Zach Cregger’s Weapons is refreshing in part because it puts its horror-mystery first, placing its many possible metaphorical meanings below the surface, where audiences can excavate them as they please. This bucks the recent genre trend where horror filmmakers steer their stories via central metaphors, usually addressing some kind of trauma. But there’s another recent horror trend that Weapons very much follows: Some viewers have complained that it delves into “hagsploitation” — the use of an older woman as a monstrous figure, characterized by a gnarled or otherwise exaggerated body that equates age with terror and evil.
This is sometimes also referred to as a “psycho-biddy” role, and recent forms of it have appeared in movies like The Substance, Ti West’s X, Cregger’s Barbarian, and the Eggers brothers’ The Front Room. Plenty has been written about whether this new wave of hagsploitation is just misogyny dressed up in the latest and gnarliest practical make-up effects. Some critics and horror fans feel that it’s too easy to turn these kinds of characters into a series of cheap shots at the supposed grossness of any female body a movie has deemed as too old to be the object of traditional sexual desire. But while Weapons may dip into hagsploitation, Cregger’s version of the trope lands differently than it does in other recent movies that cross the line into bad taste.
[Ed. note: Significant spoilers ahead for Weapons.]
The psycho-biddy of Weapons is Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), the witchy woman responsible for making 17 third-graders disappear all at once. She’s first seen at length when she meets with school principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong) as a temporary guardian of Alex (Cary Christopher), the only kid in his class who didn’t rise from bed at 2:17 a.m. and run off into the night.
Though the audience hasn’t yet been made aware that Gladys is the film’s villain at the point where she first appears, she’s visually coded as “off,” with garish makeup and the most severe set of horror-movie bangs since Courtney Cox in Scream 3. Marcus stays polite and professional for their chat, but other characters regard her with barely concealed confusion, and several of the movie’s leads have nightmares featuring versions of her rictus-grin face. Weapons eventually reveals that Alex’s parents introduced her to him as his terminally ill great-aunt. Once she moves into his home, she uses sympathetic magic to keep people in a catatonic state, forced to do her bidding as she drains their life forces to keep herself alive and healthy. Her smeared lipstick and bright orange wig are disguises for her withered face and nearly hairless head.
This puts Gladys in line with the aforementioned recent cinematic horrors: X, where Mia Goth plays both a budding young adult-film star and also Pearl, the elderly woman whose sexual frustration leads to much slashing; The Front Room, where Brandy Norwood is menaced by her racist, manipulative stepmother-in-law (Kathryn Hunter); The Substance, featuring Demi Moore’s transformation from beautiful aging actress to full-on goop-monster; and, come to think of it, Cregger’s previous film, Barbarian, where the monster lurking in the basement of the movie’s central house is a deformed woman who was once held prisoner there.
These movies are part of a rich horror tradition tracing back to almost any story involving witches or crones. Like any familiar trope, this one can be overused, or wielded thoughtlessly. Accordingly, some film fans online have noticed that both of Cregger’s horror movies employ a scary old woman to jolt audiences. The oft-tweeted line is that Cregger (or West, or whoever else) can think of nothing creepier or more unsettling than an older woman’s body.
While Ti West’s X was far from the first hagsploitation-related movie to be charged with a shallow treatment of gender dynamics, it became a recent flashpoint for its story of Pearl the elderly farm woman, who, in a fit of thwarted desire, murders a batch of young people who’ve come to the farm to shoot an X-rated movie. In a clever (but maybe also insulting?) bit of doubling, Mia Goth plays Pearl in addition to her main role as Maxine, the Final Girl who hasn’t been shy about wielding her youthful sexuality in an attempt to become famous. Goth explores both characters further in the prequel Pearl and the sequel MaXXXine. Another recent movie about actors, 2024’s The Substance, faced similar questions over whether writer-director Coralie Fargeat incisively satirizes Hollywood beauty standards, or simply uses them as an excuse to ogle Margaret Qualley’s body and cruelly punish Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle for wanting to maintain a TV career in spite of her aging.
As a horror fan, my first instinct was to disagree with these readings on principle. Horror movies aren’t designed exclusively to instruct us about the correct things to fear. They often tap into what we do fear, even if those fears are ugly or cruel. While many of us may believe in self-acceptance and body positivity (especially in the abstract), it’s clear that aging, the elderly, and the changes human bodies go through over time are sources of anxiety and stress for many people. This can come from a natural fear of death, or a socio-corporate emphasis on the value of youth — and therefore the value of any product that might keep people looking young and supposedly desirable. The Substance turns Elisabeth Sparkle into a monster who is neither a tragic hero nor an object of pure derision. She invites a mixture of fear, pity, empathy, and self-identification, which seems par for the course when dealing with such complicated, ingrained fears.
I admit, though, that watching The Front Room last year did give me pause. That movie seems absolutely repulsed by the very idea of elder care, with Kathryn Hunter’s grinning, feculent interloper Solange ruining the life of mother-to-be Belinda (Brandy Norwood) by demanding aid and attention. The implication that Solange is, for example, deliberately soiling herself to manipulate and humiliate Belinda is discomfiting, and not in a provocative way; it feels too close to genuine elder-care difficulties, with too little insight into the subject. Solange’s vile racism winds up feeling like a cheap cover for the audience to root against her — a surefire way to annihilate any lingering sympathy toward a dying old woman.
As a result, the you-go-girl reveal, where Belinda murders her nemesis to protect her new baby, feels like a shallow miscalculation. It’s worlds away from the mournfulness of a movie like 2020’s Relic, which confronts the horrors dementia might provoke both in caregivers and among the patient’s family. The film’s heightening the changes of an aging body to make the victim look particularly scaly and animalistic might seem insensitive. But there’s a built-in empathy when family members are prompted to wonder with terror whether their loved one’s degenerative condition is hereditary, and will eventually claim them, too.
Watching The Front Room also clarifies how sensitively X treats Pearl by comparison, despite her nominal status as the movie’s designated psycho-biddy. Audiences might laugh or cringe at various scenes featuring Pearl’s naked body, which is made up to look almost mummified in certain shots. But within the movie, she isn’t treated as a gross-out spectacle, with darkness often concealing her full form. The stringiness of her hair and pockmarked surface nature of her body is still exaggerated — it is Goth in full-body old-age make-up, after all — yet it’s her casual capacity for violence that makes her seem truly monstrous, particularly in the face of people who don’t see her as a monster. When Pearl propositions director RJ (Owen Campbell), he attempts to handle the situation gently and with sympathy. Later, Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) also tries to help her, and gets fed to an alligator.
Notably, the character who reacts most negatively to Pearl’s body is Goth’s Maxine, Pearl’s de-aged mirror image. That tracks with how X’s thematic throughline isn’t about how old people are gross, while young people rule; it’s about the melancholy, inevitable passage of time, and the fruitless desire to preserve youth. Appearing in an X-rated movie is one way of attempting that, whether the characters realize it or not. Their movie, if completed, might function as a longer and more explicit variation on Pearl’s old photos of herself: youthful health and desirability, captured in time.
Weapons doesn’t use its central hag quite so thoughtfully or poignantly. In Barbarian, Cregger mitigates the fearsomeness of the mutated, physically distorted Mother (Matthew Patrick Davis) by allowing her some cathartic justice when she strikes out against AJ (Justin Long), the toxic director accused of raping one of his actresses. After all, another evil man is essentially Mother’s creator. Weapons skips straight to the opposite catharsis in the end, with young people tearing the old witch apart. There isn’t some larger-scheme bad guy to blame for Gladys’ actions.
At the same time, the most disturbing aspect of Gladys’ physicality — that thing that haunts other characters’ nightmares — isn’t really her body, it’s her garish clown-like makeup and wig. This does recall the stereotype of an older woman who struggles to beautify herself long after she’s lost the judgment or physical ability to do so, by the standards of beauty marketers. (See also Elisabeth endlessly layering on makeup and despairing at how she looks as she tries to prepare for a date in The Substance.) Yet Gladys’ wig and smeary lipstick let her pass as an eccentric old lady, rather than the more conniving witch underneath. When Alex sees her without her disguise, it’s her deception that’s laid bare more than her body.
It’s also notable that Weapons also goes deepest on Gladys during the section dedicated to young Alex’s point of view. The idea of a grotesque babysitter controlling and essentially replacing a child’s parents plays like something out of an updated dark fairy tale. That’s what Weapons turns into as it hurtles toward that memorable climax, cleverly morphing from a parent’s nightmare into a child’s nightmare. (And then, finally, a child’s imperfect but gruesome, gleeful fairy-tale vengeance.) A child’s apprehension about an elderly stranger who looks either clown-like or desiccated is not a flattering or “correct” fear. It is also a pretty common one, and Cregger’s movie gleefully exploits it.
If the movie errs in its hagsploitation, it’s not through insensitivity so much as the lack of a moment where the horror fans have to hand it to Gladys. Even if the audience isn’t rooting for her, the best movie hags skew more towards monsters (fierce, majestic, compelling) than villains (conniving, antagonistic, evil). There are moments of perverse she-did-nothing-wrong triumph in X, The Substance, and Barbarian, even though none of the crone figures in these movies ultimately survive. If anything, Gladys might be too much of a standard-issue witch to join the hagsploitation pantheon.
Cregger might not have intended for her to wind up there. Though the Aunt Gladys prequel now in development, based on cut material from the Weapons script, might lock down the character’s official origin, Cregger gave Madigan two options for the character’s backstory on the set, for her own private use. Either she’s a once-normal woman who turned to dark magic to survive her illness, or she’s a creature attempting to disguise herself and prolong her life as a human. (There’s little evidence for the latter in the movie itself, though that could explain Alex’s mother mentioning Gladys’ long absence from their lives.) Leaving those options to the performer suggests Cregger was more interested in the movie’s visceral effects than in creating a hag-centric metaphor that can be tracked from backstory to climax, with some sort of meaningful message about how society treats aging women.
Of course, it is possible for filmmakers to be genuinely dismissive and exploitative of their psycho-biddy characters. Horror perhaps more than any other movie genre is subject to its best ideas being repeated and cheapened. Other filmmakers might well have paused over the hagsploitation optics of any of these movies, Weapons included. None of them are unassailable. Maybe it’s necessary for horror, though, that some movies don’t hesitate to risk bad taste.
