Flasz On Film

It’s now over fifty years since Stephen King busted onto the scene like a ball of weapons-grade fissile material with his debut Carrie. Between then and now, he has managed to become one of the most prolific and successful writers of all time with dozens of bestsellers under his belt, and crucially he inspired entire cohorts of imitators (early Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, etc.) and later fan-turned-artists paying due homage to his legacy through their work. Even his own son Joe Hill’s literary output is decidedly tipping its hat to big daddy Steve.  

While I think it’s valid to challenge somewhat King’s mark on the writing culture—after all, he seems to be a bit of a unicorn when it comes to outright success as his imitators and authors who see him as remarkably influential have not been able to replicate his meteoric rise—it is undeniable that over the years, as the waves of King-like fast-followers subsided, a slowly cresting bulge of artists who grew up reading his stuff and watching stuff based on his stuff has become increasingly visible. Think of Stranger Things and Super 8, both of which weren’t directly related to anything that King has ever written, but they might as well have been because they all captured elements of the generally agreed-upon King-esque style, such as the idea of small-town life coming under threat from a supernatural force, youthful friendship in peril, or a medley of blue-collar characters forming a lifelike tapestry upon which a King-like signature what-if scenario was painted.  

However—and I hereby invite you to comment with valid examples and make me eat my own words—the idea of building a full scrapbook out of King-related ideas and themes has rarely been attempted beyond a handful of isolated examples. The best I can recall is probably Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One with its set piece borrowed from The Shining. There’s also the Castle Rock TV show whose entire premise relies on referring back to and expanding on King’s work, as well as a small number of specials episodes of TV classics such as The Simpsons. But I don’t think anyone has ever attempted to pull off a full-on Tarantino-style film using Stephen King’s stories as building blocks.  

Until now, that is.  

Directed and written by Zach Cregger (who previously directed the oddly refreshing Barbarian and produced the recent techno-slasher satire Companion), Weapons looks from afar as though it belonged with the horror mainstream, which stands to mean that it looks like a horror of the elevated variety. Alternatively, it may also be the forces of cultural inertia that have successfully conditioned me to expect to think about what this movie is really about underneath its supernatural genre overcoat because that’s what’s de rigueur these days. It’s never about what’s on the screen, now is it?  

Therefore, even though I think there is a way you’d go about reading into this movie and lurk beneath the narrative in search of themes the filmmakers attempt to elevate, I believe it’s best to just refrain from doing so, because what’s on offer here may be orthogonal to the familiar genre counterprogramming you’d expect in the summer (like Together and Bring Her Back). What I think Weapons is above all else is a sincere and heartfelt love letter to the big man himself, Stephen King and this is the lens I view this movie through.

In contrast to Cregger’s previous movie Barbarian which stands as a piece of stealth homage to the kind of horror movies that swarmed the slowly dying video stores in the mid-noughties, Weapons wears its King inspirations proudly on its sleeve. Just like a movie directed by Quentin Tarantino, it openly invites the viewer to identify it as a mosaic of references carefully stitched together to produce something that feels original and refreshing, yet remains completely familiar, laden with winks and nods to King’s work and skillfully composed to capitalize on the most evocative elements of his style.  

Thus, you’ll not only be excused for immediately recognizing patterns you remember from King’s novels and short stories or visuals tipping the hat to the most iconic of his adaptations, but you’ll find yourself invited to do so as an inextricable part of the experience Weapons is attempting to craft. You will find here a supernatural element disrupting a small-town peace as the movie opens with that Kingian what-if scenario of “what if one day a bunch of kids disappeared never to be found,” a number of characters are introduced, and the story is left to simmer. Just what Steve’s recipe would dictate. It’s not about the plot, but about letting the characters feel their way towards a resolution to their problems while the storyteller effortlessly introduces how their lives are interconnected and intertwined and how the minutiae of workaday living are severely disrupted by that supernatural wrecking ball.  

We are then left following Justine (Julia Garner), a teacher reeling from seeing her entire class evaporate overnight; Archer (Josh Brolin), a dad trying to figure out what happened to his son and cope with his loss; Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a street cop who used to be involved with Justine; Marcus (Benedict Wong), the school principal; James (Austin Abrams), a homeless drug addict who finds himself accidentally at the centre of the missing kids mystery; and Alex (Cary Christopher), a weirdly silent kid who also happens to be the only student in Justine’s class who did not disappear. Their stories overlap in captivating ways, with key events seen from multiple perspectives that add welcome complexity to the narrative. 

And between those sub-narratives lies the Kingian crux: it’s not about the plot at all. In fact, King has always been known as the world’s most notorious “pantser,” that is a writer who doesn’t plot or structure his work but rather flies by the seat of his pants and lets the characters go where they need to go propelled by their own curiosity and momentum. Weapons is about the experience of getting ourselves invested in the world that looks like the world you live in but is somehow disrupted and corrupted by malevolent outside forces, and seeing it through to the end, messy and anticlimactic as it might be, too (which is also a King staple). And it’s so much fun! 

In fact, the movie offers at least two distinct modalities of extracting entertainment out of this bargain because it functions perfectly well on the surface level as a supernatural horror devoid of ambition to lecture me about grief (because it’s almost always about grief, isn’t it) and a dark fairy tale about a group of characters converging in pursuit of restoring their inner peace. At the same time, it also works just as well—if not better—as a King-themed Easter egg hunt, as the movie is replete with references, nods, and visual elements connected to King’s work without any of them functioning as a de facto adaptation of his work either. A skilled observer will see the central premise as lifted out of It and heavily influenced by The Tommyknockers. Character archetypes such as a teacher with an alcohol problem or a dad grieving his son would likely connect back to The Shining and Pet Sematary respectively. How the story resolves (without divulging too much) whiffs profoundly of Needful Things and the visage of the central antagonist—especially in one scene where James interacts with them in a forest—is most assuredly inspired by Tim Curry’s iconic take on Pennywise the Clown. It’s all there to be found in this otherwise straightforward—if sometimes convoluted—narrative. It is as though the filmmakers wanted the movie to feel like an attempt at King fan fiction or a scrapbook put together by a teenage fanboy, which is built out of wholly unoriginal and familiar elements but adds up to something unexpectedly heartfelt.  

That’s what Weapons is—a well-intentioned love letter to Stephen King’s legacy that identifies astutely the most fundamental elements of his style and builds a King-like narrative while making ample use of King references as points of interest, character beats, and visual tableaux. At the same time, and this is something not many filmmakers evoke correctly, Weapons manages to capture the kind of comedic sensibilities Stephen King would be fond of himself. Unobtrusive and mostly anchored to specific characters, this movie is extremely light on its feet with the way it flip-flops between elements of sheer dread, well-positioned levity, and intense flashes of gruesome violence. Memorable and effective in the moment in equal measures. And it all builds towards a climax that is as intense as it is bonkers stupid, which again is something a seasoned King veteran will be able to appreciate. 

Taken together, Weapons is a phenomenal piece of homage to the master of the genre and a beautiful mosaic of references that any fan of King’s work will have tonnes of fun deconvoluting. It has fun with King’s legacy much like Malignant and Last Night in Soho had fun with giallo in recent years. And it captures the vibes just as well as Osgood Perkins effortlessly toyed with them in Longlegs and The Monkey. Weapons transcends the idea of a “Where’s Waldo” movie engineered by an infatuated fanboy and crafts a bona fide alternative to the theme-rich elevated fare with its insistence on effortlessly delivered entertainment, complex characters built from fleeting nuances and a good old-fashioned witch-based horror full of scares, suspense and well-positioned instances of over-the-top gore. While I’d stop short of calling it the best non-King adaptation, it’s a damn near perfect love letter to his incredible body of work and a salute to his timeless cultural legacy.