The latest film from Zach Cregger, the director of Barbarian, is hitting theaters this year: Weapons. So far it looks ridiculously spooky. However, as we know, horror is often a conduit for social commentary to flourish. What Cregger and New Line have cooked up for us not only looks terrifying, but also might be a thoughtful look at how America reacts to tragedy.
Cregger received a lot of acclaim for his sleeper hit, Barbarian. It was a twisted movie, with a commanding lead by POC lead Georgina Campbell, that really explored the ideas of sexism, toxic masculinity, and abuse. He definitely also brought those ideas to another terrific film he produced this year, Companion. However, for this larger project, Cregger has upped the stakes, and might be potentially looking at how people react to tragedy in our country.
As the creepy premise goes, the film centers around a town which sees a school teacher’s entire class going missing in the course of a single night. The tragedy enrages the townspeople, causing them to lash out at one another, and understandably trying desperately to figure out what happened and why. And as deaths begin to amass, the fact that none of this is reported in the news (as the trailer goes) is troubling.
There’s a lot to unpack about this one. From an entertainment level, this looks like a really horrifying and creepy film with a lot of blood and disturbing violence accompanying a very creepy premise. I don’t love that it looks like really bad things are happening to good old Benedict Wong, one of the few POCs in this movie. I do wonder if we’ll be seeing the old patterns of bad things happening to POCs in horror movies on display here (I was hoping we’ve evolved past that).
However on a social commentary level, the interesting thing about this trailer is that we’ve seen the sense of hysteria in America when we see Caucasian children going missing. Usually, kidnappings and tragedies for minority children (for instance) don’t get as much media coverage or attention. When, overall, tragedies should receive the same amount of attention. Naturally, we don’t know for sure if any POC children go missing, and it’ll be interesting to see if the film addresses this and how.
What the trailer does give us is the natural progression of humanity to look for blame in the midst of tragedy, when faced with the unknown. The way the townspeople immediately turn on Julia Garner’s character, when, in all fairness, she just arrived to an empty classroom is, in some ways, sympathetic, but also irrational. It’s also very realistic. Any parent would very likely look for someone or something to blame when something terrible happens, but also when there are no answers to be found. And we definitely have a proclivity as a society to do the same; to find ways to point the finger when things go wrong, typically in a way that we feel will assuage our feelings of anger and fear. We see it every day, and it looks like Weapons is exploring that very phenomenon.
I’m also curious to know what the title means. In several trailers already, we see swarms of kids crashing through windows to sprint in hordes at people. I’m very curious if they’re all part of some government experiment to turn children into soldiers, or weapons, controlled by the ring of a bell (as seen at the end of the trailer). Perhaps this mind-control aspect will also explain why folks are acting insane, and/or hurting themselves in messed up ways in this trailer. If that ends up being the case here, then Weapons will likely have a lot to say about the threat of government control.
Whatever the case, there’s a lot of mystery still surrounding this movie, based on the trailer teases we’ve seen so far. And I for one am incredibly curious to see how the horror plays out, and what Cregger will be trying to say with this one. We’ll be ready (and terrified) to learn the truth when Weapons hits theaters August 8!
