Zach Cregger’s new film Weapons hit theaters on August 8th, 2025, blurring the line between horror and comedy. With the movie running for 2 hours and 8 minutes, there is a lot to unfold.
The film presents six different perspectives of a small-town mystery involving seventeen grade-school kids simultaneously running away in the middle of the night. The six perspectives are all relevant characters who live in the fictional town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, ranging from a grade school teacher to the father of one of the missing kids. The movie cuts to the grade school teacher, Ms. Justine Gandy, walking into her classroom, only to make a shocking discovery. There was only one student in her classroom, and his name was Alex. He was the only student out of her eighteen-student class who didn’t run out of his house at 2:17 a.m. Alex was questioned by his principal as well as the cops, and he claimed not to have any part in the mysterious disappearance. So, the question erupts: who is behind this vanishing?
There are parts where you may want to hide under your shirt, but there are also scenes where you can’t help but laugh. Some movie critics didn’t like the aspect of having the two genres unintentionally mixed together. According to Letterboxd, a popular movie rating app available on Android & IOS, the overall movie rating is 3.3/5 stars. Popular movie reviewer “SilentDawn” rated the movie 2.5/5 stars and included a critical review.
“Weapons. Can’t think of the last time I’ve been so frustrated by a movie […] it was scary and funny, yes, often at the same time, but it eventually synthesized as a model for both,” the review said.
Many of the comments on this review agreed, one in particular explained that one second the theater was laughing at the screen and then the next second everyone went quiet. The sharp shift from comedy to horror is what people did not enjoy about the movie.
The satire point of view seen by many viewers included the way the missing children were running out of their house. They appeared to have stiff posture, standing straight up with their arms locked and slightly lifted from their sides. This has now become a popular TikTok trend, where people film themselves mocking the running posture with the soundtrack playing in the background. In addition, there is a scene near the end of the movie where all the children can be seen running in an orderly fashion, which can also be humorous despite the plot being more tragic.
The director & producer Zach Cregger claimed that he has left the ending & other smaller details up for the viewer’s interpretation. He also decided to add at the beginning of the film that this movie was based on a true story, but that is false; the film is, however, based on the director’s experience with his sudden loss of a friend named Trevor Moore.
“It’s a personal movie — this movie’s really kind of autobiographical in many ways,” Cregger said.
To me specifically, there was another easter egg—a minor and usually unnoticed movie detail—that stood out: the time that the children ran out of their house was 2:17 a.m. The number in the 2:17 a.m. time sequence, 217, is actually the number of the U.S. House vote on the Assault Weapons Ban of 2022, where the bill was passed 217 votes to 213 votes. Later, there’s a scene in the movie where a big memorial is shown outside of Maybrook Elementary School, where the children attended school; this could be interpreted as a false yet realistic depiction of the death of children in a school shooting, such as the memorial from the Sandy Hook shooting in Texas in 2012 where 20 kids sadly passed.
Based on my experience watching Weapons, I enjoyed how there were parts of comedy in the movie. I feel that some of the comedy was a good buffer for how frightening some of the scenes were. I rated the movie 4.5/5 stars on Letterboxd, making it one of the highest-rated movies I have ever watched. With such a controversial horror film, opinions and thoughts on the topic are all over the spectrum. So what do you think? Does watching a film with two opposite genres enhance the quality or frustrate the audience?
