Zach Cregger’s Weapons is a silky, sinuous, sort-of spiritual sequel to his debut Barbarian. Both films draw on classic suburban horror and are fascinated with the thresholds that comprise suburbia. Both films are also chapterised into several sections, relying on different perspectives to create an emergent sense of horror. In Weapons, the driving event is the disappearance of nearly an entire class of primary school children in an American suburb. All of the children leave their beds in the middle of the night and run out into the dark, leaving their last known images on the doorcams and surveillance equipment of their parents. Cregger sets up this premise in the first five minutes of the film and then spends most of his screenplay switching between a number of characters in the suburb, all of whom experience the event from their own particular perspective. This allows him to artfully move between classical suspense, visceral body horror and the more pervasive and lingering sense of strangeness that often characterises the most resonant horror films.

Throughout these different perspectives, Cregger returns time and again to the connective tissue of suburbia. The first chapter is told from the vantage point of Justine, played by Julia Garner, the teacher of the class that disappeared. Understandably, the parents focus their attention and frustration on Julia, especially since she has a tendency to act like a surrogate parent herself, and so break down the distinction between the childrens’ home lives and school lives in ways that Principal Marcus, played by Benedict Wong, describes to her as unprofessional. Within the suburban syntax of the film, this means that Justine spends too much time in the connective tissue between the students’ homes and the school building. However, this is also the last place that the children were seen alive, as they all ran off into the night, so it makes Justine peculiarly well situated to investigate Alex, played by Gary Christopher, the only child who didn’t vanish. As Justine trails Alex to and from school, in an effort to figure out why he was spared, Cregger establishes the connective suburban tissue of backyards, porches, fences, back windows and porticos that will propel his film. 

One of the other narrative strands occurs from the perspective of Archer, a parent of one of the missing children, played by Josh Brolin. Arthur is the first person to suggest that the disappearances might have a spatial connection beyond the fact of the children all being in the same class at school. He maps the exact location where the children vanished, signposting them with small flags, and discovers a series of sightlines and trajectories that don’t seem to conform to the conventional suburban wayfinding devices of sidewalks and roads. Another thread follows Paul, a corrupt police officer played by Alden Ehrenreich, who chases a homeless man across town, trying to keep track of him as he disappears into the connective tissue between squalid apartment blocks. Yet another chapter follows this homeless man himself, James, played by Austin Abrams. Like Justine, he occupies the interstitial nooks and crannies of the suburb, the spaces between spaces, and this means that he too is peculiarly susceptible to the event that has unfolded. In fact, so attuned is he, as an unhoused man, to the thresholds between houses, that he is the first to discover the children.

Cregger’s fascination with suburban thresholds isn’t merely a matter of narrative details either. All of these vignettes are linked by a panoramic and mobile sense of space, as if the camera is trying to see beyond, or find its way around, the normal architectural sightlines of suburbia. Many memorable scenes involve tracking-shots that take us through several obliquely related planes of space, frequently shot from or of moving vehicles, or both at the same time. The plot builds through these flamboyantly escalating and intersecting trajectories, until it feels as if no single person or story is capable of perceiving the meaning behind the disappearance of the children in its totality. Rather, the event requires a preternatural or post-human optic that even Cregger can only approximate with his camera. That’s not to say, however, that the characters in the film don’t try to approximate this too. In Justine’s obsessive driving, Archer’s obsessive mapping and Austin’s inability to keep still, we see this desire to extend the body and sensorium until it is commensurate with the horrific event at the core of the film.

In classic suburban horror, this unthinkable position of total perception was occupied by the slasher. Behind the mask the slasher could see everything but they could never be totally seen, turning them into a perfect synecdoche for the ideological blind spots of Reganonomic suburbia. Cregger is operating in the same vein, although things turn out a little differently here. When the children vanish they run away with a flying motion that suggests a disregard for the normal spatial and visual constrictions of suburbia. Over the course of the film other characters are “infected” by the same event and adopt the same flying body language. Those who remain intact, such as Justine, Archer and Austin, are simply trying to keep up with this flight while remaining constrained by a more human set of sightlines and physical constrictions. After a while, Justine and Archer realise that these victims have been “weaponised” by a supernatural entity and are moving like a “heat-seeking missile” towards their targets, irrespective of whatever pieces of suburban infrastructure lie in their way. The weaponised children and adults make suburban thresholds terrifying because they no longer register the boundaries they are meant to uphold.

In other words, Weapons is driven above all by a series of rhythms and trajectories, ripples in the suburban space-time matrix that confound those who are still bound by it. Rather than a lone slasher disrupting the suburban sphere, it’s a network of weaponised children and adults. Admittedly, there is a witch behind them, but her presence as an individual is less terrifying than these collective undulations and perturbations that she leaves in her wake. When the children are finally turned back upon her, they pursue her through the most elaborate cross-sectional trajectory of the film – through backyards, back porches, whole houses, front porches, they perform a horrific riff upon the final sequence in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, when Ferris can only make it home by running as the crow flies, with no regard for whose property he cuts across, or where. Even then, after tearing the witch apart, the children don’t recover completely, and the film doesn’t end with total closure. Instead, Cregger paints a picture of a suburban landscape bisected by dark networked technologies that we can never fully contain or keep up with in the “real” physical world. In that sense, suburbia becomes a synecdoche for the old world of time and space, with its visual and physical regimentations, in the face of a weaponised virtual realm that ripples eerily through it, always eluding our total control.