17 children vanish into the night — ‘Weapons’ is terrific and terrifying

In the prologue of the 1983 film adaptation of The Twilight Zone, two men, played by Albert Brooks and Dan Aykroyd, are driving along a highway at night. They talk about The Twilight Zone and which episodes they think are scariest. Then, Aykroyd playfully asks Brooks, “Do you want to see something really scary?” “You bet,” Brooks says, and Aykroyd says he has to pull over — it will just take a minute. They pull over. A gleeful Aykroyd turns away and hides his face as Brooks, smiling, awaits whatever goofy gag is coming. Aykroyd turns back around as a vicious monster and eats him.

It’s not a very good movie, but this is a great dark joke, because the world in which we talk philosophically about scary things is supposed to be separate from the world in which the scariest things actually happen. This is one of the things horror does; it allows people to process the most frightening things that could happen while remaining safe themselves. All the adrenaline without the risk. That scene in The Twilight Zone is unsettling because, like meta horror movies like Scream, it allows someone who loves to be scared at a remove to suddenly be scared for real.

The paradox of fear is that while it’s supposed to make you run, the feeling itself can be alluring if you think you can get away with it. When I saw the first trailer for Weapons, the most recent film from writer-director Zach Cregger (who last made the hit Barbarian), I immediately thought, “This looks utterly terrifying, and I want to see it.” In other words, Cregger said, “Do you want to see something really scary?” And I said, “You bet.”

The film begins with something that seems impossible: One night, in the suburb of Maybrook, every student (save one) from Justine Gandy’s third-grade classroom gets up at 2:17 a.m., goes downstairs, walks out of the house, and silently runs off into the night. They are gone, 17 of them. They are caught on doorbell cameras or security cameras, disappearing into the woods or just into the darkness.

Suspicion falls on Justine (Julia Garner), for the simple reason that nobody can figure out how these kids could disappear unless something was happening in that classroom, on her watch. Were they coerced to run away? Convinced? Was there some kind of a plan? She says no, she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know. The one boy who remains, Alex (Cary Christopher), offers no answers either. Archer (Josh Brolin), the father of one of the disappeared children, restlessly hassles Justine in between nights spent sleeping in his son’s abandoned bed. Local cop Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), local troublemaker James (Austin Abrams), and school principal Marcus (Benedict Wong) also become involuntarily enmeshed in the story.

In large part, not unlike HBO’s 2014 series The Leftovers and the novel that inspired it, Weapons is a story about a community recovering from an inexplicable trauma that arrives like a natural disaster, wreaks havoc, and then cannot be reversed, only survived. There is blame, there is guilt, there is grief, and there is a deep sense of isolation for Alex, Archer and Justine in particular. How do they begin to talk about this?

But there is another thing, another Whole Thing going on in this story, which I would not spoil for anything, because it is simply too wonderfully scary and strange. What I will say is only that the film develops a tension so brutally effective that at one point, the guy sitting next to me involuntarily startled outward, pressing his arm firmly into my side for about two seconds, and then apologetically whispered, “My bad.” I whispered back, “Nope, nope, I get it.”

One of the things Weapons is so good at is never relying on a single horror note, but using the entire orchestra of scares.

One of the things Weapons is so good at is never relying on a single horror note, but using the entire orchestra of scares. Is there dread, like you feel when a babysitter in a slasher movie decides to go down into the basement alone? Yes. Are there moments that just feel wrong, even if they’re not exactly inherently terrifying? Yes.

It has the kind of jump-scare where something that wasn’t there before enters the space. It has the kind of jump-scare where something that’s been there the whole time enters the frame. It has the moment where a threat comes into focus from far away and you mutter “oh, oh, what is going on there, oh, no-no-no.” It will make you go “eeeeee-YUCK,” and gasp at a pursuit, and laugh the slightly guilty chuckle of a moment of mayhem that borders on slapstick. It will show you a sharp object, and you will see that object’s future.

If you see Weapons with a raucous crowd, which you should, and if all of you forgive yourselves and each other for reacting out loud when you can’t help it, you may hear yourself say, in the quietest voice you possess, “Ohhhh, absolutely not.”

I left the theater not to a monster in the passenger seat, and not to comfort either, but to more mundane worries: for my own safety and security, for other people’s safety and security, for the future.

On the other hand, if any of your fears come down to caring about cinema itself, there is something reassuring about how personal horror can be, about having your buttons pushed by its creatives. Whether this kind of story appeals to you or not, this is a movie that, like Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, suggests that horror is a genre where a filmmaker’s vision can still make it to theaters feeling specific and vibrant. It takes not an algorithm but a breathing person’s fears and losses to, like Dan Aykroyd in The Twilight Zone, give you the scare you genuinely did not see coming.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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