Who is it okay to brutally murder on the big screen? Zach Cregger’s Weapons (2025) provides a terrifying two hour and eight minute answer to this question. Spoilers ahead.
Despite the film’s focus on Ms. Gandy’s missing class of third-grade students, the children escape the film’s bloodier violence. Instead, five adults are hit by SUVs, headbutted to death, dismembered by elementary schoolers, shot in the throat, and executed at point-blank range. While I’m thankful for Cregger’s aversion to violence against children, his choice in method of death for each character brought me back to my original question: who is it okay to kill, and how?
Carol J. Clover crystalized the horror genre’s answer to this question in her 1992 publication Men, Women, and Chainsaws, where she coined the term “final girl.” Deaths within horror films are commonly used to police sexual morality, rewarding purity and punishing what the film deems sexual deviancy with death. “Final girls” are the virgins, the celibate and sober women who subscribe to purity culture and thus are left the “final girl” standing. Their sexually active, drug or alcohol indulging friends are hacked to pieces, hung from trees, and run through by electric chainsaws. While Clover focused predominantly on slasher flicks, a sub-genre of horror, the same concepts echo throughout modern cinema.
Cregger’s shriek-inducing slowburn mirrors a similar pattern of killings. The moral validity of each death is affirmed by the moral misdeeds each doomed character commits. During Paul’s chapter of the film, we see him cheat on his wife, relapse into alcoholism, beat a handcuffed suspect, and threaten and chase a witness. He meets his end with a bullet to the temple. In James’ chapter, we see him smoke heroin, carry around a cartoonish amount of dirty needles, and steal a child’s iPad from an unlocked car. He exits stage left with a bullet through the back of the head. The same can be said for Gladys—a child-stealing, parent-torturing, wig-wearing, garishly-dressed actual sorcerer who is rightfully torn to shreds by the victims of her witchcraft.
There are two deaths in Weapons which seem to disrupt this pattern: Principal Marcus and his husband Terry. We meet the couple in a mundane scene of domesticity. Marcus pushes a shopping cart while Terry holds up grocery options for him to choose from. The two then retire to their living room, eating hot dogs in armchairs in front of the TV when the doorbell rings.
Aunt Gladys meets Marcus and Terry with bright-red microbangs and a plan to kill. With a thorny twig and a chunk of Terry’s hair, she possesses Marcus and forces him to strangle and then headbutt his husband to death. In an excruciatingly long shot, Marcus caves in Terry’s face past the point of death. The camera lingers on Terry’s out-of-focus carcass and nose, pushed three inches into his skull.
After the trailer-teased chase sequence between Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, and Benedict Wong—playing Justine, Archer, and Marcus respectively—Marcus meets his end on the front-end of a suburban mom’s SUV. Again, the camera lingers on Marcus’ carcass. His head is obliterated by the wheel of the car, skull cracked like a watermelon with brains strewn across the asphalt. He is unrecognizable.
While Terry and Marcus make up only two of the film’s deaths, they stand out because of the particular brand of brutality they experience. They are left unrecognizable by their deaths; the violence specifically targets their faces—perhaps emblematic of their identities. In a film where each corpse perpetrates some sort of moral wrongdoing, why did the couple meet such excessively brutal deaths? In the chapter of the film focusing on Marcus—where we would normally receive examples of their wrongdoings and an attempt at morally justifying their death—we only see instances of domesticity.
I left the theater perplexed at this aberrant sequence in the rhythm of the film’s deaths. Cregger might have intended their deaths to be inexplicable, arbitrary, and intentionally pattern breaking, but this was not the sole effect of their deaths. As a piece of genre film, Weapons exists in the context of its horror predecessors and contemporaries. In wielding the narrative pattern of killing off the deviant, the script of Weapons kills murderers, kidnappers, cheaters, drug addicts, and two men whose only act of deviance is homosexual domesticity. I don’t believe it was Zach Cregger’s intention, but when questioning who it’s okay for a script to murder on the big screen, Weapons answers succinctly: kidnapping hags, cheating power-abusing cops, junkies, and a gay principal and his husband.
