Hollywood’s First Truly “Post-COVID America” Horror Film

How Weapons captures the paranoia, isolation, and distrust of a post-COVID America through a chilling lens of horror

This is a film review by Joseph Holmes. Note: CONTAINS SPOILERS

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Hollywood is one of the most influential ways we have for wrestling with our cultural changes and collective traumatic experiences. Hollywood films like The Graduate and Apocalypse Now dealt with disillusionment with our institutions, 80s movies like Rocky and Superman: The Movie reasserted our belief in American heroism, 90s movies like Fight Club and American Beauty reflected our cynicism that beating communism didn’t bring a utopia. The 2000s explosion of the superhero genre reflected a post-9/11 belief that we were in a battle of good vs evil, and the MCU’s 2010 dominance showcased a growing belief that this “evil” came from our own institutions.

Now, in the post-COVID era of the 2020s, it’s unclear how long it will take for Hollywood movies to reflect and struggle with how that event changed our collective imaginations. Some have tried to do so explicitly. Dumb Money, The Glass Onion, and this year’s Eddington were all set literally during Covid. The former two tried to capture some of the populist and anti-elites sentiment of the time, and the latter tried to show some of the chaos of conspiracy theories. But none of those films completely landed, and were too obviously trying to make a point to truly reflect how the pandemic shaped our imaginations on a visceral level.

Weapons feels like the first 2020s movie that meaningfully wrestles with the post-COVID shift in the American imagination. The film is tense, scary, as well as thrilling and even inspiring. It’s also been a massive success both critically and commercially, with a 94% critics score and 86% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and an almost unheard of mere 43% box office drop in its second weekend drop at the box office after an already successful $43 million opening weekend. And after briefly being knocked down to number #2 at the box office by Kpop Demon Hunters, it reclaimed the #1 box office spot last weekend. This is a good indication that this imagination of our day resonates.

Weapons follows a town where one night, at 2:17am, all but one child from the same classroom mysteriously vanishes at exactly the same time. The community then demands answers on what happened, but nobody can give them, leading the teacher of that class, Justine Grandy (Julia Carpenter), to be ostracized, and a local father, Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), to take matters into his own hands.

The first big thing that makes Weapons different is where the horror takes place. In Hollywood movies, horror typically comes from inside your home or away from your home. The horror renaissance of the 70s and 80s was filled with haunted houses (The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, The Shining, The Exorcist) or serial killers (Friday the 13th, Halloween). This reflected the move from America from a neighbor society to a stranger society that Jonathan Haidt alludes to in The Anxious Generation, where people were trying to escape the dangers of home (the haunted house) for the city, but then began to fear the dangers of strangers (the serial killer).

The 90s, which were much safer from serial killers and only further distanced from home life, largely kept to the horror tropes established in the 70s and 80s and switched it up with parody (Scream), camp (I Know What You Did Last Summer), and style (The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense). The 2000s were defined by the “torture porn” movies popularized by the Saw franchise, which touched on people’s fears both of terrorism and the “advanced interrogation techniques” used to fight it. The 2010s delved more deeply into the psychological fallout of such haunted houses (Hereditary, Haunting of Hill House), serial killers (Halloween, Scream) and made the fact that the horror was a metaphor for some social or psychological issue like racism (Get Out), hookup culture (It Follows) or repressed trauma (The Babadook). This reflected the rise in mental health problems, which spiked in the 2010s, along with high interest in woke/social justice issues.

But in Weapons, the monster comes from other people’s houses. As the town–particularly Archer and Justine–investigates the kids’ disappearance, their searches take them around the houses in the neighborhood that they can’t go into, yet seem suspicious. Justine wants to go in Alex’s house especially, but she’s not allowed to talk to him because she’s under suspicion. When she does, the house looks dark and scary, with the windows blocked off. Others who go inside the house don’t come back out, or see terrifying things inside before escaping. (Spoilers.) The disappearances turn out to be caused by a witch who’s taken up residence in the home of the one boy who didn’t go missing.

This reflects the reality of paranoia during the COVID era. When the virus was raging and people were forced to stay in their homes, the paranoia was based on what other people were doing in the privacy of their homes. For those on the political left, the dangers of a mysterious virus were due to ordinary citizens who lived among us that weren’t staying in quarantine or wouldn’t take the vaccine, and therefore caused the virus to spread. For those on the right, it was about elites who were plotting to manipulate (or–as some suspected–even cause) the tragedy to steal American freedoms.

This exposed a potential for horror deeply embedded in the American way of life. Because Americans care deeply about personal freedom, that means other people’s homes are–to some degree–off limits to you. But if what they can do in their home affects you, that right to privacy can be a source of fear for you. In earlier times, we knew our neighbors better, so other people’s houses were less mysterious. The “stranger” we didn’t know could be a killer in a mask on the street. But modern policing makes the public streets pretty safe. In the modern age, what’s scary is what’s going on where the police can’t go. People in our homes, and even apartments next to us, are just as much strangers as the man on the street.

In many ways, this is the “final boss” of a strange society. We moved away from our homes with our family and extended family to get away from the monsters there. Then we found the monsters who lurked on the streets. Once we escaped them by locking ourselves up in our homes, the monsters could only exist in the final mysterious place: the homes where other people locked themselves in to hide from us.

This conflict between the public and private spaces has found its way into multiple culture wars during the 2010s and 2020s, particularly when it comes to public schools. Public schools are a space where all those private homes release their children to interact with strange adults and other children. Whether that’s with gun ownership, racism or sexuality and gender identity, teachers would claim the home was the dangerous place. That’s where the kids had access to guns to bring to school. That’s where a transgender child would be misgendered by parents and be damaged by that. (Academics even argued that homeschooling should be banned to protect children.) Parents, on the other hand would claim school was the problem for being “gun-free zones” that couldn’t protect their kids, and for grooming their kids into radical gender or racial ideologies. Parents yelling at teachers at school meetings became a common video to see circling the internet.

Weapons utilizes this image vividly through the conflict between Archer and Justine. Archer is a grieving parent who blames Justine for the disappearance of his son. He accuses her publicly in a school meeting of being behind the children’s disappearance, leading a mob of other parents to do the same and harass her outside the school as well. Justine is, of course, an innocent party. The paranoia of the parents and the town’s presumption of home privacy prevent her from being allowed to talk to Alex and investigate what’s going on.

At this point, the film’s perspective largely reflects the imaginations of blue-state America. But it starts to get a little more complicated once the focus shifts to Archer. Archer is shown also to be rightly frustrated by the institutions that have failed to find his son–both the police and social services–and his own private research of the situation turns out to be, at least once he starts working with Justine, right on the money. It’s hard not to see this as the response of many red-state parents to COVID. They were told to trust the experts and institutions around the disease, the vaccines, around gender ideology, around everything. But instead, they ignored them, did their own research on the internet, and followed that research. A movie that valorizes a parent doing their own research and doing it better than the institutions they’re told to trust is definitely an imaginative validation of their narrative. This reflects the general drop in institutional trust in America over the past decades.

Of course, the institution most criticized in Weapons is the police. The police are completely incompetent at finding the kids, and the main police officer we follow is a corrupt cop who sucks at his job, cheats on his wife, beats a vagrant, and gets his boss–who’s also his father-in-law–to cover up his crime. This tracks with much with the anti-police sentiment during the COVID era, with Black Lives Matter protests spinning into “Defund/Abolish the Police” movements. Of course, corrupt cops have always been a staple of Hollywood, so it’s hard to read too much into this. But it’s worth noting nonetheless since it fits the pattern.

The reveal of the villain is also a fascinating mix of red and blue state fears. For the American left, mothers are a growing source of suspicion and terror. For the American right, single women are. This is, bluntly, most likely because single women vote left and married moms vote right. In Hollywood movies, this was reflected in movies like Don’t Worry Darling, Barbie, Immaculate, The First Omen, Longlegs, and Dune: Part Two, which portrayed romantic relationships with men and motherhood as corrupting features that turned women evil.

Gladys is a fascinating hybrid of the two. She definitely presents herself as a maternal figure. But she’s also clearly single, with no children of her own, invading the happy home of a son with his two loving parents, who are destroyed by this invader.

Alex’s defeat of Gladys, being the young boy defeating the old woman, also reflects modern trends symbolically. One of the big stories of the past several years has been young men’s sharp turn to the right. While explanations for this vary, one thing everyone agrees on is that it’s no coincidence this is happening as life is getting worse for men educationally and economically, even as a) life is getting better for their female peers based on the same metrics and b) most of men’s primary day-to-day authority figures (their moms and teachers) are women. So it’s no surprise that men would start rejecting women’s moral authority in their lives, and therefore rejecting the politics they associate with them.

Gladys’ power and Alex’s defeat of her also dovetails with how many young men–and the right–are increasingly seeing their fight with their opponents. Gladys largely defends her power by preying on others' compassion, and Alex defeats her by defying those pleas. Gladys repeatedly manipulates others, whether that’s Alex’s parents, the police, or the principal, by playing up her sickness and general vulnerability. She retains power over Alex by threatening his parents if he doesn’t cooperate. Alex, to beat her, has to see through this as a manipulation tactic and give up on protecting his parents.

This reflects the highly controversial rise in right-leaning critiques of empathy as a progressive manipulation tactic, such as in books like The Sin of Empathy and Toxic Empathy. While the film doesn’t endorse the politics that come out of this view, it does reflect the fears that make this argument often resonate with many young men who grew up in this era.

But one of the most symbolically powerful motifs in the film is the broader analysis of the problems of our cultural moment and how we can overcome them. In Weapons, the source of the evil in the world is our isolation from each other. No friends or family come to check on Alex and his parents for ages, once the government is done (incompetently) doing its job. Justine and Archer are at odds with each other because they don’t really know each other.

This motif of alienation is baked into the marrow of the filmmaking. The movie is cut up into different sections, focusing on individual characters' journeys through the story from their own perspective–like Pulp Fiction. These characters are isolated from each other even when their stories intersect in clever ways. When we are following Justine’s story and Archer is yelling at the principal about Justine and demanding answers about her, he’s kept blurred in the background. When it’s his story in the same scene, we see a close-up of his face but don’t see her at all. When Justine and Archer’s stories intersect the scene is edited so in her scene we see Archer and in his scene we see Justine. These characters–and the moments that matter for their story–are literally isolated from each other by the camera and the editing.

But then something happens. Unlike Pulp Fiction, all the stories eventually combine seamlessly into a liner story that shares the same ending. This happens as the characters meet each other, look into each other’s faces, and start to talk to each other, share information. This is how the day is–at least mostly–saved and evil defeated. This is particularly true of Justine and Archer who–as a married man and a single woman–could almost not be more representative of the cultural divide between left and right. It’s by communicating they realize they aren’t enemies and are able to save the children that they both care about.

None of this is to say that this is the right way to imagine our post-COVID America, nor that it will be the most powerful or definitive in the long run. But it is a thoughtful and viscerally effective one. It does capture–for good and ill–and meaningfully engage with the way these experiences have shaped the world we live in. It does it in a way that incorporates and synthesizes different sides in the culture wars–again, for good and ill–which makes it easier to empathize with them, and presents a hopeful way forward. At the very least, this makes the film worth understanding so we can participate in these conversations.

Major cultural moments shape our imaginations, and so does Hollywood. This will not be the last movie to be made to interpret this new era of America. But for now, Weapons is the film that has set the bar for others to match.