“Weapons” (2025) of Mass Destruction – Hollywood Fights Evil without God
Hollywood Horror trades mass and holy water for hexes — and calls it victory.
Spoilers ahead.
Released right at the start of the 2025 school year, Zach Cregger’s Weapons tells the story of seventeen third-grade students who vanish mysteriously in the night. Julia Garner plays Justine Gandy, a young single teacher left to face the reality of having only one of her seventeen students return to class.
A narrator sets the stage:
“Every other class had all their kids, but Mrs. Gandy’s room was totally empty, and do you know why? Because the night before, at 2:17 in the morning, every kid woke up, got out of bed, walked downstairs, and into the dark. And they never came back.”
The movie begins from Justine’s perspective as she faces the onslaught of community criticism. At a tense town hall announcing the reopening of classes, angry parents insist she must be responsible for the missing children. There’s a striking image here: the teacher is now standing before the parents instead of her students, unable to “teach” them to understand. One father erupts in rage, demanding she tell the truth.
After leaving the meeting, we follow Justine for the next few days as she struggles under the emotional weight of her situation. Her car is vandalized with red paint spelling “Witch.” It’s an odd choice — in an R-rated 2025 movie, the insult could have been cruder — but it turns out to be a clue.
The film then retells the same series of events from several other characters’ perspectives.
Some online reviews have connected Weapons to the subject of school violence, even suggesting a parallel to school shooter tragedies, perhaps hinted at in the title. I hadn’t read these interpretations before watching, and for the most part, those themes did not register for me. The only moment that seemed to lean in that direction was an odd, surreal image: a grieving father glimpsing a giant assault rifle hovering above a suburban home.
Why 2:17 a.m.?
The students vanish at exactly 2:17 a.m. — a detail the film emphasizes with repeated shots of alarm clocks and timestamps. Horror filmmakers have long used this kind of coded time: Michael Myers kills at 10:31 in Halloween (a nod to October 31, All Hallows’ Eve), and in The Amityville Horror, Ronald DeFeo Jr. murders his family at 3:15 a.m., the so-called “devil’s hour.”
For viewers who catch such things, 2:17 rings a different kind of bell. In Genesis 2:17 we read:
“But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
If intentional, Cregger is invoking the Bible’s first account of humanity’s encounter with evil — the warning about divine boundaries, disobedience, and death. The children leave at night, and these garden allusions invite us to connect the two narratives. Add in the nightmares various characters experience, and a second layer emerges: an allusion to Lilith.
In medieval Talmudic folklore, Lilith is the rebellious first wife of Adam who refuses to submit, leaves Eden, and becomes a night-dwelling demon who preys on children and seduces in dreams. Perhaps Lilith is the key to understanding the missing children.
Enter Gladys
In the film’s second hour, pieces of the mystery begin to surface through a new character, Gladys — the sickly aunt of Alex, the one child who didn’t run away. Although Gladys seems pulled from another age, the ways she talks and dresses make her out of place. She speaks of another character having a “consumption” as those she was from the 1700s and her wardrobe, although not medieval, shows she doesn’t fit in the modern period.
Given that the movie is called Weapons, I couldn’t help but wonder if her name nods to the Latin gladius (sword), a word tied to both gladiators and St. Paul’s “sword of the Spirit.” The fight with the Gladys will soon be reveals as a fight with evil itself.
When Alex finally explains what happened to the other seventeen children, Gladys emerges as the source of the town’s problems. She fits neatly into the Lilith typology. She has brought with her a strange, magical tree whose branches can be fashioned into ritual wands. When combined with possession, these wands can turn people into zombie-like “weapons” who kill on the witch’s “branch-breaking” command and activating bell. Subdued only by baptizing the tool into a bowl of water, her modern-day cauldron.
These zombified characters are also activated when characters cross lines of salt. Again, an allusion to the boundaries of good and evil and playing on the historic superstitions related to salt, witchcraft, and demons. In the Biblical narrative, death comes just outside the gate-like boundaries of Eden with Cain and Abel.
Symbols Without Salvation
Cregger fills the film with patterns and symbols: the tree, the witch, the Lilith figure, the transformation of innocence into instruments of death. It’s a potent mix, and for much of the runtime Weapons feels like it’s circling some great moral reckoning. But when the final act arrives, the story never rises above the occult logic it has built for itself.
How does Alex defeat the witch? He imitates her ritual, activating the missing children to literally tear her into pieces. The scene was so strange that there were uncomfortable laughs in the theater. More unsettling is what happens next: the missing kids return, but they are neither healed nor awakened. A narrator tells us that one has started to talk, but they remain permanently changed by the witch’s curse.
In the sandboxed world of Weapons, evil is resisted but never truly overcome. The hero’s “victory” is no victory really.
Fighting Evil Without God
This is the great limitation of much modern Hollywood horror: it can sketch evil with real skill, even borrow biblical imagery to deepen its shadows, but without God, the battle is never won. What happened to the days of holy water, crucifixes, and the authority to cast out demons in Christ’s name?
It’s a sharp contrast to a classic like The Exorcist (1973). There, the priests name the demon, oppose it in the name of Christ, and ultimately give their lives so that the possessed girl is freed and fully restored.
In Weapons, Cregger reveals that fighting evil without God is really powerless.
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