By Dan Roberts

**SPOILERS**

Weapons (2025), directed by Zach Cregger, had a big opening weekend and generated a lot of positive reviews. The film has great actors playing fully developed and realized characters whom the audience connects with. This makes the terrible things that happen to them resonate and curl toes. If you have yet to see the movie, don’t read any further. Just know, it is good. Go see it.

Now, if you have seen it, you know about Aunt Gladys. Aunt Gladys is a terrific villain. Her motivations are cruel and twisted, and selfish. Her actions are sinister and calculated. She is a psychopath. She does what she wants to get what she wants. 

Gladys is almost certainly a witch. You will note that I rather like evil witches who become icons. See my article on the Wicked Witch of the West. But, she is more than a witch. Aunt Gladys is emblematic of a common childhood experience. The terrifying elder requires our parents’ attention.

Many of us remember the entrance into the home of an elder whose needs come to dominate the time of other adults in the house. Children who have lived under these circumstances remember the feeling. They are often left to handle things for themselves. Meals get abridged, soup is cooked in the microwave, the TV is turned way down, and general childhood revelry is restricted. All of this so as not to disturb the sick in their final months or years.

Aside from being an encumbrance in a time when a child lacks empathy, the elder is also very scary.  They are generally in a depleted physical state. They wear cosmetics and clothing dated to more than a generation ago, meant to hide the underlying sallow appearance. There is something foreign and out of date about them, like dried-out vegetables in the refrigerator. Their grasp on living is so weak that death itself stalks about the house. 

If the specter of death and neglect are not bad enough, children contend with the unknown. They remember Grandma and Grandpa. They were always around. They are familiar, loving, and their values are consistent. This familiarity breeds empathy, but no one is familiar with Aunt Gladys. 

She comes in from the cold, sure, but to what end? She takes up space, she disrupts, she is strange, she is a foreign body upsetting the homeostasis of the nuclear family. That she turns out to be just as evil as she appears makes her that much scarier.

For Gladys to become a horror icon, she must continue to provoke primal fear. She must remain inscrutable and mysterious. Our lack of understanding of her psychopathy is what makes her frightening. 

Rumor has it Warner Bros. wants a ‘prequel,’ featuring Aunt Gladys. Mr. Creggers, I beg you to tell them “No!” https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/weapons-aunt-gladys-prequel-zach-cregger-1236342838/

Don’t ruin the fantastic work done by Amy Madigan by giving “Gladys an origin.” That she was out there doing horrible things to people is part of what unsettles us in the first place. We don’t need to see them. Gladys is scary because we are left to contemplate them. 

We already know everything we need to know. She will do anything to get what she wants, and it doesn’t work out for her. That is it. That is the origin story. We can stop there. To know her anymore would break her spell over the audience.

Cregger, I beg you, for the sake of the effective villain played masterfully to the terror of the masses, leave Gladys where she lay… in pieces on some poor family’s front lawn.