Unguided: The Thoughtless Transphobia of Weapons (2025)

CONTAINS SPOILERS

No Nazis here: the assembly was instructed to 'extend their right hands in blessing' to a member of the Catholic order who ran their school.

 

Weapons had one of the most intriguing horror premises I've seen in recent years. The children of an entire classroom all leave one night. They leave their homes and they leave their parents. They do this simultaneously and without a single word to anyone. At 2:17 am, when no child should be awake, the doors of their American parents' stately suburban homes gracefully crawl open and the kids run into the night, their arms out to their side like they're using them to glide. They take long strides, their faces blank. They are no longer human children; they are inhuman birds, flying free of the ties that bind. 

Except one. 

The empty classroom that this lone child walks into the next day is headed by Justine (Julia Garner). She cares about the kids dearly. So much so that in acting on this, she oversteps professional boundaries. Outside of work, she is hardly better. She's told to go straight home after the grieving parents heckle her with accusations of abuse- she goes to a liquor store. She seduces her recovering alcoholic ex. She goes to the house of Alex (Cary Christopher), the one remaining kid, even after he yells at her to stop following him, and rings his doorbell repeatedly. When she gets no answer, she stakes out his house in her car. 

On this car, someone painted the word 'WITCH' in bright red letters. We find out later that this was a man (Josh Brolin), an adult parent of one of the kids who was taken. This is him blaming her when by his own admission, he has no understanding of what happened.

This is a stark reminder of what the accusation of witchcraft really means- contrary to contemporary reclamation, it was not a real and suppressed spirituality with organisation and coherency. It meant simply: you are not proper. You are not living up to the standards of society. And most of the time, almost not needing to be said: you are a woman. The most famous text on 'Witchcraft', the Malleus Maleficarum, is a staggeringly misogynistic work, and the trope of witches stealing children survived all the way to the American satanic panic. This movie seemed to be a direct comment on it. A man paints a mark of witchcraft on the vehicle of a single, seductive, unprofessional, drinking woman, with every grieving parent blaming her without a second thought for the disappearance of children who were their responsibility as well as hers. Sharp criticism.

At first.

The American suburban horror genre has always been both progressive and conservative at once. It revolves around the safety of the so-called middle class, living in larger houses than the majority of the country, casting personalised transport and ownership of property (the hope for which are now laughable relics to most of us) as normal. The non-white, the queer, the woman, the child- all the characteristics of these groups that are not palatable and submissive to American hegemony are cast as wraiths and monsters- oozing, growling things without reason or interiority. This is undoubtedly a conservative scene.

And yet...

Even the most bog-standard entry in that genre carries with it an undroppable awareness of what the source of that fear really is. It knows that the ideal American family is a manmade, imposed, fragile thing. It is built on top of the churning, chaotic earth and the bones of countless loud and inconvenient human beings we call 'minorities'. The spiritual universe itself, the one the God-fearing American thinks himself master over, revolts at this construct. The climax of classic haunted house stories like The Amityville Horror often include a scene where the family CANNOT STAY HERE and they must flee into the night, leaving the house they called home to be devoured by the opposite of them. And they might live, but they don't win. The best that they can do is move somewhere else, somewhere that also used to be home to the Indian or the poor, bulldozed and paved over, blood seeping into the plumbing, all the ghosts wanting revenge. This, it says, this is the best Imperial hegemony offers you. Live by the rules of the rich and you will live in constant fear. Undoubtedly a progressive analysis.

The X factor that made Weapons hook me was the uncertainty. As one of the parents angrily declares, this is something they do not understand. No one took or forced these kids, they LEFT. This seemed to be engaging with the double consciousness I've just described, and I thought it was brilliant. The terror was not that the kids were taken by someone- it's that they weren't. Because the former could be understood, and the kids could be theoretically retrieved from the kidnapper. The societal relationship of kids to parents is left intact. 

Kids, despite all the advances made in human and child rights and welfare (telling that I didn't think twice before typing those as separate things), are still an oppressed group. They are objects and possessions of their parents, their schools, and their churches- even each other. They are considered not-yet-humans. They are there to be shaped and acted upon, and debates around how best to guide them to adulthood revolve around how to act upon them and who is shaping them- the assumption that they are to be molded like Eliza Dolittle is not questioned. It's not even considered an assumption. So the children leaving in a synchronised, confident, unforeseen, autonomous action shakes the edifice of the family to its core. It's a dreadful reminder that the hold that schools, parents and states have over children is unnatural and unfixed. A reminder that 'their' kids are already human beings, and like any human they can do things of their own accord that shock and confuse those around them. Not just that, but they all did this together! They can organise! That means they can threaten power! They can think! They can choose! They can fight... and they can leave. 

It would be one thing if just the wrong person was shaping them- it petrifies these parents to think that no one is shaping them at all.

Sadly, the movie squanders all of this, in possibly the worst way. The human characters are still refreshing- all flawed, vibrant, electrically alive, not even seeming like actors- with a unique dash of humour and even satire in their portrayals. I heard, and let out, many laughs when objectively awful things were happening. I believe this is due to two things: first, the controlled pacing. The tension is held and released playfully and confidently. And the second is the performances of the adult characters, which boil over with amusing compensation for their failures and inadequacies.

The problem is that the movie has a villain. This villain is not human. Not in the sense that she is an otherworldly being (though she might be) but that the filmmakers consider her, clearly, just a villain. A monster. A thing. See, it turns out that the children WERE forced, they WERE taken, they DO belong to someone else- a witch. Yes, a witch. Not a woman who has been called a witch, a literal witch right out of the ravings of Kramer. Old, ugly, balding, wearing garish, gaudy, too-colourful outfits, excessive red lipstick, and wigs. There is a scene where Alex, the one remaining kid, sees a wig on a stand as the witch sleeps and the camera pans to reveal the her almost completely bald head and bare arms, no makeup. That is the horror in this scene. There is no subversion to how this trope is played- it's straight an as arrow. A child-stealing witch who does magic with blood and hair, has a salt line you can't cross lest her slaves attack you, and is an ugly old crone who intrudes on a normal family and takes them over. 

Why did the Witch do this? Why did she want to take the children? This is never answered. No, a movie doesn't need to make its villain's motivation clear, but here, a reason is never even hinted to exist. I tried to think of one. The little dialogue that the witch 'Gladys' had had seemed to draw from abusive conservative mothers and grandmothers from what we think of as the 50s. Her wardrobe would too, if not for the pantsuits. I tried to think of the abusers I have come into contact with and lived under, and all the conversations I'd had with therapists about why they do what they do. After all this time and thought, I've only been able to conclude that control is an end in and of itself. There isn't truly a reason so much as a drive.   

The number one threat to children is their parents. Bar none. Look up statistics and research. They are the ones who have the most control over and proximity to said children. It is not questioned that their authority over them is earned and valid. So is the witch here a stand-in for the worst impulses of those parents? That drive to control and abuse, that the current structure of the family makes so easy, if not encourages? 

I don't believe so. Because if that was the intention, I imagine that they would've made her blend in. To be like any one of the grieving parents- and on that note, we don't even learn what kind of parents they were to the children they care so much about. It's a huge missed opportunity. Real abuse is an action, not an appearance. Once you've experienced it, the possibility never leaves your head that it could be anyone treating another person the way you were treated behind closed doors.

If we are to go just on the results of the filmmakers' efforts, we have this: the witch sticks out like a sore thumb in the way she performs an outdated, mismatched, gaudy parody of femininity. Nonetheless, she is trusted by the authorities, much to the frustration of the audience and the protagonists. Her hair, her makeup, her mannerisms, her clothing, its all an affectation to ingratiate herself into polite society- but it's a slapdash one. It's at once completely unconvincing and also flawlessly effective. The enemy is both strong and weak. I do not say that accidentally, because what this witch uses her affectation to do is steal children and make them into weapons. This is how Christians cast the figure of the Jew centuries before the Nazis. 

This is how the figure of the transgender woman is cast today. 

Through a snippet of a child answering a question in Justine's class, and Marcus and his partner watching a documentary, 'parasites' are mentioned- specifically tapeworms and the Cordyceps fungus, respectively. Do I even need to say it? The Nazis characterised the Jew as a parasite on the body of the nation. It is when that documentary is on that the witch comes to the door. Marcus is the first adult the witch enslaves on screen, and is the movie's only Asian character. She forces him to kill his partner. I thought it significant that the mixed race gay couple is targeted first by her.

But wait, surely this means that she is meant to be a conservative, bigoted figure, not a caricature made by a bigot? And the movie's heroine is a flawed and single working woman with loose sexual morals, that's hardly conservative, right? Even a drug addict who steals for survival is portrayed in a positive, or at least neutral, light, and uncovers the location of the kids because he was stealing things to pawn. An act of police brutality is committed against him and is shown to be an unjust thing. Marcus is Asian, gay, and occupies a position of authority at the school, which he uses fairly. 

Well, here's the rub. The insidiousness of transphobia is not that it aims to convince you that we are bad people. It aims to convince you that we are not people at all. That we are parasites, imposters, predators, invaders. That we only want to enforce our will on others and make them into empty vessels for ourselves. 

The bigoted hegemony has tried to adjust to advances in minority rights so that it doesn't get destroyed. What's happened isn't so much that mainstream society has become less bigoted by allowing all minorities to be a part of it, but that it's expanded to only include minorities who act and present a certain way. In this way it can even turn us against our own. The figure of the queer, the Indian, the Jew etc is still there. Out on the fringes, a deformed monster coming for your kids- only now it's coming for black kids as well as white kids. 

Marcus and his partner are respectable, law abiding, friendly and integrated people. They are gay (one or both could be bisexual), but they are not queer in the sense of being disruptive outsiders. They even make hot dogs- could you imagine a more American food? Ok, it came from Germany and got its name from a racist lie, but it's American NOW.

I fully believe that this movie was made with a liberal, if not progressive, eye. It was directed and written by Zach Cregger, who was a part of the Whitest Kids U Know- a sketch comedy group that I watched quite a lot as a kid, and I can say with certainty that it was not conservative. Though the principal members (not counting guest actors) were all male, they frequently played women in their skits. Never did I see them single out the act of playing a woman for mockery by itself. But even those of us who consciously choose to reject normalised bigotry can still carry it with us. Before we even tried to decide our own paths in life, we had so many people and institutions trying to decide ours. The concept of the witch is of course steeped in, if not totally originating from, Christianity- yet I did not see one cross, crucifix, or other Christian symbol or act of worship in the film. It's become just a thing, part of the soup we live in, and we have to remind ourselves that these things have origins and meaning, or we risk sending messages like these.

I saw this movie with a friend who said of the witch 'Although, her outfits were quite "slay"'. This friend dresses in unique, eye-catching, stunning outfits and is quite slay herself. It made me sad that this was a marker of villainy in the universe of this movie. That it communicated 'she does not belong here' and should not have been accepted. Justine teams up with the father who called her a witch, the voice of the town that was rejecting her. The lesson he learned isn't that witches don't exist- he just got the wrong one. And the right one was exactly what she looked like.

The ending of this movie makes what can be interpreted as its most progressive statement, though its preceded by its most baldly cruel moments. Alex redirects the weaponised children Gladys has made her slaves, and she runs from them in wide-eyed terror (while wearing a blue robe over pink pajamas- if unintentional, possibly the most unfortunate use of trans colours since Godzilla tore through white ice with blue breath and pink spines after messily dismembering and devouring a sea serpent named Tiamat in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire) through houses and yards, bursting through doors as the kids smash through windows. Docile couples comment on it in pauses between cacophonies and express annoyance at the inconvenience. It's shot and paced as a comedy. She is caught and torn apart in broad daylight, and we see her being ripped apart in bloody detail. She is made fully abject; not one redeeming or likeable thing about her, so why should anyone give her the dignity of an off-screen death? Why should it even be a moment of sobriety? 

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. 
-Exodus 22:18 (King James Version)

The children, in the end, are no longer under the control of the witch... but they are not returned to normal. Being controlled has irreversibly changed them. The narrator, also a child, tells us 'some of them are beginning to talk'. She also tells us that Alex is living in another city with another Aunt. It's left smartly open whether or not this Aunt is like Gladys or not, but in my mind, it doesn't matter. He still belongs to someone.