By Mo Moshaty
Weapons (2025) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐
When all but one child from the same class mysteriously vanish on the same night at exactly the same time, a community is left questioning who or what is behind their disappearance.
Horror has really said ‘Fuck them kids” this year. How much can a poor kid take, eh? Well apparently….A LOT!! Shopping, feeding, harboring a dangerous malevolent force…maybe, probably, perhaps???
In Weapons, the opening fracture is already complete: seventeen third-graders vanish in the night. Only one child, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), is left behind. The town collapses into panic, and adults scramble to frame a narrative they can live with: theories, accusations, and whispered supernatural possibilities, even the police force is stumped when they ask Alex and he has no leads.
Alex’s silence is read as shock, guilt, or defiance, depending on the agenda of the adult in the room. Parents want reassurance, police want a confession, and the media want spectacle. The only person who doesn’t approach Alex as a resource to be mined is his teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner). A woman at the center of it all, the witch, the one who HAS to be responsible. The one who HAS to know SOMETHING. When she also doesn’t have answers, the town turns against her, and at the forefront with pitchfork and torch is Archer (Josh Brolin), who’s hellbent on proving Justine is the evil incarnate he needs her to be.
The film unfolds in six chapters, weaving together despair, suspicion, and suburban dread. As the threads converge, the sinister presence of Gladys (Amy Madigan), Alex’s peculiar great Aunt, brings the already unsettling film to its peak. Zach Cregger’s narrative puzzle delivers on emotional dread more than messaging, asking us to consider whose trauma is seen and whose is used. Weapons honours its title ambiguously, sometimes we become weapons when we’re unseen, voiceless, or displaced.
In Weapons, the title is as much about survival as it is harm, the things a child learns to carry when the world will not carry him.
Mo Moshaty is an acclaimed horror writer, lecturer, and producer whose work combines visceral storytelling with the psychological insight of her Cognitive Behavioral Therapy background. She has lectured internationally, including as a keynote speaker at Nightmares from Monkeypaw: A Jordan Peele Symposium (Prairie View A&M), No Return: A Yellowjackets Symposium (Horror Studies BAFSS Sig), The Whole Damn Swarm: Celebrating 30 Years of Candyman (University of California), and with the Centre for the History of the Gothic (University of Sheffield). Mo has also presented at the BFI, Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and Final Girls Berlin Film Festival’s Brain Binge on women’s trauma in horror cinema, Cine-Excess on The Creepy Kid Horror Subgenre and Mother/Daughter Trauma in Horror, and Romancing the Gothic on Cosmic Horror’s Havoc on The Body Electric Her short film, 13 Minutes of Horror: Sci-Fi Horror, won the 2022 Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award for Best Short Film. As a core producer with Nyx Horror Collective, Mo co-created the 13 Minutes of Horror Film Fest and partnered with Shudder in 2021 and 2022, while also establishing a Stowe Story Labs fellowship supporting women creatives over 40+ in horror. A member of the Black Women in Horror Class of 2023 and featured in 160 Black Women in Horror, Mo’s short fiction appears in A Quaint and Curious Volume of Gothic Tales (Brigid’s Gate Press) and 206 Word Stories (Bag O’ Bones Press). Her debut novella, Love the Sinner, was released July 5, 2024, with Clairviolence: Tales of Tarot and Torment released in October 2025. The first of her five-volume non-fiction series, The Annex of the Obscure: The Afterlife, will be released in 2027 from Tenebrous Press. As the Editor-in-Chief of NightTide Magazine and founder of Mourning Manor Media, Mo champions marginalized voices in horror. Under her leadership, NightTide plans to launch a film festival in 2028, furthering her mission to reshape the genre through inclusivity and representation.
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