In contemporary Hollywood, horror sometimes feels like the last genre standing, the last zone of relative vitality and reliable commercial success. Unfortunately I have never had the constitution of a horror fan, and in middle age I find gore exhausting and the jump-scare experience unbearable. So if you tell me that a talented young writer-director has made a terrifying movie about a monster who lives in the basement of an Airbnb — the plot, as I understand it, of Zach Cregger’s 2022 sleeper hit, Barbarian — I will smile and nod and go ahead and read the plot summary online, maintaining my cultural literacy without suffering through the actual experience.
But sometimes, the critic has to suffer, to crouch in his seat with fingers poised against his eardrums. Cregger’s follow-up, Weapons, is currently the second-highest-grossing original film of 2025. Its haunting premise of vanishing children — one night, 17 kids from the same elementary school classroom all get up, run outside into the dark, and disappear — and focus on the aftermath seem like a clear bid to say Something Big about contemporary American derangement. So I did my duty to you, dear reader, and I crouched and flinched and watched.
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