Weapons Ending Explained

This article contains massive Weapons spoilers.

It’s been three years since Zach Cregger burst onto the horror stage with Barbarian, his shocking pivot into stunning genre filmmaking. That word of mouth hit would go on to make 10 times its $4.5 million budget, setting Cregger up as the newest horror director to watch. Now The Whitest Boys You Know comedian is back with his highly-anticipated follow-up, Weapons. 

The thrilling horror movie stars Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, and Alden Ehrenreich as locals in a suburb afflicted by the haunting, unexplained disappearance of nearly an entire classroom of kids. As the suspenseful mystery throttles its way toward a brutal end, you may be wondering what the heck you just watched, as well as where you can get your next Cregger thrill. So of course we’re here to explain it all, including just how Weapons might connect with Barbarian…

How Did the Kids Disappear in Weapons? 

At the center of the viral marketing for the film that has sparked audiences and fans’ intrigue all over the world is a group of missing children. So of course what everyone has wanted to know since the very first teaser is who is behind the uncanny disappearances that have torn apart a small community? Well, you may be shocked to find out that there weren’t any aliens or cults involved. Instead we’re introduced to Gladys Lilly (Amy Madigan), allegedly the aunt of Alex (Cary Christopher), the only kid who didn’t go missing from Ms. Gandy’s (Julia Garner) classroom. 

As we eventually learn, it’s the clown-faced new hag in town who has tempted the children from their homes thanks to a spell that she enacted with Alex’s help. After making Alex’s near comatose parents stab themselves in the faces with forks as a form of nefarious emotional blackmail, Alex supplies his aunt with personal belongings from each of his classmates, making them susceptible to bewitchment. It’s Gladys who has control of these so-called weapons, and she can set them on any locals simply by wrapping a strand of the intended victim’s hair around a twig and snapping it in half. It’s the kind of reveal that would be just as fitting in a Grimm’s fairytale as it is on the big screen in 2025. 

So About That Ending…

As Ms. Gandy and her unexpected ally—local furious man, aka bereaved dad Archer (Josh Brolin)—try to put together the pieces of the strange mystery that has enveloped their town and stolen their children, Alex is trying to take down the woman who has taken his friends hostage and made his once safe and warm family home into a tomb for his hypnotized parents and classmates. 

It is Alex that ultimately manages to defeat Gladys, wrapping a piece of her hair around one of her twigs and snapping it, setting the children on their one time captor. In one of the film’s most shocking and brutal moments, the children run through walls, windows, and doors to get to Gladys, showcasing just how powerful her magic is, as she attempts to escape. Unfortunately (or… fortunately?) she’s soon being torn apart and eaten alive by the kids that she was once controlling. There’s a catharsis to the ending as the kids get their revenge, but it’s very clear that this isn’t a happy ending. Instead we learn through the same voiceover that introduced the film that some of the children never spoke again, and others took a year to verbalize. It’s implied that Alex’s parents, meanwhile, never recovered at all. It’s a trauma that will stick with both the children and the town as long as they live, and not only because of the people Gladys killed, but also because the children ultimately had to kill Gladys themselves to be saved. 

Does Weapons Connect With Barbarian? 

While narratively it may seem like there are no obvious connections between Barbarian and Weapons, a viral campaign to promote Cregger’s new film begs to differ. The website Maybrook News features intriguing information about the children from Weapons and their shocking disappearance. But most interestingly for this particular question, it also features an article titled “Underground Prison Discovered in Rental Home” with an image of Barbarian’s unforgettable final girl Tess looking down into the basement of horrors.  

According to the article “a rental property in Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood has become the focus of a chilling investigation after a local woman escaped the home under shocking circumstances and an actor was found dead nearby.” That’ll sound familiar to anyone who has seen Cregger’s shocking breakout horror hit, which centered on documentarian Tess discovering the nightmarish truths underneath the rental home that she’s unexpectedly sharing for a night. 

So with an in-universe website acknowledging that both movies exist in the same world, and furthermore the same Midwest, this writer has a thematic theory thought to share. After watching Weapons, I was blown away by the fact that Cregger seemed to be revealing a never before seen map of North America. On his map, a sometimes supernatural but always unsettling truth lies beneath the surface of the country that we think we live in. This is an America where witches emerge in the suburbs with the intention only to harm the vulnerable and innocent; where men kidnap and torture women creating folkloric monsters out of the unforgivably grotesque and awful sins they’ve committed upon them; it’s a new horror geography of America with Cregger as its author. 

What is Zach Cregger Working on Next?

If you cannot get enough of Cregger and his original take on horror, his next project has already been announced: he’ll be helming a new Resident Evil reboot. While it would be amazing to get a third Cregger original, the concept of him taking on a brutal and bloody franchise like Resident Evil just feels like a perfect fit. With 28 Years Later recently rejuvenating zombies with an utterly new take on the genre Danny Boyle and Alex Garland revitalized 25 years ago, it feels like audiences are open to new takes on the once slumbering ghouls best known thanks to George Romero. If there’s one director who can probably surprise us with his angle on the game adaptation and the monsters at its center, Cregger feels like the best pick.