qualities, others her role as devourer. The lamiae of Greek mythology embody the latter aspect: ancient succubi who subsist on the blood of children, often depicted as women from the waist up, serpents from the waist down.
While the unjust persecution of Justine may warn us against scapegoating women, Gladys’s demonic ministrations scream that sometimes witches are real, and women can sometimes be culpable.
Gladys, wan and grotesquely aged, rather transparently represents the monstrous feminine, and even its more particular instantiation in the lamia. She derives her magic from a potted tree covered in thorns. In a nightmare, Justine catches Gladys on her ceiling. Only her torso is visible, her legs obscured as if buried in soil—like the roots of a tree or the tail of a snake. Her legs are hidden in the same manner when she appears to James in the forest. Underneath her clownishly red wig, her real hair consists of sparse, snake-like braids. (As Paglia has written, “Medusa’s snaky hair is also the writhing vegetable growth of nature.”) Gladys’s use of archaic language (she tells Principal Miller that Alex’s parents are sick with “consumption”) alludes to her being ancient. Then there’s her lair: the front door of the Lillys’ house opens on a beckoning darkness, an orifice descending into the earth.
Instead of serving as a reference to school shootings, the long rifle in the film is an Apollonian instrument, a symbolic phallus that kills. By contrast, Gladys kills by absorbing her victims’ life force, or by influencing others to kill on her behalf. Even the zombified state of her victims speaks to the horror of the chthonian, which, per Paglia, “we must block from consciousness to retain our Apollonian integrity as persons.”
It is precisely her chthonian character that makes Gladys so terrifying. Civilization is built on a swamp and might at any moment be subsumed. The Apollonian is powerless before the full force of the chthonian. The ubiquitous Ring cameras installed on Maybrook homes were parents’ attempt to keep the children safe, to control the uncontrollable; but technology cannot save us from primal forces. Archer, a construction manager who, in proper Apollonian fashion, tries to make sense of the mystery by plotting the children’s trajectories on a map, is in the end powerless before Gladys.
It is only when Alex extracts a hair from inside Gladys’s wig and harnesses her blood magic against her, that the good guys triumph. But it is a triumph not of the Apollonian, but of the chthonian against the chthonian: in a scene that recalls Pentheus’s dismemberment by the Maenads in Euripides’s The Bacchae, Gladys is torn limb from limb by the children formerly under her power.
The monstrous feminine is experiencing something of a revival lately, suggesting a rebellion against the ongoing domination of culture by feminist sensibilities. Films like The VVitch, Raw, Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid, Titane, Pearl, and The Substance are refreshingly reactionary, attesting that female agency has its dark side, that women are capable of astonishing violence against others, and against themselves. “The rise of rational, technological woman may demand the repression of unpleasant, archetypal realities,” Paglia wrote in Sexual Personae. The repressed, of course, has a habit of returning. In Weapons it returns with mythic, lyric eloquence.
