The following essay about Weapons (2025) contains some spoilers.
In the already much-buzzed-about horror film of the summer Weapons, written and directed by Zach Cregger, schoolteacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) enters her third grade classroom one morning to find all her students except for one have disappeared. Our real story begins not with their disappearance but with the aftermath several weeks later, as our child narrator informs us. In that aftermath, the town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania is shot-through with collective trauma and grief. How could 17 kids have gotten out of their beds at precisely 2:17 a.m. and run out of their homes, never to be seen again? Where did they go? Who made them do this? For surely, a bunch of third graders don’t just conspire to simultaneously run away. Something or someone made them do it, their parents are sure. And who do they suspect first? Why, their teacher Ms. Gandy of course.
Justine Gandy is an impulsive, paranoid, haunted alcoholic who likes to sleep with other women’s cop boyfriends and pour hard liquor into plastic gas station cups. She isn’t, as far as the text shows us, queer, but it sure is easy to map her experiences and position in the film onto what it’s like to be a queer or trans teacher today. As part of their multi-level attacks on public education, the religious right has demonized LGBTQ+ teachers. A teacher in Florida was fired for using the honorific Mx. to reflect their gender identity. When the Don’t Say Gay bill initially passed in Florida, it was designed to be confusing, making it unclear whether teachers could legally identify as gay. The religious right wants Christianity back in public schools and queerness and transness far from it. And the Trump Administration is pushing an “anti-indoctrination” agenda that would in turn implement racist, anti-trans, and ahistoric indoctrination in public schools. None of this is new; it’s just the latest escalation of attacks on queer teachers. Nearly 70 years ago, Florida pushed gay and lesbian teachers out of public schools. The sentiment then was the same as it is now: The right loves to chase after this boogeyman of immoral indoctrination in public schools. Of course the parents turn on Ms. Gandy when their kids go missing. It’s not textually because she’s queer, but she indeed does not fit their definition of an upstanding individual in society. She drinks, is unmarried, has a string of ill-advised relationships, lives alone in her sad little house. For all her faults, it’s always clear Justine cares about her students. She’s as devastated by their disappearance as their parents are, bereft of closure or answers.
At one point, the principal of her school — who himself is gay — tells her she couldn’t possibly understand the position of the parents. She isn’t a parent herself. Only their teacher. Here, we get an even more wholistic view of how society treats and views teachers. Because sure, we don’t know the politics of the parents in Weapons; they aren’t portrayed as overt right wingers. But all sides of the political spectrum devalue teachers and push parental choice, which is how we end up with bipartisan support for things like school voucher programs, which have devastating impact on public schools.
It’s these themes subtly threaded into Weapons that call to me most. The devaluation of teachers in general. The scapegoating of queer teachers. The demonization of public education when the real demons are so cartoonishly right there in front of everyone’s noses.
(I already warned you about spoilers, so I’ll do so again: SPOILER ALERT!)
The film’s real villain is a witch-like old woman named Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan) who can — with some blood, some hair, the snap of a twig, and the ding of a bell — transform people into zombie-like creatures who either rest in the dark, not quite dead but also barely alive, or become laser-focused assassins who will stop at nothing to kill whoever she wishes to target. Like mapping Gandy’s role in the film onto the real-life scapegoating of queer teachers, it’s easy to map Aunt Gladys’ desire for power, control, and the weaponization of youth onto how the right wants to subjugate the youth of today by depriving them of personal liberties like gender-affirming care and by taking any real learning about history and society out of public schools. Aunt Gladys turns these children into docile, obedient, homogenized beings who exist solely for her personal gain. They do not get to be kids at all.
While the real witch works her evil, it’s Justine Gandy whose car is vandalized with the word WITCH painted in blood red. She is far from a perfect horror hero, but that’s a much more interesting choice than if her edges had been softened. Because regardless of some of the choices she has made in her personal life, she is not a threat to these children. The cartoonish Aunt Gladys is, and she capitalizes on making Justine into a target, deploying her latest weapon. Again, it maps well onto the scapegoating and diversion that happens in real life. The religious right’s obsession with villainizing queer and trans schoolteachers obscures one of the most disturbing calls coming from inside the house: the rampant sexual abuse that happens in U.S. megachurches, which are also sites of explicit indoctrination that often ignores or outright denies science, history, and reality.
Horror films often slash the picturesque portrait of American suburban life, but Weapons is at its best when it takes this one step further and really looks directly at the ways communities can tear themselves apart when focused on the wrong things. If Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), the father of one of the missing children, had teamed up with Justine sooner, maybe they could have saved those kids before all the death and destruction of the film’s final act. If others had treated James (Austin Abrams), a homeless addict who lives in a tent in the town’s woods, like a real person instead of something disposable, then maybe he could have led them to the children, too. Aunt Gladys is the real villain, yes, but she’s able to operate in the shadows because of the systems already in place. Grief and fear are easy to weaponize, and Aunt Gladys uses that to her advantage. The most powerful villains in real life are getting away with it, too.
