On August 8 of this year, Zach Creggor’s Weapons premiered in theaters. When I went to see it, I brought my concealed carry weapon to the theater, my gun on me, recent threats I’d received buzzing between my ears, hypervigilance drawing down my energy, making me forget what day it was. Almost exactly a month after Weapons came out, just a few weeks after I watched a movie while armed because this is what we do now, on September 10, a Utah college audience, and then the country, watched a bullet tear through Charlie Kirk’s neck.
A sense memory: kids yelling over each other, a school bell ringing off metal lockers and buffed floors, teacher shoes clacking, papers and nylon bookbags rustling, the squeak of sneakers. Even during a test, there is the scratch of pencils, the sniffle of runny noses, deep sighs, classroom furniture scraping at the smallest of movements. To have quiet descend on a school during the day feels instantly, bone-chillingly wrong.
Weapons opens with the camera hanging low, at a child’s height, often observing adults moving with their heads cut off by the top of the frame, emphasizing a child’s perspective, a child’s world. A child’s voice narrates the story, noting that the town’s police and others covered up the story we’re about to see because they were embarrassed that they couldn’t solve it. When Justine, a young teacher with curly bleach blonde hair, walks into her third grade classroom to find 17 kids missing, with only one boy, Alex, left behind, the dread sets in. What families might think was grief all their own becomes a tragedy that tears apart a town. A memorial that looks like so many we’ve seen sees its candles sputter out, wear and tear set in over days and weeks of searching for the missing children. As for the children, we see them running out at 2:17am, into the dark. The only traces left behind are open doors and doorbell camera footage.
Creggor maintains that he did not write Weapons as an allegory for school shootings, that he wrote it through and about the grief he experienced when he lost a friend. For a movie about genuine grieving, it strikes a strange, dark note before the pageantry of mourning put on for Kirk weeks later. It’s not an original thought to note that a child or adolescent is killed with a firearm every 2 hours and 48 minutes, and yet we don’t see the outpouring of performative grief we did for Kirk, even as youth gun deaths rise in states with more permissive gun laws year after year, gun deaths now far outpacing car crashes as the leading cause of death in those under 18 years of age.
On the very same day Kirk died, another school shooting took place at Evergreen High School in Colorado. As always, rightwing commentators tried to assert the shooter was trans, but as is more often than not the case, the alleged shooter is a white cis boy, 16 years old. What’s more, his social media history demonstrates a likely worship of mass killers, as well as white supremacist and antisemitic views, including images of people in Nazi uniform. According to the Denver post, in one photo on Tiktok, “Desmond appears to be wearing a black T-shirt with the word “Wrath” written in red across the chest — similar to what one of the attackers wore in the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, also in Jefferson County.” In the words of a student, Kai, who survived the shooting, who had practiced active shooter drills, never thinking he’d have to use them, “It almost doesn’t feel real. It’s like a dream.”
What many parents, authorities, and others don’t understand about the nightmare we’re currently living through is how quickly dangerous information spreads online, hateful rhetoric slithering into the supposedly safe bedrooms of suburban homes, radicalizing their kids without them ever knowing.
Regardless, the number is less important than the entire gun floating in the air above a house in a movie titled Weapons. Archer compares the children and Marcus — the school principal who is set on a path to murder Justine Gandy — to “heat-seeking missiles.”
As for what the gun means to Creggor, according to an interview in Variety, he’s less sure. “I think what I love about it so much is that I don’t understand it,” he tells Variety. “I have a few different ideas of what it might be there for, but I don’t have the right answer. I like the idea that everyone is probably going to have their own kind of interaction or their own relationship with that scene, whether they don’t give a shit about it and it’s boring, or whether they think it’s some sort of political statement, or whether they think it’s just cool. I don’t really care. It’s not up to me. I just like that it’s there.”
The film’s villain is Alex’s aunt Gladys. She grooms a child, turns children and adults into murder weapons, and lets them loose in service of her self-serving accumulation of power. It all started, though, with her seeming vulnerable, telling Alex and his family she was sick. Alex finds Gladys — orange wig off — retching on the floor, telling him that she needs his help.
Zach Creggor speaks about his writing method in almost every interview. He advocates heartily for Transcendental Mediation, a technique used and popularized by David Lynch. With this style of meditation, the goal is to shut off the conscious brain and allow the subconscious to flow and create. In this state, according to Creggor and Lynch, the writer can tap into currents in society around them that they may not even be consciously aware of. “It’s wonderful to be an antenna,” Creggor says of the process.
When watching Weapons, it is wholly unsurprising that Zach Creggor’s a huge Lynch-head. The horror of the suburbs comes out in full force. Despite about 80% of Americans living in urban areas, the suburbs and rural areas (always depicted as majority white) are so often held up by rightwing influencers like Charlie Kirk as some kind of “real America.” In this suburban setting, a stranger arrives suddenly in the night, an aunt — Gladys — whom neither the central boy character, Alex, nor his parents have seen in a long time. Without warning, she soon has the upper-hand, newspapering the windows of Alex’s house to keep the light out (or the dark in), and using her magic to turn Alex’s mother and father into possessed puppets. Whenever Gladys attempts to move through the suburban daylight, she dons an orange wig, caked on white, clownish makeup and an outfit like a Boca Raton retiree complete with chunky jewelry, huge gradient glasses and matching sneakers. Her white makeup gathers in patches making her skin look like curdled milk, with her teeth hinting at her possible ancient age, worn down to near nubs housed in gums that peek out below her lip line.
Alex starts out his chapter of the movie being bullied at school the day before his aunt arrives. He is lonely, disaffected, without connection besides his concerned teacher Justine. When Alex panics at seeing his parents listless, hollow-eyed, sitting at his kitchen table without moving, Gladys tells Alex he must not tell a soul about what is happening at home. She demonstrates the consequences for snitching as she cuts herself, blends the blood into her — for lack of a better term — magic stick, and snaps it to activate her spell. Alex’s mother and father grab forks and begin stabbing themselves in the face over and over while Alex begs Gladys to make it stop. She does, but the threat remains looming over Alex.
Creggor has spoken in interviews about growing up with a dad who struggled with alcoholism. He likened it to coming home and finding that everything inside the house was changed, to feeling like a parent had been replaced overnight. He spoke of the pain of not being able to tell a soul. I saw Creggor’s pain, too, in the chicken soup Alex must prepare and spoon-feed his parents. Campbell’s soup, for all its homey advertising, is also the go-to food for children who are too young to really cook, but who must feed themselves, or themselves and others, from a way-too-young age. And if Creggor thinks that the audience can take whatever they want from what his antenna is tapping into, I saw something else, too, in the threats of harm issued by Gladys, the secret intruder into Alex’s life that parents and police can’t figure out.
These groups and others very much in the same vein also have been known to encourage would-be spree shooters, to egg them on in Telegram chats, to turn the “successful” mass-killers into “martyrs” and “saints.” The blood magic in Weapons of course, comes from a long tradition of the use of blood in magic acts both in the real-world and on film, and it’s no different in groups like 764. In a recent case involving the arrest of a young man on CSAM (child sexual abuse material) charges, Ali Winston of Wired writes, “investigators found reams of videos depicting children being raped, ultraviolent videos of executions, and the extremist mass shootings in Buffalo, Nashville, and Columbine, along with a photo on Harding’s phone of a phrase daubed in blood: ‘I sold my soul to 764,’ above a swastika and a Lviathan cross often used by 764. Another photo, handed up to the judge and not shown in court, depicted the naked chest of a young girl wearing a cross, with the words ‘No Lives Matter’ carved into her body with a sharp instrument.”
Groomers often use threats of violence against parents and family to secure compliance with their young victims. It’s easy to take some information a kid’s given and to then find their address and parents’ names and other information online, to scare a child into cutting herself and sending a photo. Or, if a groomer obtains CSAM of their victim, then that can be used as blackmail, with the child complying out of fear of punishment, shame, or worse.
764 hopefuls — those looking to earn their credentials by providing enough new material — are told to target the most vulnerable youth, including queer and trans kids. In this sea of blood and gore streaming into the minds of kids and especially young cis boys and young cis men, with this endless cycle of producing violence in order to beget more violence, gaining approval only by enacting violence, the reasons behind recent spates of school shootings actually become less murky. Some people have said that when Alex takes the names of his students off their cubbies, it reminds them of a school shooter making a list. To me, it conjured the image of a bullied kid who’d thought he’d found a friend online, someone who promised to protect him from bullying, who then began to demand he get things, that he harm his peers or else his parents will be hurt. It feels like Gladys appears out of the dark as quickly as a kid can connect to a stranger on the internet who uses any small point of familiarity — like a claim of being a family member — to get a foot in the door. The young man Winston wrote about worshipped mass shooters, too, and the hearing where prosecution walked the court through evidence the FBI had collected from his devices featuring chats of the young man and his friend discussing plans for committing a mass shooting alongside photos and videos of the two visiting the Columbine memorial and “posing for a photo in front of a swastika flag while dressed as Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris [the Columbine shooters].” The people grooming kids online feed off their fear and suffering — and the attention they get from their peers. The parasite motif in Weapons is admittedly on the nose, but when you consider how groomers and rightwing influencers alike require a rapt audience of sycophantic followers, Gladys draining the life out of a classroom’s worth of kids suddenly doesn’t seem too far from real life.
Gladys as a witch is not some eldritch horror or specter or even Satan. She has limited supernatural powers and a single body made of flesh. Yet, even though we can see her, pin her down, stop her spells, she’s still unknowable. She’s a horror movie villain that is at once so powerful when kept in the dark, when her victims don’t speak out against her, and one that is quickly vanquished when her victims are turned on her.
Weapons ends on a gut punch, with the child narrator mentioning that some of the kids began to speak again, implying that others, like Alex’s parents, might never come back to their old selves. There is a point of no return, and it is horrifying to consider where that line lies and whether we might have already crossed it.
Good angle linking the unexplained disappearance stuff in the movie to something so malignant +nihilistic like 764. I think theres a broader critique of the alienated family unit as this space of trauma + alienation that isnt as present in Weapons as it could have been, and sort of offloads the “evil” onto some metaphysical parasite force- i e Gladys (and irl extrafamilial forces a la 764) -that causes the harm. For a second i thought he was gonna try to link it to the 5G tower. I also just wish everyrhing was left unexplained and not offer even the bittersweet closure we got. But im also a brutal sad cinema pervert.