This Halloween, expect to see young folks running around your neighborhood with their arms slightly extended to the side and a zoned-out look in their eyes, like small children dreamily playing at being airplanes or Peter Pan. Blame the new release from writer-director Zach Cregger, who made a splash in the horror world with 2022’s Barbarian. The trailers for his Weapons feature an array of 8-year-olds deserting their suburban homes in the dead of night, all running exactly as I just described — a parent’s nightmare and an irresistible inspiration for teens on TikTok.
The deal
The once-sleepy town of Maybrook is in turmoil. One month earlier, 17 students from the same third-grade class left their homes at exactly 2:17 a.m. (as attested by home security cameras) and vanished. The only remaining class member, Alex (Cary Christopher), seems clueless about the fates of the others.
Terrified parents of the missing children, such as contractor Archer (Josh Brolin), vent their frustration on the only target they can find: the kids’ teacher, Justine (Julia Garner). She steadfastly maintains her innocence, but the townspeople’s harassment drives her to drink … and investigate. When Justine follows Alex home, against the advice of the school’s principal (Benedict Wong), she finds his windows shrouded in newspaper and dark figures sitting motionless in the living room. How did the cops miss this weirdness? For help, Justine turns to a married patrolman (Alden Ehrenreich) with whom she’s eager to rekindle a messy relationship. But he has problems of his own.
In a series of nonchronological chapters, each told from the perspective of one Maybrook resident, the truth of what happened to the children unfolds.
Will you like it?
Weapons opens with the voice-over of a child (Scarlett Sher) whispering the premise to us as if we were a new kid in town who had to be brought up to speed. This evocative device seems to align the movie with a long tradition of films about the myths and rituals of suburban coming-of-age. But it’s misleading, because Weapons isn’t primarily about kids and their secrets.
Most of the chapters are told from adult perspectives, focusing on their futile efforts to erect barriers against dangers to their children and themselves. Archer and Justine have sinister dreams of doors that fail to keep out inchoate darkness, establishing a persistent visual motif. Meanwhile, an unhoused meth addict (Austin Abrams) tests the boundaries, blithely breaking into homes and cars.
Barbarian was also about real estate and how seemingly safe spaces become unsafe. But while that film’s limited setting gave it a tight focus, Weapons is all over the place. Like the recent Eddington (also from a horror director), it’s a snapshot of an American burg in crisis, taking us on a wandering path through several people’s lives. While some of those byways are directly relevant to the mystery, others are not: Think Winesburg, Ohio, with jump scares.
Viewers who expect the movie to produce a shocking or politically charged twist may be disappointed; it’s less of a slow burn than a creepy ramble. No one emerges as a protagonist, and without a strong emotional connection to the characters, we aren’t as invested as we should be.
Yet we stay interested because of the sheer skill with which Cregger executes his set pieces, whether they’re scary, gross, funny or (fairly frequently) all three. His dark spaces are genuinely menacing, his tracking shots are exhilarating, and his use of framing and soundtrack are diabolically apt at creating suspense.
Audience laughter is no longer a bad sign for a horror movie. At my screening, people laughed through Weapons’ climax not because it didn’t work but because it did. The absurdity is precisely timed to release pent-up tension, splitting the difference between comedy and horror.
Personally, I wish Cregger had lingered longer in the scary register, leaning into the terror of the unknown that the mystery elicits. Still, Weapons is an impressive feat of narrative and technical ingenuity, like Go or Magnolia for the horror genre. And the excitement around it reflects how much cultural capital that genre has accumulated in the past decade. For better or worse, many of the best young writers and directors now work in horror, and we expect their movies to have important things to say.
In Weapons, the images are the most eloquent. Running off into the dark, the children of Maybrook initially appear to be embracing freedom, yet the uncanny sameness of their runs suggests remote control. That image may endure longer than the film’s eventual explanation, because it feels uncannily apt for an era when people increasingly take their cues from machines.
76 Days Adrift: For a gripping real-life horror story, catch a screening of this 2024 documentary about a man who survived months stranded in the Atlantic Ocean, on Wednesday, August 20, 6:30 p.m., at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier. Co-executive producer Robert Sennott is a former Vermont resident.
Barbarian (2022; Netflix, rentable): Cregger’s breakout feature made a lot of travelers uneasy by using nonlinear narrative to explore the unsavory history of a short-term rental property in Detroit.
I Saw the TV Glow (2024; HBO Max, rentable): Like Weapons, Jane Schoenbrun’s horror-tinged indie film deals with suburban childhood but from a different angle and with a stronger emotional core.
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2025.
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