2025 has seen a number of rather facile attempts to suggest the problem with modern horror is it has too much to say about modern life, and – to coin Clarisse Loughrey’s particularly ham-fisted phrase – leave audiences feel like they’ve been “bonked on the head by the metaphor hammer”. But after the jump scares and the superficial stuff fades away, the metaphoric ways the horror touches on our lived reality are the source of the most potent terror of all – as Zach Cregger’s Weapons shows.
Weapons is one of my unexpected hits of the year. Not so much because I knew anything about it before I watched it, or had bothered to read about its box-office takings or critical receptions. More because the first place I saw it marketed was a WWE event – somewhere experience has taught me that only the worst of the worst will be promoted.
In the weeks that followed, however, it turned out to be one of those classic examples of why horror endures as a force in Hollywood. A smaller-than-average budget yielded a titanic theatrical return, while writer-director Zach Cregger managed to touch on all kinds of potentially inflammatory topics, without losing mass appeal (though whether he manages that feat with Resident Evil still seems unlikely).
When I finally got round to viewing the film, I had been subjected to large amounts of hype from critics and my friendship circles. That typically poisons me against a film – I feel like I am being imposed upon – especially when I have a tonne of films in my inbox which I need to review for Indy Film Library anyway. The fact that I unequivocally enjoyed Weapons in spite of this speaks to its qualities.
The reason I am writing about it at all, though, is not to give another glowing review – its legacy is firmly secured without my ten cents. Rather, I am interested in how it has been crammed into a certain ongoing debate around horror, and metaphor.
Horror films don’t scare us anymore is an article rewritten by a different hack every five years or so – with the conclusions as to why hastily drawing together variants around any particular combination of: formulaic films mean many of the stories we see in the mainstream are recycled; real life is now scarier than these movies; and most irritatingly, horror movies have become too concerned with metaphor and making topical statements.
In some quarters, Weapons has been held up as an example of horror which can still be scary because it bucks these trends. In particular, the third. After all, Cregger did tell a podcaster Jesse Hassenger that Weapons wasn’t an explicit metaphor about school shootings – something that led Hassenger to gush that it is “hard to fault Cregger for making a horror movie that is more concerned with its own scary, twisty immediacy than its optics as a social critique.”
There is a degree of naïveté about taking Cregger’s statement at face value here. As someone looking to continue working in Hollywood, at a time when the studios commissioning him are happily bending the knee to an authoritarian White House that does not take criticism well, keeping your cards close to your chest is probably not a bad idea. But beyond those practicalities, it also feels like there is an underestimation of what makes the film scary.
In the short-term sense, obviously there are lots of things which make the film frightening in a traditional, conventional sense. A couple of well-placed jump-scares, some black-eyed-children, a woman who may or may not be in clown makeup turning up in places you wouldn’t expect. And watching Weapons alone in a dark house, these were extremely effective in my case. Particularly when one of my cats decided to jump out from behind the TV stand.
But those aren’t really the things that kept me thinking about the film, which caused me to anxiously think back on what I had seen weeks after the final credits rolled. They were fun for a bit of roller-coaster adrenaline. But that inevitably fades away in the end.
The thing that genuinely left me feeling panicked, was the story’s knack of playing with the real state of public discussion – and parenthood – in and outside the US. The standout scene being the parent-teacher meeting held to discuss the mass disappearance of children at the heart of everything.
The film rotates whose perspective we witness events from – the first being teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), after 17 out of 18 kids in her class just wandered into the night, never to be seen again. Justine is visibly shaken by the events as she tries to address the meeting – but proceedings rapidly descend into chaos, as one of the parents, Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), belligerently shouts her down, convinced that she must know something.
The scene places us in the shoes of a scapegoat, someone whose characteristics have predestined her to become the focal point of any irresolvable social rift. There could be a million things the mob fixates on as the police fail to get to the bottom of the crime (which it turns out doesn’t really even require much sleuthing to solve) – but the one they pick just happens to be a young, single woman who works as an educator. The idea that this doesn’t invoke the dreaded m-word – and serve as a metaphor for a society (in North America and Europe particularly) where the failure of the state to address the harmful contradictions of capital, have led to a witch-hunt for people like Justine – is blinkered in the maximum.
In the US, in Britain, in the Netherlands, I have witnessed this process time and again. It was at play three years ago, when in my review of ParaNorman, I mentioned the recriminations of a ‘Satanic’ mural at a Michigan school that parents took exception to over its LGBT+ representation. It was at play when parents in the Netherlands were suckered in by an ultra-conservative Catholic campaign that painted an institute working to improve sex education at schools as paedophiles. And it remains at play every time the English far-right mobilises against attempts by drag story time events to boost literacy and inclusivity for children.
This is not the only way in which Weapons supplies us with lasting anxieties, though. It is not just about putting us in the nightmarish shoes of someone who has been arbitrarily blamed for something they didn’t do. Like the best of Romero’s Dead series, the horror isn’t only in the being chased or destroyed; it is also in the acknowledgement that to some extent, we are already infected with the potential to become the pursuer. The shambling undead, relentlessly in search of something to chew and consume without any sense of control or personality. Or here, the formerly loving family man, transformed into an agent of irrational hatred.
When the perspective shifts from Justine, to Archer, we get a glimpse of a fate that has befallen many before him, and could still befall us. Here is an intelligent individual, accomplished in his particular line of work, whose mind simply cannot cope when horrific events he might have been able to ignore outside his own household, manifest in the sacred space of the home. It is telling that Archer is someone who builds houses – the ultimate overseer of the American dream, and the belief that private property enshrines the rights and freedoms of the individuals who own it.
When his four walls do nothing to protect his son, Matthew, Archer’s ideological foundations are rocked to their very core – and he collapses into flailing recriminations. In economies across the West, this is the reality every parent now faces: the things they have been told would safeguard their future – the things which make them and their progeny worthy in the eyes of god, capital or both – are falling apart. While health systems have been marketised, and social care have become a private fiefdom for slumlords and crooks, that house that was supposed to support your kids will more likely end up paying for your shambolic stay in a care home. Should your kids become sick or unemployed after that, they’re on their own. In the void, and in a society where any genuine answers about reorienting the economy around compassion and human need have been strangled, all that remains is the insane and inane world of right-wing conspiracy.
Weapons is still a conventional narrative in many respects, and so Archer gets an arc where he sees some of the error of his ways. But the fact remains, we have seen just how easily any one of us – even the strongest and most established in our current economic and social order – can go off the deep end, and completely lose sight of whatever loving, compassionate individual we used to be. In a post-Qanon world, Weapons is surely delivering metaphors that go far beyond the simple or primal horror that some of its supporters cite as buoying its success. The metaphor is not about school shootings, that much is true. It is a far more pervasive, systemic nightmare which it delivers.
There are real things hidden in Weapons, driving a fear that lingers. Without being addressed directly in a literal manner, they lurk and they wait for our minds to wander – to dwell in their shadowy corners, and feel their influence encroaching into our daily lives. That is the very essence of metaphor in horror.