Zach Cregger’s Weapons was one of the most-talked-about horror films of 2025, just as his inaugural effort, Barbarian (2022), was much-discussed in 2022. Both are stylish, well-made horror films that draw quite efficiently on the basic material resources of film (sight and sound) to produce an atmosphere of tension and dread, which makes it all the more effective when they are punctuated by jump-scare moments of sudden fright. In short, to some extent, Cregger’s films fundamentally depend for their success on their ability to do what horror films have done throughout the history of the genre. However, they achieve their effects through a particularly complex formal structure that increases their impact by evoking fears in multiple modes at once, somewhat in the same way that medieval Biblical scholars saw the Bible as generating meaning on four different levels. Barbarian and (especially) Weapons tell relatively straightforward stories whose meaning is not difficult to extract in the literal mode. But their stories also have what might be called “allegorical” meanings that point beyond their actual events to broader phenomena (especially anxieties and fears) in society at large. In addition, these films create meaning in what might called an “archetypal” mode through the way their literal, allegorical, and generic meanings are linked to fundamental fears and anxieties that go beyond their own contemporary cultural/historical moment to address almost universal human concerns. And, finally, Cregger’s films deploy an extensive array of familiar horror-film motifs, sometimes including allusions to specific films, generating further meaning in what might be called a “meta/generic” mode by borrowing from previous films in a way that is quite similar to what Fredric Jameson has referred to as postmodern “pastiche.” Indeed, reading Cregger’s films in the context of postmodernism is very useful for illuminating, not only their multiple modes of signification, but also their nonlinear narrative structures and (especially in the case of Weapons) their complex tonality, mixing horror with comedy.
The Conventional Resources of Horror Film—and Beyond
Perhaps even more than other speculative genres, horror narratives have access to particularly flexible narrative resources in what I am calling the literal mode due to the fact that their scenarios and events are not constrained by the nature of actually existing social or physical reality. At the same time, this disengagement from reality means that horror narratives must rely on strong allegorical and archetypal modes of signification in order to be truly effective, something that Robin Wood comprehended decades ago when, seeking a structure within which to contrast what he saw as the high point of 1970s horror films with the low point of 1980s horror films, he suggested that horror films in general provide a mechanism for dealing with the repressed anxieties brought about by life under “patriarchal capitalism” (63–65). According to Wood, the concept of repression is closely linked to the concept of “the Other,” which “represents that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with” (65). Wood then proceeds to outline various categories of Others, which generally have to do with differences based on gender, ethnicity, class, culture, ideology, or age, though for Wood the most basic category of Other is simply other people in general, given that the dynamics of capitalism encourage us to regard all other people as foreign to us in some way (66–67). The monsters and other alien entities and forces that we encounter in horror movies are then the representatives of these various sorts of Others. “One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, its re-emergence dramatized, as in our nightmares, as an object of horror, a matter for terror, and the happy ending (when it exists) typically signifying the restoration of repression” (68).
Both the allegorical and the archetypal levels of meaning in Barbarian and Weapons can be comprehended well via Wood’s analysis. Where Cregger’s films (and, to an extent, most of what has come to be called “smart” or “elevated” horror in general) differ from previous horror films, thus moving beyond even the high-water mark of 1970s horror, is that they also have a particularly strong meta/generic dimension that goes beyond the simple generic markers that identify the films as “horror.” Indeed, the horror films of the 2020s arise in a much different media environment than did the horror films of the 1970s, which existed in a much more marginalized cultural space. Horror films of the 2020s have become much more critically respected, thus the critical terminology concerning “smart,” or “elevated” horror films, while the viewing audience for horror has become both broader and more sophisticated thanks to the easy availability of horror films, many of them excellent, for home viewing, especially via streaming platforms.
The literal, allegorical, and archetypal levels of meaning in Cregger’s films can all be comprehended within the terms of Wood’s analysis. However, what I mean by “meta/generic” meaning, especially in relation to Jameson’s vision of postmodern pastiche, probably requires more explanation. The concept of pastiche is crucial to Jameson’s overall theorization of postmodernism as the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” For him, the psychic fragmentation that results from life under late capitalism deprives postmodern artists of the ability to develop and maintain distinctive individual styles of the kind that Jameson associates with modernist artists. Instead, postmodernists borrow liberally from both the style and content of earlier works, treating the entire cultural tradition as a sort of cafeteria menu from which they can draw as needed. For Jameson, in the postmodern era, “the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture” (Postmodernism 17–18). What is key for the postmodern artist is that they typically borrow from the past in a mode of affectless nostalgia, with no critical engagement with the works being borrowed from and no consideration of the historical context in which those works were created, drawing both upon specific individual works and entire genres (as in the case of neo-noir film). Characterizing this practice as the “random cannibalization of all the styles of the past,” Jameson, argues that postmodern pastiche is,
like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of any laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. (Postmodernism 17)
Cregger’s films are essentially constructed as a mosaic of motifs with which viewers would already be familiar from other horror films—and in a way that is perhaps more overt than that which is naturally found in any genre film. In particular, the extensive borrowing of imagery and motifs from earlier films in both Barbarian and Weapons clearly resembles the postmodern pastiche described by Jameson, even if these films probably engage in a bit more critical dialogue with their sources than Jameson believed he saw in relation to the “high” postmodern texts of the 1970s and 1980s, from which he derived his original theorization of postmodernism. However, this difference can largely be explained simply as a matter of the passing of time and of the growing maturation of horror as a genre and of its audience. It thus does not suggest a fundamental deviation from Jameson’s theorization of postmodern pastiche.
The Four Modes of Meaning in Barbarian
Multiple modes of meaning are built into Barbarian from the very first scene. As the film begins, an attractive young woman named Tess (Georgina Campbell) pulls up in front of a modest and slightly rundown (but not explicitly horrifying) house in suburban Detroit that she has booked as a rental through Airbnb. At the literal level, nothing scary or ominous has occurred, but we all know that such rentals might lead to negative consequences of various kinds, and this knowledge is reinforced in the meta/generic mode partly because similar situations had led to dire results in a number of films in the years prior to the release of Barbarian, including David Koepp’s You Should Have Left (2020), Dave Franco’s The Rental (2020), and Brandon Christensen’s Superhost (2021). This motif, incidentally has continued to be popular since the release of Barbarian, as in Renny Harlin’s The Strangers: Part 1 (2024) andMercedes Bryce Morgan’s Bone Lake (2024), suggesting the broad appeal of Airbnb horror. In a more general meta/generic mode, Barbarian introduces a number of iconic horror film motifs in these beginning moments. It is, for example, a particularly dark and stormy night, with rain pouring and thunder rumbling in the background. Tense, discordant music plays, eventually melding into a cacophony of human voices that sound almost like tormented souls in hell. In short, though nothing really ominous or frightening has occurred to this point, we are immediately alerted (perhaps excessively so) to be prepared for horrors through familiar generic cues.
As the scene proceeds, Tess has some initial difficulty opening the lock box, then finds that there is no key in the box, building more tension at the literal level that points to an unpleasant and inconvenient rental experience. Then, she gets a nasty surprise when she discovers that the house is already occupied by a young man named Keith (Bill Skarsgård), who has apparently booked the same house for the same period through another platform. This double-booking thus goes beyond the banality of inconvenience to evoke a stronger contemporary anxiety. Unable to get a call through to the company that has rented the house, Tess and Keith decide to share the house for the nonce, despite Tess’s clear trepidation that Keith might be dangerous (though Keith at one point becomes concerned about Tess, as well). Here, then, the film begins to draw, at the allegorical level, upon a more basic contemporary fear—that men, in general, might be dangerous to women. This idea can be encapsulated in the widely distributed current notion, usually attributed as originating with Margaret Atwood, who reports a conversation with a male friend, in which she asks him why men feel threatened by women: “‘They’re afraid women will laugh at them,’ he said. ‘Undercut their world view.’ Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, ‘Why do women feel threatened by men?’ ‘They’re afraid of being killed,’ they said” (413–14).
This fear, of course, extends to a more archetypal fear of other people, especially strangers. In this case, though, this concern takes an extra turn in the meta/generic mode. Skarsgärd’s Keith seems clean-cut, respectable, and relatively non-threatening, but horror-film aficionados will be aware that Skarsgärd, as an actor, had been best known for playing the monstrous supernatural killer clown Pennywise in the It films in 2017 and 2019, a reputation that would no doubt contribute to his casting as the title character in Nosferatu (2024), released two years after Barbarian. In short, the idea that Keith might be dangerous is enhanced by the casting of Skarsgärd, but this effect only works for horror film fans who are in the know, relying on an audience familiarity with the genre of a sort that Cregger employs quite often in his two films.
The Airbnb does not, in itself, seem all that threatening at first, but then the units in films such as The Rental and Superhost are in themselves especially luxurious, set in beautiful scenic locations. Meanwhile, during the first night, Tess awakes in the bedroom and hears Keith, who is on the couch in the living room, moaning in his sleep as if having a nightmare. Moreover, someone (or something) has inexplicably opened the door to the bedroom. The house will then, of course, become very frightening, as Tess ventures into the basement in search of toilet paper (another very mundane modern problem), only to have the door inexplicably (in a somewhat humorous moment of horror-film cliché) swing shut and lock behind her. That seemingly ordinary basement will then turn out to conceal a veritable chamber of horrors—a chamber that itself contains a collection of familiar horror-film motifs.
For example, Tess discovers a secret room containing a bed, a camera, and a bucket, suggesting that someone might have been held prisoner there for nefarious (probably sexual) purposes. Basements, of course, can be inherently scary—especially unknown basements in unfamiliar houses. Scary basements are the descendants of the dungeons of yore, which are very much the stuff of horror, but basements and cellars are in themselves a well-established motif in modern horror films at least from Evil Dead II (1987) onward. For example, it is no surprise that the extremely meta horror film The Cabin in the Woods (2011) builds significantly on the motif of a horror emanating from the basement. And recent horror films such as The Conjuring (2013), Cloverfield Lane (2016), It (2017), Don’t Breathe (2016), The Black Phone (2021), and X (2022) all draw upon the inherent scariness of basements and cellars structures, while there is also a broader array of “underground horror” films as well, deploying the darkness and claustrophobia of caves, tunnels, and the like, as in The Descent (2005).
Later, after Tess is initially rescued by Keith from the basement, he goes back down and find even more horrifying things, including an underground complex, featuring a secret sublevel with grim-looking cages, and (of course) a monster. In fact, by the time Tess locates Keith in the basement, he has been bitten by the monster. Will he be infected? Will he become a monster, like those bitten by vampires or zombies? He then gets destroyed by the monster, leaving Tess screaming as the screen cuts to black, followed by the jolting intrusion of upbeat music to accompany a shot of a young man driving in a convertible along the scenic California coast, singing along to the music, which turns out to be diegetic, playing on his car’s sound system.
This new, wide-open scenario supplies a sharp contrast to the claustrophobic terror of the basement back in Detroit. However, the man in the car turns out to be actor AJ Gilbride (Justin Long), who suddenly receives a call in the car informing him that he is being accused of raping his female co-star during the filming of the pilot for a new series for which he is the male lead. He seems shocked by the charge and vehemently declares his innocence, but it is clear that this #MeToo-style rape charge is going to derail his participation in the new series, and perhaps ruin his entire career, including possible legal jeopardy. This sudden veer into an entirely new subplot thus illuminates the previous allegorical plot by providing a more specific contemporary context for women’s fears about men. This new subplot is then linked directly back to the original plot when we discover that AJ is the absentee landlord of the Airbnb from the first part of the film. Indeed, he comes to Detroit to check on his property toward the possibility of liquidating it, taking him to the house and into the midst of the main narrative, his situation meanwhile introducing another dimension to the motif of the mutual dangers that men and women might pose to one another in the contemporary world. In this case, that motif is complicated by the fact that there are mounting hints that AJ, who initially seems about as harmless as Keith, might be more insidious than he initially lets on.
By this time, it is a couple of weeks after the initial arrival of Tess at the house, but she is still being held captive in the basement. AJ discovers her things in the house and eventually wanders into the basement himself, suspecting that squatters might be hiding there—though his pose as a tough guy going down to root them out enhances the slight hints of comedy that are sprinkled throughout this film. Meanwhile, a stronger note of comedy is added when AJ begins to hope that the secret underground realm beneath his house might enhance its sale value, so he goes on to try to measure its square footage, finding more and more secret areas, to his great delight, which turns to a rather comic terror when he realizes that someone else is apparently down there. Then he gets locked in the underground chamber where Tess is already being held.
At this point, the film again suddenly changes directions, with a cut to a flashback sequence in a time (in the 1980s) when the neighborhood of the Airbnb was still filled with relatively well-kept, if modest homes, their lawns neatly tended, even if the neighborhood was already beginning to decay. A man emerges from the Airbnb house, and we will eventually learn that this man, named Frank (Richard Brake), habitually kidnaps women and makes them his sexual captives. By the present-day time of the film, he has raped a number of these women, eventually producing (then raping and procreating with) generations of daughters, leading to more and more genetic damage in the offspring. In the meta/generic mode, the motif of captive women in the scary basement recalls such recent films as Girl in the Bunker (2018) and Girl in the Basement (2021), both of which are based on real crimes. The latter of these, meanwhile, is particularly relevant because its central motif (based on the true story of Elisabeth Fritzl[1]) of a father imprisoning and raping his daughter aligns particularly well with this key plot line in Barbarian.
The “monster” in the basement is the latest of Frank’s in-bred children (played, with appropriate prostheses, by Matthew Patrick Davies), now grown into a grotesque naked woman who attacks Keith and then Tess and attempts to make them feed from her large, hanging breasts, treating them as her “babies.” In both the archetypal and the meta/generic mode, she is, at first glance, the walking embodiment of Barbara Creed’s “monstrous-feminine,” one of the most influential concepts in recent horror film criticism. Creed employs Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject to argue that horror as a genre gives us opportunities to “bring about a confrontation with the abject (the corpse, bodily wastes, the monstrous-feminine) in order finally to separate out the symbolic order from all that threatens its stability” (14). And, while Creed’s focus on the monstrous-feminine goes beyond mothers, the representation of terrifyingly devouring mothers is a key part of her discussion, including such classic examples as Norma Bates in Psycho (1960) and Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) in Friday the 13th (1980). Since the initial publication of Creed’s work, this motif has continued to appear frequently—as in Mama (2013)—though it has also recently sometimes been nuanced by featuring mothers whose culpability is unclear through the film, including such examples as The Babadook (2014) and Hereditary (2018).
In Barbarian, this motif is also nuanced, but here by the fact that the film’s monstrous mother is also a victimized child, so that the barbarian of the title is presumably meant to be Frank, rather than his latest daughter, though it might also be AJ[2]. After all, the director initially appears to have been wrongly accused but seems more and more guilty as the film proceeds. Moreover, at one point late in the film, he shows himself willing to sacrifice Tess in order to save himself from the woman in the basement. The motif of the threatening monstrous-feminine is thus justaposed with the motif of the threatening male, producing a potentially interesting dialogue that asks us to consider whether the depiction of women as monstrous and dangerous serves, not just as an expression of disgust at the more physical aspects of our lives as animals, but also as a diversion from the fact that men are far more dangerous to women than vice versa.
All of these themes, meanwhile, are given an added charge by the fact that the Airbnb is located within the notorious Brightmoor area of Detroit, introducing a general fear of urban (and broader social) decay into the matrix of allegorical anxieties in the film. While it is difficult to see in the darkness of the opening scene, the neighborhood around the house does seem ominously rundown, a perception that will eventually be verified (and extended) when we get a better look at the blighted area surrounding the house (and learn that it is, in fact, Brightmoor). The deterioration of Detroit, of course, is particularly infamous, and the sad state of this neighborhood becomes obvious when Tess steps out in the daylight and realizes for the first time just how bad the neighborhood really is. Indeed, when Tess goes into downtown Detroit to meet with the documentary filmmaker with whom she is going to be working, the filmmaker expresses surprise and alarm that Tess is staying in Brightmoor, adding to the tension, which is then increased further when Tess drives back to the Airbnb and finds herself pursued on the street by a strange figure, looking like a stereotypical homeless person, who runs toward her and chases her into the house, adding to the sense that this neighborhood is dangerous.
In addition to this allegorical commentary on urban decay, Barbarian plays on a motif that has been important in a number of recent horror films, with urban decay in Detroit becoming a focus of Hollywood films at least as far back as Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop (1986). The motif became particularly popular in horror films in the 2010s, being central to such films as Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), It Follows (2014), and Don’t Breathe (2016). In Barbarian, the neighborhood itself thus becomes an additional source of ruin-porn horror that draws upon some well-known contemporary concerns, generating both allegorical and meta/generic meaning.
Tess makes it inside safely in this scene but is told that no units are available to respond when she calls the police to report being chased into the house. The lack of support from official authorities is another source of tension in this film. Meanwhile, AJ has discovered an aged and dying Frank, still in the basement, surrounded by his library of videotapes of his victims. The last minutes of the film then essentially become an action sequence, beginning with Frank committing suicide by shooting himself and Tess ramming her car into the “mother” figure. AJ accidentally shoots Tess, then helps her flee, while both are soon aided by the strange man who had earlier chased Tess into the house. He turns out to be a man named Andre (Jaymes Butler) who lives in the ruined neighborhood and who has considerable experience evading the “mother,” who apparently comes out and roams the neighborhood at night. Soon, though, the mother attacks and kills Andre, then eventually kills AJ by gouging out his eyes with her horrible thumbs in a classic case of meta/generic body horror. Tess then shoots and kills the mother as the latter bids a farewell to her “baby” in a weird final moment, followed by a sudden cut to an oddly upbeat pop song with the macabrely (but hilariously) appropriate title “Be My Baby,” a hit for the Ronettes all the way back in 1963, thus providing a final sly suggestion that what we have just witnessed is as much postmodern play as exploration of horror.
The Pastiche Construction of Weapons
If Barbarian seems to be constructed as a patchwork of familiar motifs in a mode that might be described as postmodern pastiche, then that characterization pertains even more to Weapons, which draws upon even more well-established horror film motifs—and draws upon them in more effective and sophisticated ways. In some ways, though, Weapons combines with Barbarian to bookend prominent contemporary fears. Thus, if Barbarian draws upon fear of urban blight, Weapons centrally draws upon the fear that we might not be safe even in seemingly clear, well-lit, prosperous suburbs. Rather than a rundown area of Detroit, Weapons is set amid thriving suburban affluence in the fictional small town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, which turns out to be just as dangerous.
Perhaps in keeping with this more affluent setting, Weapons had a production budget of roughly ten times the $4 million that was spent making Barbarian (and took in roughly six times as much at the box office, making both films financial successes). This higher budget also means higher production values and perhaps also helped to facilitate the greater formal complexity of the 2025 film, which goes beyond the sudden narrative shifts of Barbarian into a much more elaborate narrative apparatus that includes a prologue, a postscript, and six overlapping story segments, each told from the perspective of a different point-of-view character, introduced by on-screen titles announcing the shift in perspective. This overt segmentation, possibly influenced by the on-screen the chapter titles in The Shining[3], helps to identify Weapons as a bit more identifiably postmodern than is Barbarian.
In that opening prologue, a young girl (voiced by Scarlett Sher) announces in voiceover that the following story happened in her community but was not reported in the media because it was covered up by the authorities. This brief explanation thus already introduces a very contemporary note of conspiracy and distrust of the media into the film, which will remain in close contact with the contemporary reality of the mid-2020s throughout, a reality that has, in fact, been largely defined by a pervasive air of suspicion and mistrust that creates a perfect environment for horror. In any case, we learn from this opening narration that this story involves the sudden disappearance of seventeen young children who had all been in the same third-grade class at Maybrook Elementary School, a class taught by one Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), a new teacher at the school. All of these students had simply left their homes at exactly 2:17 am on a Wednesday morning, with only one of Justine’s students, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), remaining at his home and showing up for class as scheduled the next day. The remainder of the film involves the efforts of Justine, the local authorities, and the parents of the missing children to unravel the mystery of this disappearance and to recover the children. This prologue thus introduces the central archetypal anxiety that drives this film: the fear that something will happen to one’s children. And, of course, in our particular contemporary moment, this fear, especially when focused on a school, has primarily to do with school shootings in the allegorical mode. Thus, reviewer Brian Tellerico, while noting the complexities and ambiguities of Weapon, also appropriately notes that the filmcan easily be read as a school shooting allegory.
We will eventually learn that Alex’s great aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan) has used some sort of witchcraft to lure the children to her so that she can feed off of their youthful energies and thereby restore some of her own fading vigor. Gladys is the most important character not to have her own point-of-view segment, which serves further to isolate her as an evil figure of otherness and to place her in a tradition of “wicked-witch” narratives so old that it makes her essentially an archetypal figure, along the lines of the wicked witch in the “Hansel and Gretel” fairytale, one of the best-known narratives in modern Western culture. This narrative has influenced a number of horror films, including direct adaptations such as Oz Perkins’ Gretel & Hansel (2020),[4] so that it also functions in the meta/generic mode. At the same time, the ailing Gladys, apparently nearing death, has just come to live with the family so that she will have a relatively comfortable place to die. To a small child like Alex, who doesn’t know Gladys at all, this family drama is another allegorical modern terror of the kind that Cregger builds into his films so well.
The character of Gladys also has allegorical and archetypal implications as a commentary on aging and on Western society’s horror of aging women that can again be illuminated by Creed’s work. In this sense, Weapons also generates meta/generic meaning by recalling the whole subgenre of what has been called “psycho-biddy” or “hagsploitation” horror, from classics such as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) to more recent examples, such as Ti West’s X (2022). Meanwhile, The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014) and the Australian film Relic (2020) add elderly dementia to the motif, with an added supernatural twist. Weapons also links to a range of films about older women attempting to restore their youth, from Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman (1959) and Edward Dein’s The Leech Woman (1960) to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024). Finally, though perhaps less obviously than with Skarsgård in Barbarian, the casting of Madigan carries meta/generic meaning due to her status as a longtime star who has commented in recent years on the lack of roles available to her as an older actress[5].
The first narrative segment in Weapons, “JUSTINE,” shows Justine’s (sometimes misguided) efforts to help find the children, while also dodging the ire of the many locals who are convinced that she is somehow culpable in the disappearance of the children. Indeed, Justine virtually stalks Alex and even stakes out his house in an effort to get information, even though she has been strongly warned not to undertake such behavior. Meanwhile, she herself becomes the target of considerable harassment, including having someone paint “WITCH” in large red letters on the side of her car. Justine seems a sympathetic character throughout this segment, though there are some hints of possible promiscuity and excessive drinking that might make some viewers begin to question her innocence, or even to wonder if she might, indeed, be a witch who is responsible for the disappearance of the children. At the end of the “JUSTINE” segment, a mysterious unidentified figure enters the car where Justine has been staking out Alex’s house while drinking enough alcohol to become essentially unconscious, allowing the figure to snip off a lock of her hair with a large pair of ominous-looking scissors.
The film then suddenly cuts to “ARCHER,” the second segment, focusing on the perspective of building contractor Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), the father of one of the missing children (who happens also to be Alex’s bully). We first meet Archer as he disrupts a school meeting called to discuss the disappearances, becoming a leader of angry parents of a kind that seem to have become a fixture at recent school meetings in the U.S. Unhappy with the outcome of the meeting and with the work of the police, Archer pursues his own independent investigation. He also suspects that Justine knows more than she is telling, despite the fact that the police have concluded otherwise. Archer’s company is building new up-scale homes in the community, suggesting its ongoing prosperity, but he seems too distracted by his investigation to oversee his projects efficiently. He shadows Justine much in the way that she shadows Alex, and there are even hints (such as a close-up shot of cans of red paint in the back of his pickup truck) that Archer might be the one who vandalized Justine’s car.
At one point, Archer experiences a dream that comes close to referencing school shootings explicitly and suggest that he, as the parent of a threatened child, apparently has school shootings in the back of his mind. As he pursues his son Matthew in the dream, he sees an assault rifle hovering over their house like an alien spacecraft, with a large digital “217” displayed on the side. Later in the same dream, Archer seems to address Matthew as he sleeps in his bed, professing his love for the boy. Then, in a jump scare that causes Archer to bolt awake in terror, the face of Matthew morphs into what appears to be the face of an old woman wearing exaggerated makeup, foreshadowing the appearance of the film’s real wicked witch, though she has yet to appear in the film. At the end of this segment, the film takes a sudden turn as Archer approaches Justine while she puts gas in her car, only to have her suddenly attacked by a bloodied and seemingly maniacal version of Marcus (Benedict Wong), the school principal. The segment ends as Marcus and Archer grapple on the gas station pavement as Justine runs inside.
The segment “PAUL” that follows focuses on local police officer Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), Justine’s former boyfriend, with whom she had had a brief hookup in her segment. This segment, though, focuses largely on Paul’s encounter with James (Austin Abrams), a homeless drug addict and small-time criminal who lives in a tent in the woods just outside Maybrook, an encounter that occurs before Paul’s meetup with Justine in the first segment (but nearly a month after the disappearance of the children), for the first time making it clear that the segments are not necessarily in chronological order but overlap considerably. This segment ends as Paul, having previously had an altercation with James, sees him on the street again and begins to chase him, leading into the next segment, presented from the point of view of James.
In “JAMES,” we see James hustling for drug money and being hassled by Paul, whom he eventually directs to Alex’s home by revealing his discovery (while attempting to burgle the home) that the missing children are being held there (in the basement). At one point, he runs into the woods with Paul in pursuit and believes he sees the wicked witch in the woods, though the sighting may be a hallucination. He has apparently not seen her before, so this hallucination, combined with Archer’s dream, suggests that Gladys might somehow be exercising a psychic influence on the people of Maybrook. James hopes to receive the $50,000 reward that has been offered for information leading to the recovery of the children. Instead, both he and Paul are captured and added to Gladys’s collection of spellbound victims. Then, in “MARCUS,” we see the principal’s attempts to investigate what is going on in Alex’s home, also leading to his “possession” by Gladys, who sends him off to attack Justine, as we saw earlier.
Cregger suggests in an interview with Eric Eisenberg that the motif of “a small town just imploding over one central mystery” that is so central to Weapons was surely influenced by his memory of the trailer for the 1993 film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1991 novel Needful Things, though Cregger suggests that he was less influenced by the actual film than by the trailer. But, of course, the fictional small town in Needful Things is Castle Rock, Maine, which has appeared in several of King’s works (beginning with The Dead Zone in 1979) and is so prominent that it became the basis of its own 2018 streaming series on Hulu, not to mention that it supplied the name for the production company Castle Rock Entertainment, founded by Rob Reiner and others in 1987. And the motif of evil coming to a seemingly safe small town or suburb has, in fact, been seen in numerous horror films, with John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) perhaps being the most famous example in which evil arising to menace a peaceful small town or suburb is the central motif.
Most of the homes we see in Maybrook seem comfortable, indeed, even if their similarity to one another perhaps suggests an uncomfortable tendency toward conformism. The up-scale home Archer’s company is currently building, for example, is a virtual carbon copy of Archer’s own. At the same time, there are also signs of economic inequality in the community: the homes directly across the street from Archer’s home and the homes of his affluent immediate neighbors, are considerably more modest and seem much older. Meanwhile, in keeping with its multi-dimensional tendencies, Weapons employs this motif in more ways than simply the emergence of an evil witch in the town. McCarren County does indeed, provide police protection for the town, but the fact that the McCarren County Police Department seems fairly large and well equipped suggests that this protection is, in fact, needed. Indeed, the very presence of James, however relatively harmless he himself might appear, provides a stark reminder that not everyone in the area is comfortable and affluent and that life there does have a more difficult side, as well. In fact, lurking in the background of the prosperous lives of the people is a sort of vague, unstated (maybe even unconscious) precarity, a sense that all their comfortable lives could be taken away from them at any moment.
This sense of precarity explains why the presence of someone such as James (or the presence of homeless people in our own world) would be felt as so threatening. It also explains why the sudden and shocking disappearance of seventeen children would be perceived as a threat that goes far beyond even the horror of the specific loss of these particular children, suggesting that the community’s entire way of life (including the majority of children who have thus far been untouched) might be under serious attack, just as once sanguine notions of the peaceful, secure nature of life in American small towns are no longer available as an image of utopia. Writing in an essay originally published in 1979, Jameson notes of the 1972 film The Godfather that the Mafia family in this film offers an image of community and a contemporary pretext for a Utopian fantasy which can no longer express itself through such outmoded paradigms and stereotypes as the image of the now extinct American small town” (Signatures 33).
The Postmodernism of Weapons
Weapons is just a bit over the top throughout, and its comic elements are more prominent than those in Barbarian. In Weapons, these elements also tend more toward the meta/generic mode, as in the gratuitous gross-out body horror scenes, including not only graphic bodily destruction but also Marcus’s impossibly prodigious vomiting on his partner as he murders him. This last scene, in particular, recalls similar scenes of super-vomiting from various other horror films—such as The Exorcist (1973) or Drag Me to Hell (2009)—but the scene also suggests a self-conscious bit of horror film pastiche that spills into uneasy comedy.
In the tumultuous final sequence of Weapons, semi-comic over-the-top violence erupts full force, beginning with the scene in which a possessed Paul attacks Justine in the Lilly kitchen, causing her to attempt to defend herself by rather ineffectually scraping his face with a vegetable peeler. Meanwhile, Archer comically defends himself from attacks by a surprisingly resilient spellbound James, before we return to the kitchen, where Justine eventually pulls Paul’s gun from his holster and blows his brains out, after which she finally finishes off James by blowing his brains out as well. Then, in the climactic final moments of the film, Gladys weaponizes Archer against Justine, but then Alex uses Gladys’s magic to weaponize the captive children against Gladys herself, sending her hilariously screaming and careening through several neighboring houses with the kids in hot pursuit, while the inhabitants of the homes look on in comic disbelief, peaceful Maybrook having been disrupted in a fashion too spectacular for them to believe. The kids finally take Gladys down and then rip her to pieces in one last bit of gruesome body horror that nevertheless has a comic edge to it, thanks to the fact that Gladys has had one foot in self-parody territory throughout the film.
Indeed, the obviously comic elements of Weapons provide an indicator of one way the borrowing from earlier films (and from horror film as a genre) in Cregger’s films moves beyond the blank parody associated by Jameson with postmodern pastiche, restoring some of the laughter that Jameson attributes to conventional parody. At the same time, this laughter is not particularly critical or satirical. It is, in fact, more homage/fan service than critique, as can perhaps best be seen when, during the key climactic sequence of Weapons, Alex is chased through his house by his parents, who have now been weaponized to kill him by Aunt Gladys’s dark magic. As they chase him from room to room, he slams and locks doors behind him, but they keep smashing their way through panels in the doors. They then glare menacingly through in a rather obvious re-enactment of one of the most iconic sequences in all of horror film, the one in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining when Jack Nicholson’s seemingly possessed Jack Torrance axes his way through two doors in pursuit of his own son (and wife). Meanwhile, that the scene in The Shining is already a close replication of similar scenes from both D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) and Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage (1921) is an extra bonus that adds energy to the secondariness of this scene in Weapons, reinforcing the film’s self-conscious status as a patchwork of quotations from other films.
There does not seem, however, to be any implied critique of The Shining in this sequence, and Cregger has acknowledged in interviews his great admiration for Kubrick’s film. In the Eisenberg interview, he notes his conclusion that the 2:17 time that is so central to Weapons must surely have come to him subconsciously from the fact that 217 is the number of the haunted room in the Stephen King novel on which the film is based, though the number was changed to 237 in the film. Then Cregger goes on in the interview to state: “I’m a Kubrick guy when it comes to The Shining; I definitely, like, worship that movie, and I thought of changing it to 2:37. But then I was like, ‘You know what? My first impulse has gotta be the one I stick with,’ so I kept 2:17.”
In fact, the footprints of both King and Kubrick’s The Shining are all over Weapons, and Cregger admits in this same interview that it is fair to think of Weapons as “Stephen King–coded.” The fact that “2:17” has such a significance in Cregger’s filmalso points to the way viewers of recent smart horror films have come to expect significance from such details, poring over films in search of subtle clues that perhaps only real horror fans would notice. The heavy use of the meta/generic mode in both Barbarian and Weapons seems designed largely to appeal to horror film audiences who are accustomed to such things and should not be read as a self-conscious commentary on the belatedness of our postmodern condition.
Similarly, the theme of weaponization of individuals adds a clearly political dimension to the allegorical mode in Weapons. After all, Americans living in 2025 have become quite accustomed to murderous violence being perpetrated by someone who has been “radicalized,” often through participation in various forms of on-line communication. Thus, when seemingly harmless individuals in the filmsuddenly become deadly weapons, their transformation looks all too familiar to us—though we’ve also seen it in much earlier films, as in George Romero’s The Crazies (1973). That this radicalization extends even to quite young children is also familiar, and the idea that one’s children will someone be contaminated by objectionable ideas seems ever-present in the America of the mid-2020s. However, as with the theme of school shooting, Weapons does little more than acknowledge this issue and does not really seem to want to make a strong statement about it, just as Barbarian acknowledged problems such as sexual abuse and urban decay without taking any sort of stand on those issues that might point toward specific actions.
Conclusion
Both Barbarian and Weapons respond to general anxiety levels in American (and Western) society that are probably at their highest since the 1970s, while also responding to the growing maturation of horror film as an art form. Thanks to the increasingly sophisticated nature of both horror films and their viewers, the meta/generic mode in contemporary films has the opportunity to function far more effectively than such a mode could have in the 1970s, and the horror films of Zach Cregger take full advantage of this opportunity. Cregger’s well-made films generate effective narratives in the literal mode, greatly enhanced by the meta/generic mode. At the same time, they also generate meaning in the allegorical and archetypal modes, even if the latter two modes are so intermixed with the meta/generic mode that they sometimes hover on the brink of self-parody and prevent the films from performing any sort of serious social or political commentary.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Second Words: Selected Critical Prose, 1960–1982. House of Anansi Press, 1982.
Booker, M. Keith. Postmodern Cinema: What’s New in Film and Why It Makes Us Feel So Strange. Praeger, 2007.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.
Eisenberg, Eric. “Weapons Director Name-Dropped an Amazing Stephen King Deep Cut Discussing the Author’s Influence on the New Horror Movie.” CinemaBlend, 24 July 2025, https://www.cinemablend.com/movies/weapons-director-namedropped-amazing-stephen-king-deep-cut-discussing-authors-influence-horror-movie-king-beat. Accessed 26 September 2025.
Glatt, John. Secrets in the Cellar: A True Story of the Austrian Incest Case that Shocked the World. St. Martin’s, 2009.
Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.”In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Edited by Hal Foster, New Press, 1998, pp. 127–144. First published 1983.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.
Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. Routledge, 1992.
King, Susan. “Classic Hollywood: Amy Madigan, Stage Lover, Directs an L.A. Play.” Los Angeles Times, 11 July 2015, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/classichollywood/la-ca-cm-classic-hollywood-amy-madigan-20150712-story.html. Accessed 15 October 2025.
Quart, Alissa. “Networked.” Film Comment, vol.41, no. 4, 2005, pp. 48–51.
Tellerico, Brian. “Weapons.” RogerEbert.com, 7 August 2025, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/weapons-movie-review-2025. Accessed 15 September 2025.
Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond. Revised and expanded edition. Columbia University Press, 2003.
Notes
[1] Perhaps tellingly (especially in terms of the recent trend toward 1980s nostalgia in contemporary popular culture Josef Fritzl’s basement imprisonment and abuse (in Austria) of his daughter Elisabeth began in the 1980s, as does Frank’s imprisonment of his line of daughters in Barbarian. On the Fritzl case, see Glatt.
[2] Note that the address of the Airbnb is 476 Barbary St., so that “Barbarian” partly refers simply to this address.
[3] This technique is often used in postmodern cinema, as in Pulp Fiction (1994) or in several films by Robert Altman and Don Roos. Alissa Quart has referred to this structure of jumping from one perspective to another as “hyperlink cinema.” See also the discussion of this technique in Booker (12–15).
[4] The disappearing children of Weapons have other folkloric precedents as well, most obviously in the well-known story of the “Pied Piper of Hamelin.”
[5] See Madigan’s interview with Susan King.