Beware of Darkness: Zach Cregger’s “Weapons”
Film Review ★ Leanna Hubers ★ @leannagirly ★ 4 Minutes
When the screen fades in, George Harrison’s Beware of Darkness plays through the opening sequence, instantly setting a mood of dread as children leave their homes and run through the darkness. It’s a nod to the fragile border between innocence and corruption that Zach Cregger creates through Weapons.
Stills from Weapons 2025
Character Breakdown & Their Importance
Rather than heroes, Cregger's cast embodies the misery and guilt of corruption in everyday life.
• Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) — An elementary school teacher who wakes to find her whole class vanished, except for one. Her breakdown at the school assembly shows how society’s grief targets individuals, often unfairly.
• Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) — A grieving father whose son Matthew is missing. He embodies collective anger and desperation, lashing out at Justine. His journey illustrates how grief distorts reason.
• Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich) — A corrupt cop tangled in chaos and personal problems. His involvement with Justine further complicates the moral landscape, reflecting how personal failings hamper collective crisis response.
• James (Austin Abrams) — A drug addict whose odd presence injects dark humor but also shows how the overlooked can still be deeply affected in situations.
• Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong) — The principal of the school striving to contain the situation. He represents the failing structures meant to manage chaos.
• Gladys (Amy Madigan) — The supernatural antagonist: Alex’s “great-aunt” who abducts the children. As part of her arc, she’s the aging-woman horror trope while twisting them into something symbolic and vengeful.
• Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher) — The single child left behind. Having survived, he becomes a vessel of resistance, allowing the narrative to reclaim its ownership.
Spoilers & Symbolism
Spoilers Ahead!
(Skip this paragraph if you haven’t seen the film.)
In the film’s climax… it's revealed that Gladys, using witchcraft, controls the children’s disappearance. Alex resists her control and uses a hair from Gladys to invert the spell. The children then physically destroy her. This serves as a powerful visual of trauma fighting back. Although many adults perish, the children survive and begin healing, suggesting resilience amid horror. Weapons thrive on metaphor and Cregger’s storytelling insists that every scare doubles as a symbol for something more unsettling. Some symbolism I’m putting together is also present in the film:
• Children as Innocence & Rebellion
The vanishing children symbolize the erasure of innocence in a fractured society. Their eventual resistance against Gladys transforms them into emblems of generational defiance, a refusal to inherit cycles of silence and trauma.
• Gladys as Living Trauma
Instead of just a witch, Gladys embodies generational pain. She swallows children because unresolved wounds consume the future. Her presence critiques both ageism in horror and the way families suppress darkness until it festers.
• The Floating AK-47
One of the most surreal moments comes when an assault rifle appears to drift, suspended in midair in a dream. Many viewers see this as pure dream logic, but it’s really a haunting metaphor:
o The gun is violence without hands, detached from who wields it, symbolizing how cycles of harm continue even when no single person takes responsibility. o Its floating quality makes it seem mythic, untouchable, suggesting how weapons themselves become larger-than-life icons in American culture.
o It also reflects fear of inevitability violence is always present when no one pulls the trigger.
• The School as a Broken Institution
Once a space of safety, the abandoned classrooms represent systemic collapse. The failure of adult’s, teachers, police, and even parents mirror the real-world distrust in institutions meant to protect the vulnerable.
Stills from Weapons 2025
• Darkness & Cycles
George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness,” recurring shadows and spirals suggest how violence repeats unless interrupted. Darkness is not just absence of light, but the weight of unbroken cycles passed down through generations.
• Fragmented Storytelling
The film’s non-linear structure is itself symbolic. Memory under trauma is jagged, incomplete. Viewers, like the characters, are forced to navigate a story that refuses clarity, mirroring the disorientation of surviving loss.
• Violence as Renewal
The climax, where children tear Gladys apart, is a grotesque act of rebirth. It’s a violent metaphor for breaking free of the past with destruction as the only path to rebuilding.
In the end, the weapon is never just a gun, spell, or curse but grief, and inheritance. The true horror is not what Gladys does, but what communities allow to be unchecked.
Why It Feels Vintage—and Why That Matters
Cregger layers the film with a retro-horror aesthetic. With slow pacing, analog camera work, and archetypal figures rather than modern, hyper-individualized characters. The look and feeling, kind of like a ’70s giallo in Gladys’s association, and analog suspense amplify this effect. The music and these effects create distance, invoking an uncanny timelessness that magnifies the film’s themes: horror rooted not in modernity, but in human failings across generations.
Closing Thoughts
Weapons is a confusing movie, with lots of symbols. it gives us fractured lives, overlapping narratives, and symbolic horror that bleeds into even our own anxieties. Emotional catharsis (however violent) and a final image of children reclaiming power was a powerful way to end the film.
