Let’s get it out of the way up front: This piece contains absolutely no spoilers for Weapons, Zach Cregger’s follow-up to his buzzy 2022 shocks-upon-shocks horror movie Barbarian. I’m a fan of going into any movie knowing as little as possible about it, apart from the basics of genre and who made it, and that goes triple for Weapons. The entire experience is cleverly constructed, first around a central mystery, then out of a series of smaller escalating what-the-fuuuuuuck? surprises. If you can go into this movie unspoiled, you should. It’s one of the summer’s best films, and one of 2025’s best horror flicks.
But more importantly, Weapons is one of this year’s best full-audience-experience movies. And by that I mean, seeing this movie in a theater packed with people is an absolute trip, and I highly recommend it.
I get it — people in movie theaters can be obnoxious, pulling out their phones to surf social media or whispering with their friends or commenting on the action or whatever. There was a little of that in my screening, and may the movie-whisperers of the world always have sand in their shorts. Seeing movies in theaters is more expensive and less predictable than watching them at home on the couch.
But Weapons thrives on the full darkness and complete focus of a theater setting, and Cregger’s control of tone extends to controlling how an audience breathes. Experiencing that with a crowd is tremendous. It means different things in different moments. In some sequences in my screening, you could feel that giddy sensation of a whole room full of people holding their breath all at the same time, waiting for the reveal. That’s common enough for a really good horror movie, and so is the opposite sensation, where the reveal is so sharp and startling that it provokes involuntary yelps.
But Weapons goes further as a collective experience, especially when Cregger plays with silence, and with small, telling sound effects that illustrate something important happening off-screen. At one point in my showing, the room (and the movie) went dead silent for a long, excruciating minute or two, until a single tiny, meaningful noise on screen provoked a sharp intake of breath from the whole theater — a tiny, muffled, collective gasp of shock.
That’s what I want most in a horror movie. Or in any audience experience, really — the sense of everyone being caught up together in the same moment. There’s a real power to collective experience, and an incredible power to being hit so hard by a story that you hold your breath or cry out or moan without meaning to, and hear the sounds of hundreds of other people around you, all audibly feeling the same thing at the same time.
I sympathize with anyone navigating traumas or triggers — Weapons gets gnarly in places, and there are plenty of horror elements here that are designed to get under people’s skin. (Trypanophobics, beware.) Protect yourself however you need to, visit DoesTheDogDie.com for a rundown on which common triggers you’re going to face, do whatever you have to do.
But see Weapons early and with an audience if you can. Some traumas are meant to be shared.
