Weapons Is Nightmare Fuel, But I Was Also Disappointed By The Horror Villain For One Big Reason

I’m always looking out for what upcoming horror movies are on the way because the genre has brought me some of my most unforgettable memories watching films in recent years. So, when I saw our five-star Weapons review, and its massive box office achievements, I knew I had to give it a shot. Wow...I didn’t know what I was in for. Zach Cregger’s followup to Barbarian is truly terrifying to me, and that’s not something that I can quickly say about most “scary” movies out there. I do have a gripe with its ending reveal, though.

While I absolutely appreciate Weapons for the very bold, scary and expertly crafted movie that it is on one hand, I do have to say that for me personally, it went a couple of bridges too far for my taste on the other. For one, having the main victims of the movie being elementary school children really got under my skin, because the importance of childhood and innocence is a very sacred thing to me that this movie totally tore at the seams. The second reason why Weapons was a lot for me is the villain behind their disappearances and all the brutal violence of the movie, which I want to talk about more in depth. MAJOR SPOILERS are ahead!

I Was Disappointed By Gladys

Gladys absolutely had all the proverbial hairs on my body standing up in fear, from the first appearance in a nightmare early in the film, and things just spiral from there. It’s rather amazing that Cregger was able to do this with a red-wigged old lady with funky clothing and weird makeup. But, I also left the film feeling put off by the narrative decision to make the mystery of the film lead up to a witch who basically kidnaps her nephew and feeds off the souls of children in order to stay as youthful and alive as possible. When you think about it, it’s kind of an age old horror story, when the rest of Weapons felt fresh and modern to me.

I’m not saying Gladys is a bad villain – as I've communicated, I found the whole thing to be quite effectively chilling, but in the larger context of all the horror movies I’ve seen in the past few years, Gladys feels like the continuation of a trend in the genre that’s starting to become rather stale for me.

What's Up With So Many Creepy Old Lady Villains In Horror Movies Lately?

So, Gladys is the fifth “creepy old lady” villain I’ve seen in a major horror release in the last three years. Let’s go through the examples. In Ti West’s 2022 movie, X, a group of young people trying to make a porno at a rural farm and are hunted down by an elderly couple, Howard and Pearl – with Pearl’s creepy demeanor expertly played by Mia Goth, being the scary highlight of the whole thing. The X ending disturbed audiences (including myself) because Pearl actually wanted in on the sexual activities taking place on their property.

That very same year, Zach Cregger’s debut horror movie, Barbarian, came out. The twist of that movie is that a character known as The Mother, who comes from a line of women a deranged man named Frank raped and had kids with to a gross, incestuous level. The Mother took the form of an elderly naked woman with her hair falling out and saggy breasts.

Then, we jump to two other horror movies from last year. There’s the Eggers’ The Front Room, which had Kathryn Hunter playing a terrifying stepmother-in-law of Brandy’s character, who haunts the poor pregnant woman with extreme caregiving tasks, along with a sprinkle of racial and religious microaggressions that also had me turning in my seat. And finally, there’s The Substance, which has an aging star Elisabeth Sparkles (Demi Moore) resorting to a mysterious medication that allows her to be young for two weeks at a time slowly turning herself into a grotesque old lady monster. Anyone else sensing a trend here?

Villains Like Gladys Are Given No Redeeming Qualities, And Are Depicted As Absolute Evils

Along with creepy old ladies being a common subject matter for villain characters in recent horror movies, I noticed each of them have a similar thing in common. There is very little empathy or humanity shown for these characters, and who they are as people. Each of them really scared me (aside from maybe The Substance) because they are seen as these completely evil anomalies that cannot be easily stopped – especially with any kind of reason.

To get into Gladys storyline further, it’s made pretty clear that she doesn’t care about anyone except for herself. Heck, she allows a 10-year-old to watch his parents self harm themselves and be completely unresponsive to him and makes him serve soup to them daily (along with his whole class of children) in order to stay alive. If that isn’t pure evil, I don’t know what is.

The Use Of Aging Women's Bodies To Disgust Audiences On So Many Occasions Is Becoming A Bothersome Trend

Upon reflection, the trend is starting to bother me because it’s portraying elderly women as these absolute evils with grotesque bodies, and hearts of coal, and I don’t really know what the root of that is. Sure, in The Substance it’s talking about how the pressures of societal standards creates a literal monster, and perhaps X is about sexual repression of women (that is before Pearl fleshes out a rather psychotic origin story for the character), and Barbarian imagines the evil that can brew from a man taking advantage of women across generations, but what is Weapons trying to tell me? What bigger message is behind the surface to account for the terror Gladys wreaks on a classroom of children and their parents?

I can only deduce that the aging of women is coming in fashion as a nightmarish image that is sure to get horror fans raving, and I have complicated feelings about that. As someone who hopes to be an elderly woman someday, I’m not necessarily offended by this trend, but I am troubled about how much they’ve amounted to some of the scariest movies I’ve seen in recent years. With so many examples in recent years, I’m hoping horror filmmakers can get the memo and look elsewhere when crafting their next big villain twists, otherwise it's moving into trope territory.