Zach Cregger’s Weapons is a new kind of cinema

Weapons, Zach Cregger’s sophomore picture after the acclaimed Barbarian, was a conspicuous success story in its opening weekend: brilliant reviews, an A- CinemaScore from audiences (rare for the horror genre, in which anything above a B is considered a major hit) and, of course, a massive box office. Its first weekend gross was $43.5 million, an astonishing amount for a film without an existing intellectual property, A-list stars (although Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich and Julia Garner are hardly unknowns) or big-name director. Instead, its success lay in a superbly orchestrated marketing campaign by its studio, New Line, pent-up audience desire to see something different and audiences desperate to have the question answered that was posed by the posters: what on earth happened to the 17 grade-school children who suddenly fled from their homes one night at precisely 2:17am?

The eventual revelation of what happens in Weapons may be underwhelming for some, just as the film’s gradual shift in tone – from hushed, funeral horror to Grand Guignol, almost Evil Dead-esque black comedy – will be divisive for audiences. But if you’re willing to buy into Cregger’s vision, the picture is quite the ride and is aided immeasurably by the third-act appearance of probably the strangest and most memorable human antagonist in this kind of film since Kevin Spacey terrified picturegoers in Seven three decades ago as the omniscient serial killer John Doe. Yet while Spacey’s grand plan unfolded with hideous philosophical control, the ultimate twist here is nothing so cutting-edge or contemporary. Instead, it’s as solidly traditional as an MR James or Edgar Allen Poe short story, and indicates that horror works best when it’s based on time-honored foundations.

Nonetheless, before it goes big, Weapons has some interesting and perceptive things to say about small-town America, from the way that Brolin’s character is deftly painted as a Republican-leaning gun obsessive (he even fantasizes about assault rifles!) to the fashion in which the disappearance of the children, and subsequent paranoia of the community from which they have vanished, clearly has parallels with the many school shootings that have taken place over the last few decades. (The clue is in the title, which has an elegant double meaning.) Certainly, there is an insightful degree of social commentary here that you won’t find in, say, F1 or Superman, and it’s yet another indication – after the success of Sinners earlier this year and the work of Jordan Peele – that horror is where the smart filmmakers are going in contemporary Hollywood.

It isn’t hard to see why. Since the early days of the medium, directors such as James Whale and Tod Browning were able to smuggle outrageous sexual innuendo and horrific implied violence into their pictures in a way that no other studios would have countenanced. (There was a special certificate, “H” for horror, which was routinely doled out to such films.) Watched today, early Thirties classics such as Bride of Frankenstein or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde stand up far better than their often-stilted peers because of the sly wit and ahead-of-their-time double entendres that the films are rich in.

Nearly a century later, while Hollywood seems ever more frightened about making pictures aimed at adults, the success of Weapons and Sinners surely indicates that over-18s are still interested in unusual, challenging projects that aren’t just the usual banal superhero slop (although Ryan Coogler has proven that he can move from the Black Panther films to similarly African American friendly fare with ease) and that they will be rewarded at the box office and critically. Expect to see Weapons nominated for numerous awards next year (and if that villainous actor, whose name I won’t spoil for the uninitiated, doesn’t win quite a few of them, I’ll be astonished). And, if it makes bank as it’s supposed to, this may yet be the making of a new kind of cinema. Here’s hoping, anyway.