Review: Is Weapons a Metaphor for School Shootings?

The new hit horror movie is really about adults using kids for their own ends.

Weapons, the new horror film from writer-director Zach Cregger, is fascinatingly oblique. Unlike so much message-heavy, highly politicized modern horror, it lacks a single dominant metaphor. But the big idea it circles is clear enough.

Weapons tracks a classroom full of kids who run away from home in the middle of the night. The movie then reveals all the ways that adult authority figures—cops, school officials, parents—have failed those kids, using them for their own ends, ignoring their duty to protect them, or just box checking bureaucratic requirements so they can go back to their own lives. We see tense town meetings with angry parents who cannot process the terrifying mystery of the disappearance.

At times the movie seems to hint that it's a metaphor for school shootings. At other moments it seems to nod to pandemic-era school closures. The big mystery is: What happened to all those kids? In the end the answer is that they've been weaponized, in a metaphorical way that the movie literalizes to terrifyingly creepy effect. And what's been done to them can never really be undone.