This review contains spoilers for Weapons (2025) & Barbarian (2022).
Weapons is a horror story about telling white women, “no.”
I do not understand how this film has received so much praise. The story has been done several times over in Hollywood: old woman afraid of death finds a way to manipulate or suck the literal life out of those around her. It feels like 2025 was the year of Psycho Biddy horror or Hagsploitation, but the misogyny in Weapons doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the racism or ableism.
I think Zach Cregger and I watched the same TV shows and movies growing up because I recognize so many of the scenes and elements taken from them for his films, but is it intentional nostalgia-baiting or what. Stranger Things is upfront about their re-hashing of tropes, references, and even iconic moments, but Cregger presents his work as wholly original.
Yeah, okay. Original.
I will not share the famous Vietnam “Terror of War” (1972) photograph due to its sensitive nature (an injured, nude child), but Cregger revealed in behind-the-scenes footage that young Phan Thi Kim Phuc was his inspiration. Learn More about the U.S. using illegal chemical weapons on civilians and the girl who survived a napalm attack on her village.
Some critics are also upset with similarities between the film and a recent Epstein Island documentary in which children run away from men with cameras.
Cregger’s Problem with Women
You’d think that a U.S. director would realize that demonizing women during a period of extreme misogynist regression and frequent human rights violations might not be a responsible choice, but Cregger sure loves to make his villains women you want to see brutalized on-screen.
In Barbarian (2022), one of two villains, The Mother, is a victim of incest, sexual assault, forced birthing, and abuse–but it’s okay to cheer for her demise because she’s grotesque. There is a brief moment of empathy as the music becomes softer and Mother beckons Tess to return to the basement, but she had to die because she is monstrous, not human.
In fact, Mother might have even given Tess her blessing before being executed by stroking her forehead and cooing either, “baby” or “bye bye.” See? No guilt for taking a human life!
Weapons includes not only a monstrous villain, but one who wields black magic, and the protagonist is a drunkard who manipulates people and refuses to respect boundaries or maintain even the slightest level of professionalism. I’ll come back to Gladys in the next section.
Justine (Julia Garner) is not a hero, but she is presented as the only person who cares about the wellbeing of students besides one desperate father, Archer (Josh Brolin). She is harassed by parents and her car is vandalized after her students vanish because parents believe she has to be involved.
As a teacher, what really bothered me about Justine is she stalked a student, violated multiple direct instructions from her school principal, but she’s proven right in the end. What is the message? Teachers should overstep boundaries, follow students home, and refuse to listen to others on the off-chance they’re actually helping?
Justine is positioned as the victim/hero throughout the story, but she doesn’t actually help save anyone or solve the mystery. Despite knowing her friend is married and trying to get sober, she pressures him into drinking and going home with her, but we aren’t supposed to place any blame on Justine because the friend isn’t a good person, either, and it’s really his fault they had an affair.
The boyfriend characters in Barbarian and Weapons both end up dead by a woman’s hand with Justine shooting hers and Mother killing Tess’s man. Both scenes are thin metaphors for the heroines being freed from patriarchy minus the consequences of murder. That makes up for all the misogyny, I guess.
Serpent & the Rainbow Shit Again?
I could write an entire article on the depiction of Haitian Vodou in Weapons and its conflation with Louisiana Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Santería, but I am going to focus on the character Gladys for this review.
Oh, Amy Madigan. Did you not stop to ask yourself why you were dressed like Erykah Badu during the climax of this film? Did wearing traditional African clothing not feel inappropriate to you, a white woman, as you terrorized the main characters?
Probably not.
Traditional African and Indigenous cultural practices were outlawed in the United States until the 1970s and belief systems like Vodou, Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Santería were considered Black Magic and demonic witchcraft. Black and Indigenous women and gender non-conforming folks, especially faith leaders and healers, would be targeted in Southern states and the Caribbean.
All forms of these cultural traditions are closed-practice which means they are not taught to the general public, widely-published, or open to outsiders. While some branches combine African and Indigenous knowledge under the veil of Catholicism, like Louisiana Voodoo and Santería, they are still relegated to their original or diasporic communities.
So how the hell did Aunt Gladys become a practitioner? That is pretty damn important information when audiences are watching a white woman dressed in traditional African garb associated with priestesses.
“Gladys, as a theme, is very autobiographical. And really, it’s about my childhood. And it’s not that there was an evil woman that came into my life, but it was more about just growing up in an alcoholic family,” he said. “And the idea of a new entity coming into your house and upending the family dynamic, and taking a safe place and turning it into a scary place, and what it does to children, and that sort of thing … But no, I never met a crazy woman with red hair.”
Zach Cregger, Gizmodo Interview (2025)
The reason for the villain’s grotesque appearance in Barbarian and Weapons might be different, but they are aesthetically identical. Cregger claims his inspiration was alcoholism and the way it can upend a child’s life, but alcohol is not important to the film at all.
Two characters struggle with sobriety, but it’s irrelevant to the plot and doesn’t lead to character growth; in fact, the main child character has two attentive parents who are not depicted abusing alcohol at any point (although the dad makes a weird joke about his ten year-old kissing supermodels). Are we to assume the children bullying him had alcoholic parents without ever seeing them?
Is Aunt Gladys a formidable Vodou practitioner or is she mentally ill? How does Vodou relate to alcoholism or family dynamics?
I don’t see how alcoholism has anything to do with Weapons.
I guess we are supposed to be grateful Cregger left out “voodoo dolls.” I’d much rather Hollywood just left cultural practices alone.
You Can’t Outrun Disability, Zach
Both Barbarian and Weapons end with the villain running and then meeting their demise. Yes, the way in which it happens is different, but not by much. There is also a weird tonal shift during these final moments in which audiences are prompted to laugh at the villains. I don’t know why Cregger thought his serious film about missing children and an evil witch needed an homage to Ferris Bueller, but audiences got one.
The overarching metaphor for this story is parasitism (read: misogyny & ableism) and the audience is reminded several times parasites are afoot. One scene acts as a sort of red herring by presenting the idea of mind-controlling fungus in ant brains, but the clear comparisons between the events of the film and parasitism are made with Aunt Gladys.
Horror usually treats disability as a character flaw, motivation, moral lesson, or MacGuffin: Jason Voorhees was a disabled child who fell victim to bullying and neglect, Paul Sheldon had to overcome his newly-disabled legs to escape Annie, Papa Jupiter’s family was cursed with horrible birth defects for inbreeding in a nuclear wasteland, and Regan Abbott saved the world by being deaf.
Gladys comes to stay with her estranged family after being diagnosed with cancer because the niece feels a family obligation to become her mom’s sister’s primary care provider. This is believable. It happens. But cancer isn’t framed as the parasite–it’s Gladys.
To cure her illness and regain vitality, Gladys zombifies her niece and nephew-in-law. We are not told if she drains their life essence or what process is occurring, only that she snaps thorny twigs wrapped with personal items to control her victims and the spell is paused when the twig is dropped into water. I don’t know what this spell is supposed to be, but what is clear is the message that Gladys is a parasite feeding off of her family’s goodwill and innocent children.
The disabled community has made so much progress over the past few decades regarding public education and media representation, but then we get people like Cregger who come along and use addiction, disability, or chronic illness as a lazy, alleged, metaphor for abuse and evil.
We try to teach children that someone’s appearance does not always reflect their character and there is nothing scary about age, disability, or facial difference. Then Cregger comes in and says, “Nah the cancer-ridden older woman is actually a crazy, parasitic zombie witch.
And in the end, after the spell is broken all of the children are left physically disabled and catatonic. The narrator tells the audience that some children regained their ability to speak after a few weeks, but there is no established recovery time or guarantee which means parents might be left with children who need 24-hour care, assisted feeding, and therapy. The fact they were reunited just after tearing apart an elderly woman is not addressed.. What is the message or lesson here?
I don’t want to talk about this anymore. It’s pissing me off too much.
Final Thoughts
Three movies are competing for our attention in Weapons: a coming-of-age tale about confronting bullies, a romantic drama between two shitty people, and a film about zombies. And not one of them is very good.
Let’s agree to stop watching Cregger’s movies until he leaves the racist tropes and misogyny in the 80s where he seems to be emotionally stuck. If a creative team can’t think of a better metaphor for alcoholism than “crazy old voodoo lady,” then maybe they should just… not.
There is nothing redeeming about this one and I think the story has been done before, and better.