For years now, horror fans and critics have grown increasingly and understandably impatient with the tendency of genre films to orient their scares toward a clearly conveyed central metaphor.
The real monster in these movies is parenthood, personal trauma or that old horror-movie standby, grief. Writer-director Zach Cregger is no stranger to this line of thinking; his 2022 horror movie Barbarian is very much a spooky-creature-in-the-basement movie for the #MeToo era. Now Cregger has returned with a movie that may well stymie anyone who has been trained by the last decade to search for an easy-to-track allegory within their viscerally depicted fears. His new movie Weapons has received mostly rave reviews and positive audience response. But at least a few critics and fans are pivoting from complaining about obvious metaphors to ask … is that all there is? Is Weapons actually about anything? (To further delve into this question, of course, we’ll need to go full spoiler mode, so if you want to see the movie and haven’t yet, turn back now.)
