Something interesting is happening this year in American cinema horror films have become the boldest, most artistic, independent, and also profitable genre. Judas, by Ryan Coogler broke box offices 28 Years Later looks like an experimental art house film with avant-garde editing and set design resembling a museum sculpture garden Attached is an extreme and witty body horror about a relationship Chuck’s Life is not a horror film in the conventional sense, but it comes from the minds of Stephen King and Mike Flanagan and is quite apocalyptic Alien Earth expands a familiar cinematic universe with dozens of new monsters.
Now joins them Weapons, which, like the others on the list, is a psychological human drama using the vocabulary of horror films, and the freedom they provide to employ extreme violence and heightened anxiety, to carry a larger message about community, parenting, trauma, grief, and mutual responsibility.
It is not that such things never happened before between Jaws and The Silence of the Lambs, horror films have become canonical cinematic works breaking out of the genre fan niche. But the concentration of these films, and the understanding that the best things made this year in America are defined as horror films, requires analysis and interpretation.
About three years ago, two horror films revealed to us the names of intriguing, original, and dark emerging creators. The film You Touched, You Were Killed was the debut of the Australian brothers Michael and Danny Philippo, and Barbarians put Zach Kruger on the map, who, like Jordan Peele once, moved to direct horror films after a career in comedy and sketches.
Now they have new films, and surprisingly there are several points of convergence both deal with dead or missing children and the grief of parents coping with loss, both treat children rather cruelly, perhaps sparing kindergarten kids but much less so schoolchildren, and they will show no mercy to adults.
Bring Her Back, the new film by the Philippo brothers, goes in the direction of films like The Babadook and Hereditary, which translate to horror. Kruger’s new film is called Weapons, and like Bring Her Back, it also touches on the worlds of occultism and hidden knowledge.
In both films, for example, there is a character who is a kind of witch cutting the hair of her victims to cast a spell. Bring Her Back was released in America in May. I did not like it, but for those who want their horror films full of dismembered organs, smashed heads, and shredded bodies, this film gives a full serving of flesh and blood.
The most interesting among them, therefore, is Weapons, a film not only directed superbly, but with an original script full of mystery that generations of viewers will try to decipher its secrets and messages. The film immediately propels 44-year-old Kruger who wrote, directed, and composed the film to the top of the list of intriguing Hollywood directors. The fact that after the first weekend it seems the film also makes money and not just buzz makes Kruger a rising star.
There is a lot of talent in Weapons. Kruger evokes David Fincher, who also helped him with consulting and mentoring, and Paul Thomas Anderson as inspirations (and there are at least a few shots nicely borrowed from Kubrick), but the truth is that upon seeing the film one cannot help but think of Stephen King as inspiration in creating the story, in which a small town becomes a center of violence and horror following an incomprehensible event. Cinematically,
there is something in Weapons reminiscent of Alex Garland’s films, especially Ex Machina: in both cases, the film obeys the rules of the horror genre but strengthens them with surreal cinematic ideas meant to function either as a nightmare or an allegory. Weapons makes it clear that the original title is an allegory, and the film is a parable. But what does it actually say?
The film opens with narration by a girl telling us a story: one night, in a small and quiet American town, 17 third-grade children, all students of the same class at the same school, leave their beds, leave their homes, and begin to run into the darkness with their arms outstretched. A month later, the town tries to return to normal, to recover from the trauma, although there is no trace of these children.
This opening slightly recalls The Leftovers, but in America one cannot help but think of local disasters in the last fifty years, where almost an entire class of students disappeared, leaving behind horror and mourning.
The film is called Weapons, but for many viewers the right name is Triggers. Many, many triggers.
At the center of the film is the class teacher, who becomes the main suspect in the disappearance of her students, alongside a father whose son is one of the missing children.
A cop, an alcoholic, tries to solve the mystery but only manages to create more chaos. The film moves from character to character and tells the story from different perspectives, so each chapter has a slightly different tone. This is a film that not only tells a fascinating story, it tells it in a fascinating way.
It is a film without simplicity, entirely inviting interpretation. In the American context, it is obvious that Kruger tells a story based on reality, where children are sometimes killed by their classmates, a meaning supported by several images throughout the film. But the film hints that the children themselves can become weapons.
In the second half of the film, and from the moment a monstrous character named Aunt Gladys appears, the film changes direction and its meaning suddenly becomes less clear. Gladys’ character is both the flaw of the film she leaves too many plot holes and its brilliance, in her grotesque originality, reminding of Stephen King: within prosaic horror that could be considered easy to explain, pure human evil hides, feeding on the lives of others.
One person’s trauma becomes the vitality of another. Weapons, one of the most intense films I have seen this year, overwhelms viewers with fear and leaves them without catharsis, with undeciphered dreams and reality without explanation. Perhaps that is why this film is so anxiety-inducing.