Fear in the Hero-less Age: Postmodern Games with the Horror Genre in Weapons

This web of references forms a kind of mental map of the horror genre history․

Fatemeh Shahbandeh

Synopsis։ In the small town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, at 2:17 a.m., seventeen children from teacher Justin Gandy’s class mysteriously leave their homes and disappear — all except Alex Lilly.

Weapons 

(2025)

Director and Screenwriter: Zach Karger

Producers: Zach Karger, Roy Lee, Miri Yoon
Cast: Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Toby Huss
Distributed by: Warner Bros.
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At first, an unknown narrator begins to speak in a childish voice. The opening image is an introductory shot that defines the general environment and narrative space — a broad introduction to the story. After that, several medium shots follow, showing that the characters are mostly young. Finally, there is a close-up of a clock against a dark background.

On the surface, this sequence fully adheres to the rules of classical narrative — the principles of visual clarity and gradual revelation. However, compared to the classic structure in Hitchcock’s films, where the sequence of shots usually begins with a close-up, then continues with a medium shot, and finally concludes with an establishing shot, Weapons reveals a semantic shift in the filmmaker’s attitude toward the concept of classical narration.

Hitchcock takes the viewer from the smallest element to the whole, creating gradual curiosity; Weapons, however, moves from the whole to the part — first presenting its world as a familiar totality, then gradually creating a gap within this familiarity by delving into the details.

The director uses a similar sequence in The Barbarian, yet ultimately it results in a postmodern film structure. At the beginning of both films, the viewer is confronted with a familiar rhythm, but behind their classical appearance lies a sense of hesitation and uncertainty that slowly leads to a modern deconstruction. As the story progresses, the audience’s initial expectation of narrative continuity collapses; the story deviates from its linear path and defies predictability. A kind of cognitive trust in the viewer is shaken, and among the disjointed fragments of the narrative, they must reconstruct meaning.

Linear coherence gives way to fragmentation, and the centrality of the protagonist becomes multi-voiced. The work clearly enters the realm of postmodernism. The narrator is no longer omniscient, and micro-narratives replace the unified storyline. The plurality of perspectives portrays a pluralistic lived experience. The film does not aim to narrate reality but to represent how reality is narrated.

As a result, instead of witnessing a straightforward narrative unraveling, the viewer faces a multilayered network of meanings that constantly seeks to redefine itself. Continuing its anti-classical trajectory, the film deliberately departs from the hero-centric, hero’s-journey-based Hollywood paradigm, moving instead toward a structure in which collective action, psychological crises, and power relations replace individualistic and savior-oriented implications.

In this small town, the sudden disappearance of all but one child from a class plunges the local community into chaos. The characters involved — the class teacher, the principal, a cowardly policeman and his wife, a homeless addict, Aunt Gladys, the missing student, and others — each contribute a fragment of the story. Depicting parts of each of these lives creates a genre hybrid rather than a tale of heroism.

A deliberate instability emerges, reflecting the identity crisis of the contemporary world. The film reminds viewers that in today’s reality, the boundaries between truth, fantasy, and media are no longer reliable.

The ending, however, is highly controversial. After much confusion and fragmentation, all narrative forces converge in a final confrontation between evil and innocence. Yet again — contrary to audience expectations of a dramatic or heroic showdown — the defeat of evil occurs not through strength or sacrifice, but through a completely satirical and humorous action by the children. The mythological model of the battle between good and evil is subverted and replaced by situational humor. The children destroy the force of evil in a childish yet ruthless manner. In these scenes, violence intertwines with humor. The innocence of children is contrasted with the brutality of their actions. Interestingly, they derive their power to destroy evil from evil itself — a dark satire that inverts the stereotype of the child hero.

This web of references forms a kind of mental map of the horror genre history, in which the filmmaker simultaneously pays homage and deconstructs with every gesture. Consequently, the film is both familiar and alien — a world where reference itself becomes play, imitation, critique, and where the memory of classic cinema becomes material for constructing a new concept.

In this context, the strange, haunting image of the children fleeing their homes — inspired by Nick Út’s famous photograph from the Vietnam War — reveals another layer of intertextuality. This reference links cinematic horror to historical reality. Rather than merely repeating clichés, the genre becomes a tool for reflecting on the very concept of fear and its consumption in contemporary culture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKHySfXqN0I&t=2s

Translated by Amirreza Fakhri