Weapons Beat Sheet Analysis
Why We Chose to Do a Save a Cat! Beat Sheet Analysis of Weapons
Weapons is one of the breakout horror hits of the year, with an unusual structure of “chapters”—each telling the story of an individual character—which, in the end, coalesce into a captivating and terrifying tale. Oh, and it hits the Save the Cat! beats.
Weapons
Written and Directed by: Zach Cregger
Genre: Monster in the House (Subgenre: Solve the Puzzle)
A hero is trapped in some location or situation (aka the “house”) and must survive a monster (human or otherwise). There must be a sin committed—often greed—prompting the creation of a supernatural being that comes like an avenging angel to kill the sinners. Monster in the House stories are commonly found in horror movies, urban thrillers, or comedies about people or things that just won’t go away.
The 3 elements of a MONSTER IN THE HOUSE story are:
1) A monster that is supernatural in its powers—even if its strength derives from insanity—and “evil” at its core.
2) A house, meaning an enclosed space that can include a family unit, an entire town, or even “the world.”
3) A sin. Someone is guilty of bringing the monster in the house… a transgression that can include ignorance.
Save the Cat! Beat Sheet Analysis for Weapons
Opening Image
Against a black screen, we hear a little girl’s voice claiming that what she’s about to tell us is a true story about something terrible that happened in her suburb of Maybrook, but it’s one we won’t hear on the news because “the police and top people in this town were, like, so embarrassed they couldn’t solve it, that they covered everything all up.”
We immediately start to form an idea about what the sin of this MITH story might be and as we watch a large group of young children escape from their homes at 2:17 AM, running with their arms spread wide like birds and disappearing into the night while lyrics warn “take care, beware of greedy leaders, beware of darkness,” we’ve got an opening scare that’s full of menace and trepidation, a deliciously dark dread start.
Theme Stated
Archer (Josh Brolin) stands up in the parents’ meeting the night before school is set to resume and yells, “What happened in that classroom? Why just her classroom? Why only hers?” This aura of suspicion, blame-shifting, and demanding reasons for something unexplainable will give Weapons its thematic premise and although writer Cregger says it was not his focus, there is no way to miss the symbolism of a community shattered by a school shooting and the “disappearance” of their beloved children.
Archer’s line and the meeting in general point to the House of this MITH movie, which is Maybrook itself. An average suburb no one can escape, as it’s their home, Maybrook is full of small-town prejudices, secrets, unquestioned privilege, and complacency. Those home security cameras may have made their owners feel protected, but did nothing to show the dysfunction happening behind closed doors.
Set-Up
Our young narrator fills in some of the details and things that need fixing in this troubling thesis world: the 17 children that vanished were all from the same third-grade classroom, that of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), a new teacher in the school; one child from the class, Alex Lily (Cary Christopher), remains, but has no idea what happened to his friends; various security cameras recorded the children running away, but didn’t show where they went; and parents of the missing children are distraught, enraged, and looking to blame someone.
And who else would they blame other than Justine Gandy? At the parents’ meeting, they rip into the decimated classroom’s teacher, the outsider they don’t know or trust, the perfect scapegoat. But they underestimate Gandy, who’s quirkier and far ornerier than your average horror flick Hero. Sure, she has a drinking problem, terrible taste in men, and a suspect past, but she’s also someone who digs her heels in and fights back. And, as we will discover, someone who really loves her students and cares about what goes on behind the closed doors of their home lives.
Worth noting is that Cregger’s unusual structure of telling his story in chapters, starting with “Justine” and continuing on to five other characters, gives Weapons its slow burn horror nature—the monster works behind the scenes in each of their lives until all their stories intersect in a full bore, truly batshit-crazy Act 3.
Catalyst
Principal Marcus (Benedict Wong) gently tells Justine that she’s suspended from teaching, but hey, she’s still on the school’s health insurance plan with plenty of mental health professionals to choose from.
Debate
Justine strenuously argues her fate and is criticized for “overstepping professional lines” by hugging students, driving a student home when she missed the bus, and in this instance, asking to talk to Alex Lilly. She is certain that Alex knows more than he’s saying and being prevented from connecting with him drives Justine into coping with her grief in less than healthy ways, including seducing her policeman ex-boyfriend, Paul (Alden Ehrenreich).
When Paul treats the ongoing investigation into the missing kids in a laissez-faire manner, Justine is understandably perturbed, telling him, “I’m just wondering if I need to solve this thing myself.”
Break into Two
After getting attacked by Paul’s wife in a liquor store and having a nightmare about a horrifying red-haired woman morphing out of her ceiling, Justine has had enough. She forces an Act 2 by talking directly to Alex, kicking off a whole antithesis world of hurt.
B Story
Amongst the myriad of warped relationships in Maybrook, the purity of the teacher/student bond between Justine and Alex gives Weapons the lion’s share of its heart. They are both bullied outcasts whose connection drives the film through to its (not really) happy ending.
Fun and Games
With its morbid sense of humor and a few pungent moments where we know we’re in the hands of a madman, this upside-down world lives up to its fun and games moniker. The first delicious madman moment comes when Justine falls asleep in her car while surveying Alex’s house and in the darkness, Alex’s mother lopes out in that same freaky arms-spread manner with a giant pair of scissors, creeps into the back of the car, and… stabs her?! Nope, just snips off a lock of Justine’s hair.
This “WTF?!” sequence is followed by Archer’s slow burn chapter, in which he desperately tries to find his son, Matthew. More clues are added as Archer aggressively chases down Justine, certain that she’s responsible for the children’s disappearances, and culminating in a madman moment for the ages: while Archer and Justine argue at a gas station, the mild-mannered principal, Marcus, comes racing out of the trees with arms flung wide, eyes popped out, and face stained with blood, and tries to kill Justine. The attack is so random and out of left field that our minds are whirling as we try to piece things together, only to be interrupted by a smash cut to Paul’s chapter. WTF?!
The rollercoaster continues as more clues are slipped in sideways and longways and slantways, ending with Paul apprehending a young drug addict and burglar, James (Austin Abrams), whose uber-darkly hilarious chapter ramps us up to the false victory of:
Midpoint
The inadvertent discovery of the 17 missing children in a catatonic state in Alex’s basement, a creepy kids scare of the highest order.
Bad Guys Close In
If it were anyone else but James making the discovery, the movie might be over. Unfortunately, our poor dear James is not only drug-addled but also a few sandwiches short of a picnic, so his method of alerting others to the find goes horribly wrong. Despite James’ ineptitude, the discovery is still a win that stirs the monster, so before both he and Paul meet a gruesome end, James’s chapter gives us the first full glimpse of the utterly bizarre and terrifying Gladys Lilly (Amy Madigan in the meatiest role of her career).
Hinted at by the word “Witch” graffitied on Justine’s car in the first few moments of the film, our monster Gladys is a literal witch, albeit a dying one. Alex’s aunt has slipped into town thanks to the innocent kindness of his parents, who are the first victims in her effort to stay alive by sucking out people’s life forces and leaving them zombified. In Marcus’s extremely violent and sad chapter, we see Gladys’s method of controlling others, a spell that involves a magical stick, a little blood, and an object belonging to her victims.
After Marcus’s brutal death, Justine and Archer bond to figure out what the hell is going on and we feel the dread of a possible kill the rescuers moment on the horizon as we finally move into our final chapter: “Alex.” Cregger re-runs the events of the entire film through Alex’s POV, leading to his coerced involvement in Glady’s scheme to have a harvest of young, fresh humans to feast on by stealing the name tags of his classmates for her spell.
All Is Lost
Gladys and Alex stand on the porch at 2:17 AM and watch as 17 entranced third-graders run through the night into their house.
Dark Night of the Soul
Alex looks at Gladys in horror as he realizes he is now an accomplice to terrible evil. It’s a tragic moment, a deeply lonely one, because he instinctively knows that help is not on the way and he is utterly alone, one of the consequences of Maybrook’s sin.
Break into Three
All the POVS (well, those of the final folk who are still alive) come together when Alex looks out his window and sees that Justine and Archer are watching his house. The jig is up. He’s got to do something or they will die, too.
Finale
The teams are gathered as Justine and Archer approach the house and Alex assesses his options. Because Justine and Archer don’t really have a plan, their execution is ham-handed and nearly results in their deaths by the hands of Paul and James under Gladys’s spell, but Alex escapes his murderous parents and locks himself in Gladys’s bathroom to execute his plan: it’s time for Gladys to experience some character karma.
Alex performs the spell with a hair from Glady’s garish wig and his own blood, weaponizing his 17 classmates against Gladys, and in a grimly hilarious and satisfying high tower surprise, the children chase her through the neighborhood as she shrieks in terror.
It’s a full gross-out ending as they tear Gladys to pieces, her death freeing her zombies just before Archer chokes the life out of Justine. The spell broken, Archer chases after Matthew, leaving Justine to search for Alex. A and B Stories cross as she finds him hugging his catatonic mom and dad and Justine sheds a tear, knowing that even though Gladys is dead, Alex’s parents are, in effect, lost to him forever.
Final Image
Archer snatches Matthew out of the circle of children surrounding Gladys’s remains and carries him away as we hear our young narrator again delivering the cryptic final line, “All of the kids were reunited with their parents. Some of them even started talking again this year.” Many MITH films have a final evil lives on beat, but they usually involve the monster coming back to life. In Weapons, the evil that lives on is trauma, the scars of a community whose synthesis involves lasting and permanent damage. Cregger’s ending is timely, yes, but heartbreakingly so.
