Midway through Taxi Driver, deranged Travis Bickle purchased a greeting card emblazoned with “I’m Going to Get Myself Organi-zized.” Relate that prank to the media’s perverse praise for the cautionary horror film Weapons: Our film culture has been Weaponi-zized.
Director Zach Cregger is among the legion of Hollywood hacks (Ari Aster, Ti West, Robert Eggers, Jane Schoenbrun, Jordan Peele) who specialize in the horror genre not to spook us but to use storytelling against us. In Weapons, Cregger’s story — about a suburban community where 17 schoolkids have vanished into the night — evokes contemporary social horror, as if to make sense of the many mass murders of youths that haunt our society.
Cregger’s conceit in Weapons vilifies the everyday conventions of suburban America, meaning to undermine and destroy them. It gets political when a school board meeting (that flash point where concerned parents question the Department of Education) exposes the vulnerabilities of both homemakers and authorities. Angry, bereaved dad Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) displays his toxic male menace and attacks the flaky schoolteacher Justine (Julia Garner), revealing her personal, off-hours flaws. There are many. Beneath the mystery of the mass vanishings, routine middle-class sins (drugs, sex, neglect) are divulged. Brian Taylor satirized parental flaws in the brilliant Mom and Dad, but horror gives Cregger an easy out.
Horror is the genre that permits gleeful, goose-pimply destruction of the family and religious convention. Recent examples — Sinners, Eddington, 28 Years Later, Nosferatu, and I Saw the TV Glow — manipulate generalized feelings of inadequacy, insecurity, and fright that have arisen ever since 9/11, followed by periodic mass killings and then exacerbated by Covid’s lockdown psyops. Instead of a serious approach to those issues, and examining widespread, individual political antagonism, Cregger toys with chaos. Despite some stylistic extravagance, Weapons is, at its core, an exploitation movie.
Millennial pop culture doesn’t just twist the truth and distort our thoughts. Film and TV makers who largely share the same liberal political leanings actively attack our sensibilities and fears. Weapons derives suspense from the trauma of parents and communities that go through school shootings. The phenomenon is allegorized by the specificity of 17 missing grade school students and one exception, Alex (Cary Christopher). These are not just neighborhood casualties, they’re victims of a witch, Alex’s aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), who casts a spell that is the occasion for Cregger’s sop to secularism and other creepy stereotypes. (There’s scant difference between Madigan’s nutball performance here and Glenn Close in The Deliverance, Lee Daniels’s black-Exorcist rip-off.)
In the aftermath of Sandy Hook; Aurora, Colo.; Parkland, Fla.; and Nashville, with its suspiciously guarded manifesto of a trans shooter, Cregger’s reliance on the occult suggests a deliberate choice to neglect the political tragedy of mass shootings and out-of-control parenting. This was also the theme of Schoenbrun’s art-movie I Saw the TV Glow, which protected itself through a repetitive David Lynchian freak-out: “It feels like a psychic wound!”
Cregg salts the wound and, in the name of studio entertainment, seeks to normalize social disturbance and cultural radicalization that are the real threats to spiritual solace and public peace. Despite the six-narrator story structure, these children have no traits that stand for society at large, which was the genius of Four Adventures of Mirabelle and Reinette, in which Éric Rohmer dared to observe the psychological differences between childlike friends verging on adulthood. Weapons works at a lower artistic level, even lesser than Schoenbrun’s film, which recognized “young adult” as a generic category of pop media.
Reviewers who celebrate Cregger’s impudence (his imagination runs to instances of comically grotesque face-stabbings, self-mutilation, and cannibalism) can rightly be accused of collaborating with his weaponization of “entertainment.” Cregger expands social catastrophe without offering spiritual enlightenment. Media endorsement of this trash — the normalization of weaponization — is an outrage.
Cregger is no more conscientious than Travis Bickle, the Vietnam War vet turned cabbie who lost his moral bearings and thought a porn film was suitable for a first date. No one in Hollywood or the press is held accountable for the offenses that have happened or even the horror porn injustices sold as entertainment.