Many critics agree that horror is a deeply political film genre. This has become very clear in recent years, especially with the work of Jordan Peele who has made horror films that speak to the history of racism in the U.S. As "horror" is a particular product that is aimed at a particular audience, and is not for the consumption of the whole public, several messages can be inserted and go unnoticed by the political classes and avid film watchers.
This could easily have been the case with me. The poster for "Weapons" made an appearance on my online film platform some weeks ago and I resisted it long enough before I gave into curiosity. It features the backs of children running away from the audience toward a darkening horizon, with American suburban houses on either side. The horror genre, both in novel and films, has already made suburbia an uncanny place – a place where, ironically, white middle classes had moved in the 60s to avoid non-white people in the cities. But artists would not let them be, and they have consistently made this space full of monsters and maniacs.
However, what is more unsettling in the poster than the suburban setting is the posture of the children, their arms raised halfway each side, in one sense like they are imitating airplanes. A short search in the archive of images in my head reveals what they are really mimicking, though, is the posture of the iconic photograph of the Vietnamese girl running from a Napalm bomb, with American soldiers holding machine guns behind her to make sure she runs fast. The other aspect of the posture is that as the kids are running, their legs from knee down cannot be properly seen, making them look like amputees, recalling to mind Afghan amputee children running, or indeed, the new amputee children the US-Israel complex is creating as we speak.
But of course, ‘Weapons’ is about American children, maimed by their very own government. As this is a horror film, this political fact needs to be closeted in a mystery tale, and the voice over of a child informs us that one night, in the beautiful town of Maybrook, children of a classroom walk out into the night in the posture I’ve explained, toward an unknown destination. The community is then left to mostly mourn for these kids rather than properly investigate what happened. There is a memorial wall with flowers- a scene we know from news reporting from American school shootings. Not only suburbia but also American schools are now places of horror- and the irony of Americans being proud of their spacious homes and great education establishments cannot be lost on an international audience.
Only one child has not left home, and he is sitting in an empty classroom- a picture that also has a resonance in my mental archive. The classrooms bereft of most of their children during Israel’s incursion into Gaza a decade earlier- when Israel had not quite put in motion their Final Solution, and some children and the school itself had survived. It is impossible not to see everything through the prism of Gaza during this time of genocide, but ‘Weapons’ keeps attracting these parallels, especially when we realize as the film progresses that there is some sort of mind control going on in the town. One can’t help but think of the Israeli officials’ new threats– after, indeed, they have carried out the terrorist attacks that maimed children in Iran- of how the whole world is dependent on their technology and how they can turn these gadgets into weapons (yes, the title of the film) by waving their magic wand.
After the scene of the children fleeing, we are transported to a public gathering for school parents and teachers. The narrative of the film then gets divided into several parts: Justine, the teacher for the class, Archer, the father of one of the kids who go missing, Paul, a police officer with whom Justine is having an affair, James, the local drug addict, Marcus, the school principle, and finally the quiet kid Alex, whose story, as expected, gives us the explanation of the mystery. While each character has their own arc, we see some scenes repeatedly from different perspectives, and this helps involve the viewer in the sense of solving a mystery.
There are a number of scary dreams involving faces turning into clown faces – a phenomenon that needs to be studied more at length: as in, how does a cultural product that is supposed to entertain children turn into a canonical figure of horror? However, the part that impressed me most in these several dream sequences was one in which Archer is searching for his son at night, and as he seems to find out where he is, an apparition slowly appears in the dark night sky. I closed my eyes, fearing it would be something horrifying, but it turned out to be a huge machine gun- America’s evil god declaring its dominion on the town.
The film has several such moments of grand allegory, which I won’t go into because of spoilers, but it also has smaller, softer touches that critique the American way of life that has been forcefully marketed to the world. When we get to Alex’s story, we see that he is being bullied at school and when he gets back to his perfect home and perfect parents, the parents ask him perfectly superficially how his day has been, and of course, he says nothing about the way his peers treat him. We see that the family has been buried under veneer after veneer of "everything is perfect."
As a horror film skeptic, I would be the last to tell people to put themselves through the ordeal of going to a dark room to suffer palpitations. However, if horror is now where American artists hide their cultural and political criticism, we have to go there, and some of us would be advised to do so from the comfort of their small screens.
