Hear Me Out: ‘Weapons’ is a Zombie Movie
Editor’s Note: Big whopping spoilers for Weapons inside.
Zach Cregger’s Weapons currently has a deserved stranglehold over horror audiences this summer. His previous film, Barbarian, had the unique delight of watching a man get beaten to death with his own arm, and Weapons continues his streak of nightmare fuel with gusto. Though much of the horror in the film is derived from missing children, strange running posture, and a creepy aunt who is unaware of the concept of lip liner, I really want to talk about the fact that the children and a few unfortunate adults are bewitched in the cinematic tradition of zombies.
I swear, I can make this make sense.
When the word “zombie” is typically used, it is a reference to the undead, lurching automatons we are used to seeing in media featuring the undead. These creatures are previously dead, walking eating machines with no thoughts or emotions left in their slowly rotting skulls. The first instance of this type of zombie came from George A. Romero’s 1968 horror powerhouse Night of the Living Dead. Though Romero himself did not use the word “zombie” to describe his undead (he used “ghouls” before conceding to the cultural zeitgeist of “zombie”), there is no denying that, to paraphrase Billy Joel, Romero started the fire.
Structurally, these zombies and their corresponding cinematic tradition tend to act much like outbreak films. The dissipation of the scourge and how it permeates a culture and the nation’s fear. The chance that any one of us could become an infected or zombie, which also means that each one of “them” used to be “us” quite recently. But crucially, the difference between zombie and outbreak films is the mechanism of real death. Zombies are reanimated dead, not just humans with a disease or parasite. There is no cure and there is no hope; zombies are undead, full stop. Well, at least that kind of zombie is undead.
The kind of zombies I’m talking about here are the more classic, literary, and colonially based zombies from the African diaspora in the Caribbean and Creole regions spanning the Atlantic between North and South America. We are talking voodoo zombies.
Prior to 1968, the name “zombie” nearly exclusively referred to Haitian people, often slaves, revived by necromancy conducted by witch or sorcery. These often undead (though not always) creatures were fully under the spell of whomever conjured their return to animation, and they were essentially slaves to their magical master. Given that the timing and context of these voodoo myths of resurrection very closely coincided with slavery in America and beyond, it is easy to extrapolate that one of the greatest fears of these people was to not ever regain their freedom, not even in death.
One of the earliest films depicting these voodoo zombies was 1932’s White Zombie, starring horror grandaddy himself, Bela Lugosi. Undoubtedly the inspiration for Rob Zombie’s band name, the “white” in the title refers to the novelty of a zombie being made of a white woman, rather than the typical Black slave. Yup, that title you’ve heard dozens of times is literally a reference to race.
In that film, Lugosi plays an evil voodoo practitioner who turns a beautiful white woman into a zombie to control her, lure her away from her beloved, and make her his slave. He has already turned many of his enemies into zombies to work on his sugar cane plantation in Haiti, and has no intention of pulling back on his controlling power trip. Notably for my purposes here, he needs to first steal her scarf for his ritual in order to complete his controlling spell.
This is where the comparison to Weapons can begin to be drawn.
In Weapons, all of the children are missing because they are put under the spell of Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan). In order to do so, she needs one personal item from each of these children, and terrified captive nephew Alex (Cary Christopher) has no choice but to help her. Her magic necessitates personal ephemera from every person under her spell, child or not. And much like in White Zombie, her whole plan hinges on obtaining these items.
Even without the physical mechanics of the spell casting and enchanting, there is an argument to be made that the intention behind Gladys’s control of these children and community closely resembles that of a voodoo witch.
One of the major reasons that Weapons is so effective as a horror film is the realization that this strange and seemingly incomprehensible tragedy of these missing children is that it was all conducted with a specific purpose. Gladys wanted to build an army, and her weapons needed to be assembled by bewitching an entire classroom of innocent children. They were not killed or kidnapped to place far away; they were being corralled right under the town’s noses to be a wholly programmable tool for one clearly diabolical woman to yield at will.
It is this complete lack of personal will that is unnerving to the core. These children have been robbed of their autonomy, their personal spirit. Now, just like a voodoo zombie, they are doomed to merely do the bidding of an evil woman without hesitation or self preservation. Stripping them of volition by malice without permission is one of the scariest things that can be imagined.
Treating a person as a utensil and not a conscious soul is unforgivable. In the case of Weapons, this method is consistent with the horror seen in pre-Romero zombie films, and the terror is still as fresh and relatable today as it was nearly a century ago when it was introduced into the relatively new mass medium cinema. Films conscious of movie history should be celebrated, so let’s add that accolade to the pile already earned by Weapons.
Categorized: Editorials
