What If Witches Are Actually Real? Zach Cregger’s Weapons and Witches

Robert S. Cairns

In high school we had to read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), an allegory about the McCarthy-era, Communist ‘Red Scare’ in America that used the Salem Witch Trials as its point of comparison. Years later, I discovered there was actually Communist infiltration during this time and that the fear was credible. If the supposed hysteria surrounding the ‘Red Scare’ had some basis in truth, could the same be said of the witches Arthur Miller used as a historical reference?

Years later still, I watched Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943). Another allegory for mass hysteria, I remember wondering why witches couldn’t just be real in this moment of occult-haunted history, and why it seemed as if the intelligent person had to represent them by way of allegory. Dreyer depicted the existence of miracles in his other, most famous film, Ordet (1955). But apparently witches were a step too far for him.

I noticed that with some exceptions, any so-called ‘serious’ treatise on witches understood them to be not real but rather an example of a hysteria problem or a persecution problem. The implication was that our global and persistent belief in witches has really just been one awful misunderstanding. In other words, what the backward mind considered to be witchcraft, the enlightened mind considered to be evidence of social, religious, or gendered persecution.

Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943)

I expected Zach Cregger’s Weapons (2025) to do the same when the word ‘WITCH’ is painted on the side of the teacher’s car after all of the children from her class mysteriously vanish one night. I was pleasantly surprised when the narrative instead leaned into the idea of witches in a more open way. But the idea of witches as a form of social madness is still played with in the film. The teacher is single, unmarried, and childless. This is apparently bound to raise some suspicion, especially considering the bizarre nature of the children’s disappearance.

In her article on Weapons in The Atlantic, titled “Nothing Is Scarier Than an Unmarried Woman”, critic Beatrice Loayza considers the gendered view. But men were also suspected of, and persecuted for, being witches. And in many cultures, men are also considered with some degree of suspicion if they are still unmarried and without children after a certain age. Why wouldn’t this be the case? It seems to me that the film presents a more entertaining possibility: what if nothing is scarier than an actual witch?

Other subtext, most notably American gun violence, is teased throughout the film. During a dream sequence, we see a giant AR-15 rifle hovering menacingly over a house. Regardless of one’s political affiliations, American gun violence can reasonably be seen as ‘demonic’ in some sense of that word. We also see how problems at home can lead to problems with classmates and then classmates ‘disappearing’, a sure thematic acknowledgement of the disturbing prevalence of school shootings in the US. But everything in the film, including these problems at home, keeps coming back to the idea of witches.

Aunt Gladys and Alex in Weapons (2025)

What are witches and what do they want? Do witches use natural things to channel the supernatural or do they channel their own supernatural powers through natural things? If they are merely malcontents and trouble-makers, can their historical presence be explained by our modern understanding of serious mental illness? Or has the secular world misread these signs as clinical instead of spiritual ailments?

We get some attempt to address at least a couple of these questions in Weapons. If witches are real then their interest in children will have some goal in mind and would make the witch a certain type of creature. The many references in the film to parasites are obviously by careful design. In teasing some political and some gendered readings but ultimately not committing to them, the film (contra Dreyer or Arthur Miller) asks, in an intelligent way: what would it look like if witches are actually real? Because of this, the film’s other concerns pivot around ideas of witchcraft and evil, instead of the other way around with witchcraft and evil as ‘mere allegory.’

Some other recent films that address evil are Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) and the Philippou brothers’ Bring Her Back (2025). But the cursed bloodline of the former appears to emphasise ‘family trauma’ as its main theme, and the failed maternal necromancy of the latter seems to give us ‘parental loss’ as its main theme. It is Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015), with its suggestion of an ancient, pantheistic evil, that is the least didactic and therefore most closely related to Weapons. In the end, for all its high-energy and tonal shifting, Weapons does invite the viewer to take this spiritual question seriously.

The term ‘elevated Horror’ has been discussed to death in recent years. But it’s worth noting two initially paradoxical insights from the discussion. The first, that horror films don’t always need to be ‘message’ vehicles. The second, that horror has always contained some deeper anxiety or commentary about something or other. The second point seems to me inescapably true, and the first seems to forget that the ‘message’ can also be the actual subject of the horror itself. Although multiple readings are always possible, Weapons makes as its centrepiece the de-allegorised possibility of a witch, in the same way that other readings of Jaws (1975) do not detract from the terror of a shark with dead black eyes like a doll.