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A conspiracy constructs a world run by its own warped beliefs, optimized to elide even the most objective facts that may dispute its logic. Conspiracy is a self-sustaining parasite because it heedlessly consumes all that it encounters, even that which doesn’t really fit into its own belief system.
It preys on our modern cultural dependencies, namely our fear of the unknown and the twin suspicion that the Unknown will fundamentally deprive you of whatever base sense of normalcy you rely on to survive.
A generous read of Zach Cregger’s sophomore feature, Weapons, claims interest in the paranoia and fear that drives conspiracy theorists and communities in mourning. Still, the film fails to rise above its own narrative paranoia, thus never reaching what it may have originally set out to say about grief, conspiracy, and loss. (This is, of course, even more disappointing a failure in the face of another 2025 release about the spiraling, conspiratorial nature of grief, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds.)
There’s something undeniably sensual about conspiracy, about partaking in the illicit. It is both within and without–an intimate community based on the nearly erotic experience of being on the outskirts of the norm. Horror, as a medium, is driven by outsider-Eros, the overlap between the fearful and the erotic, the eroticism of reaching beyond the skin and under it at once. The genre’s skeleton key is to identify what about a text scares you and then ask yourself whether it also turns you on.
That which is furthest from you has the potential to beckon the most intimate from within you.
Allowing multiple ideas about fear and desire to coexist in a narrative creates complex resolutions that engage with the open-ended, sticky nature of horror. It allows us to believe that one could be, and perhaps should be, fundamentally affected by that with which we interact. That we could become undiscoverable to ourselves, and it should serve us to do so.
Horror and conspiracy are natural complements to each other–think Rosemary’s Baby–but this relationship requires proper stakes, usually dependent on balancing fear and desire. To understand the stakes of conspiracy, we must have some conception of the alternative–alternative politics, alternative modes of being, even alternative or twisting final acts. We must not only see the Other, but we must see how we too can become Othered, even if that horror is subsequently defeated.
Many recent horror movies fail to achieve the prerequisites for emotional response tied to embodied experience. The stakes are vacant, and the Outsider is emptily malignant. We’re constructing plots in which there can be no resolution beyond the mindless destruction of that which offends–which is entertaining, surely, but uncomplicated and simple. Horror itself is often lethargic, mainly reliant on jump scares–providing high-octane emotional situations for viewers for little to no effort on the narrative’s part.
Weapons’ fundamental failure to evoke complex stakes and emotional response is due to its need for narrative absolution. The paranoia it brings forth is justified, its eroticism is puritanical, and its interests are surface-level. More than merely absolved, everything tense is packaged away. Tension falls flat because what is being built up to shift narratively is simply dignified, nothing new to understand. The mob with its pitchforks raised against heresy is rightfully paranoid. Something evil is lurking in their community, stealing their kids away from them. Their group delusion-turned-reality is the source of heroism.
Texts like these are engaged in the very world-defining, morally rigid conspiracy projects they are trying to depict, but they rarely know it. While trying to structure an increasingly chaotic world, well-intentioned people fall victim to barely masked neo-conservative narratives, which hoist rigorous Christian morality upon narrative structure where it isn’t required. These conservative moral structures restrict narratives from coming to anything but foregone conclusions.
At its root, this is a problem of imaginative capacity. Who can or can’t be evil is societally preconceived. We’re just writing narratives to go alongside a fortuned inevitability.
The underpinning moral of Weapons is that you are right to feel unsettled, even to the point of mad-dog violence, by the outsider lurking in your community. Their outsider blood will infect you and yours, unless you take it upon yourself to cleanse your idyllic suburban community from any semblance of intruder. Even upon their destruction, your children may never return to themselves–fundamentally tainted by their excursion with the Devil. The American family unit may never return to what it was.
I have no interest in speculating about the politics of Cregger or anyone involved with the writing or production of Weapons. My concern is not that Weapons is a propagandist sleeper agent, but rather its narrative, both in structure and content, hides something malicious inside it. I’m concerned not with Weapons but the fact that, perhaps, we’re unable to overcome the messaging that we are inundated with by conservative, right-wing pulpits.
The first act establishes that its community's paranoia is delusional and misguided with fear, grief, and anger. The opening scene follows its two central characters, Justine Grady (Julia Garner), a disgraced third-grade teacher whose class has disappeared, and Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), aggrieved parent of Matthew, who disappeared from Justine’s class. Archer verbally accosts Justine, who attempts to address a crowd of parents and community members at an emergency town hall. He quickly mobilizes the community into a sticks-and-stones mob against Justine, who is rushed out of the room.
It’s an exceptional opening, landing you squarely into a community that is blinded by its own grief, lashing out at anyone who seems like a fit container for their anger.
Once settled in Justine’s world, indicated by a ‘JUSTINE’ title card, we’re quickly shown that she is innocent, merely the misdirected target. Yet, just as quickly, the narrative also tells us she is a troubled young woman (somewhat facetiously but with enough force to suggest sincerity). She drinks too much, she’s single, she oversteps boundaries and endangers people. Her moral deficiencies lead a cop (Alden Ehrenreich) down the wrong path, toward his eventual death.
She might be the wrong target for the case of the missing children, but she is a target.
Meanwhile, Archer is a troubled father whose greatest flaw is not his aggression, but his repression. He can’t say “I love you” to his son. His wife, who is graciously given one line, is repulsed by his feminized grief response. She leaves to go to work(!) while he lies in his absent son’s bed, immobilized. We’re meant to view his emotions as ultimately comprehensible, enough to shift our opinion on his earlier tirade. He doesn’t know what to do with all he’s feeling.
Later, Paul Morgan, the good cop, chases down a young man, James (Austin Abrams), because he thinks he’s up to no good. Don’t worry, he isn’t up to anything good. He’s not only a junkie trying to steal from the community, but he’s also a liar who puts good-cop Paul, in a sticky situation when he leaves uncapped needles in his pocket and pricks Paul during a body search. In response to this biological intrusion, Paul loses his cool, rushing to disinfect his finger. He punches James to the ground after he’s disinfected himself. It’s not framed as the morally correct decision, but it is never really complicated.
It’s unsurprising in an atmosphere like this one, in which individuals are to blame for every problem and their social ills are laid bare for all those to see, that the only reasonable answer for the overarching evil of the town is Satanism. Or whatever approximation of paganism that the film creates. To try to justify the unjustifiable–the abrupt, horrible (yet seemingly agential) disappearance of 17 children–the film’s logic has nowhere else to turn but to the Devil.
And here, the ultimate conservative wet dream plays out: a single bad actor, or a handful of them at most, are stealing your kids out from under you.
The cause of all your unease? The unchristian, uncouth, kind of ugly witch who wants to do strange things to your children to keep herself alive longer. The film’s obsession with infection, whether social, biological, or mythological, is pervasive. Justine is teaching the children about parasites before they all disappear. An outsider’s blood-borne infection that blights the family unit, gay, and children is the root of all evil.
Satanism has long roots in horror movies, tracing back to George Méliès 1896 short Le manoir du diable. Even the previously mentioned Rosemary’s Baby famously places the Devil at the center of its own conspiracy narrative. Yet, the modern resurgence of the Devil and satanism in film feels explicitly interested in laying blame on a single entity or individual.
What is it about our political or cultural landscape that refuses to let our big horror pictures of the year escape their suffocating, uncreative rules? Is evil only comprehensible through decidedly moralistic narratives?
I resent the assumption that morality needs to operate without nuance, even in religiously motivated, satanic horror. The evil within Arkasha Stevenson’s brilliant The First Omen (2024) boils down to Satan, but its moral landscape and understanding of tension, community, and paranoia are distinctly layered. Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 reimagining of Suspiria relies on the witch as well, with Satanic imagery abounding, but similarly fails to sink to conservative ideologies to differentiate good from evil.
Even our wildest fantasies can only take us so far from the traditionalist American landscape. Hollywood has given up American film as a location of nuance, or perhaps it never was one to begin with. It’s difficult to ask the genre known best for only letting the virginal girl live to reach up and above its tropes, but I’m asking regardless.
Many solid American horror directors are working with major studios–Ryan Coogler made this summer’s biggest blockbuster compelling, original horror movie–but at large, we’re working with a small, niche market that perhaps isn’t interested in pushing forward exciting, new narratives, complex moral and thematic structures, and stories that mean something beyond cementing existent social undercurrents.
Horror as a genre has the potential to depict our deepest fears, put a trick mirror up to them, and reflect something new, engaging, and relevant within it. It’s one of our greatest tools because it rips through our celluloid boundaries and into our psyches. Why settle for the cheap thrill, the ill-conceived fable? No need to get rid of the old woman–just let her reinvent herself.