Weapons (2025)

Hollywood movies that I liked this year have very much kept with the Blumhouse trend and channeled its more righteous attributes. Sinners, for example, is in line with the incendiary and outspoken approach of Get Out and the other Jordan Peele films, while maintaining its own graphic novel-esque approach. There is also a lot in A24’s so-called 'elevated horror' that is worth emulating, with its harrowing art house take on chills, spills and kills. I like the fact that Zach Cregger’s Weapons isn't straight up horror. At least not like the Blumhouse/A24 kind that’s become a template to such a point it has straightjacketed a genre with rigid formalism, when it’s supposed to be messy. There's definitely a LOT of merit in that 2010s template. It encapsulates an era marked by claustrophobic geopolitical impunity since the War on Terror became a thing, with renditions, preemptive strikes and Abu Gharib foreshadowing the imperialist unpleasantness in Gaza, all of which have to be channeled to make the proper horror movie for the times. At least present the kind of nightmare realm that will be recognizable to kids. The Shallows. Get Out. Don't Breathe. The 2018 Halloween remake. Grim. Structured. Single or limited location. Siege and entrapment. With a deep and heavy feeling in the jump scares and kill scenes and a crunchiness to the violence that’s drenched in chiaroscuro light and shadow. Torture chamber in solitary confinement, forever under siege. All of these have since coalesced into a ‘formula’ to deliver this specific brand of horror in whatever context. You can slot in any situation, any story, any topic or metaconcern right in, and it will be a punchy and effective horror once all is said and done. A24 horror hems quite closely along this line, since it is of the same era, too. It’s only a bit more purple prose about it. This has become the genre standard. When mainstream audiences think horror these days, it has to look and sound and feel like THIS. But here's a thing: it's a formula, a template, and it can get bland and boring and lazy after a while. And it did. While Weapons does have the Blumhouse traits (chiaroscuro, limited location, high concept, crunchy violence and grim dark heavy sense of unease), it plays a bit fast and loose with it in ways that are so confident and assured that it’s not po faced about it all the time, and is more of boosted by a drunken love for high concept, cult horror and genre films. So it lets in some humor in its jump scares and kill scenes, albeit the pitch black kind. Admittedly, I was a bit bummed out at first, wishing it was tonally and formally similar to Sinners or the excellent Korean horror movie, Exhuma, but as it plunged headlong toits conclusion like a genocidal missile, its design became much more clear. There's a spontaneity in its approach, and it's fun to see a bit of camp in the proceedings before its bluntly righteous moment. The one we need. Which is to say this is less interested in that Blumhouse/A24 horror structure that we’ve come to expect, and more in drowning in a vast array of influences and basking in them, simulating what it’s like to read tons of Fangoria, Rue Morgue, Stephen King novels, comics, news and obscure macabre stuff and let all of that fry your brain to crispy perfection. Low brow and high brow. Cheap and big budget. Foreign and local. Post-millennial genre geekness for this dark and hyperactive children’s fable. Part of me wishes it went more geopolitical re: the victimization of kids by the fascist geriatrics, but we already have Iran and Superman for that. The other part of me wishes it was more of a bizarre true crime thing. But it's fine. It's all good. There are weapons. - Carlo Cielo