Hacker Cinema
Weapons
2025 · Film · 128 min
Directed by Zach Cregger
When all but one child from the same class mysteriously vanish on the same night at exactly the same time, a community is left questioning who or what is behind their disappearance.
2 positive5 neutralfrom 7 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
What I’m impressed by of late is that a lot of contemporary horror films (thinking of Weapons, Backrooms, Obsession) rely much more on a creepy mood than on gore to do their thing (which is not to say that they lack gore, but they don’t rely on it to the extent that horror films of the ’80s through '10s did (the Saw films probably being the apex of the splattercore aesthetic).
> Major studios were too afraid to produce something fresh instead of numberless sequels and reboots in the last decade or so.
This is a perennial statement for the last 100 years of cinema. "Let's do that again" and "let's try our version of what they did" are effective business strategies in commercial art and always will be. That strategy had already been mature in publishing and theater and fine art and cottage art, and took about zero days to take hold in cinema when the medium emerged. And then again in gaming. And podcasting. And influencer / short form media.
The reality is that there are always a big audience who enjoyed something and want more of the same, and a tiny audience curious to explore the deeply avant garde and a tapering body of audience filling the spectrum in between. Through various deals and production company brands, big studios tend to build an engine that spans most of that spectrum, profiting off the big audience with "more of the same, but bigger" until the heat burns off while probing other opportunities to see if they can spot the next big thing.
Based on the last 10-15 years of projects, I don't think it surprises anyone in the industry that horror is ascendant and that a inventive horror movie broke out [again]. What to expect next is a lot more sequlization and reinterpretation of what people think worked about Backrooms (and Weapons and Sinners and Get Out and etc etc)
Recent good movies, just going in release order off my letterboxd, although I have to be careful to include only "Hollywood" here:
- 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple - beautifully shot and a beautiful theme about what humanity is
- One Battle After Another - it's PTA, all his movies are good
- Bugonia - incredible dark comedy
- Weapons - fun little horror comedy movie
- Sinners - just won an oscar for the soundtrack, not a perfect movie but a fun watch with some incredible scenes
- Companion
- Nosferatu - incredibly atmospheric
- The Surfer - total trip with good old Nicholas Cage
- Love Lies Bleeding - just a fun, a bit crazy movie
- Dream Scenario - another trippy Cage movie
- Poor Things
- Oppenheimer ...
- Renfield
- The Menu
- The Banshees of Insherin
- Barbarian (same director as Weapons)
- Prey
- Bullet Train - fun action movie
- The Northman
- The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
- Everything Everywhere All At Once
- The Invisible Man - most effective horror movie I've ever seen
- The Gentlemen
- Joker -how close can you get to looking like Taxi Driver without being Taxi Driver ...
- The Vast of Night - some scenes that really draw you in and pretty nostalgic
in 2019 now, so I won't continue, but there are plenty of good movies made nowadays, and I won't say I've seen even a close amount of them from the past few years. Of course I'm watching these at home, not in theatres, so that's certainly an argument.
Tent-pole black movies? Basically anything Ryan Coogler or Jordan Peele are involved in. They're a case where the unfortunate stereotype might work out in your favor, if you're looking for a group experience that heightens with shared energy and a visual-and-sonic spectacle. (Well, assuming it's true.)
Or maybe it's just a horror/Marvel thing. Weapons and Endgame had a similar audience feel to Sinners and Black Panther.
Definitely not during Chris Nolan films. It's hard enough to hear his dialogue when it's dead silent.
Door bells also had a popular movie made that revolved around their use: Weapons.
And that didn’t raise an uproar of suspicion even as one character went door to door asking if he could look at his neighbors recordings.
People are comfortable with the idea of being recorded, so long as accessing many recordings is a drawn out and manual process.
A few recent Warner Bros films / coproductions
Imagine if these had not had theatrical releases, or, had only had 1 week limited releases just to qualify for awards..
Tenet
Dune
The Batman
Barbie
Furiosa
Twisters
Minecraft
Sinners
Superman
Weapons
One Battle After Another
This is amazing, beat me to it, I had this in my TODO since last year.
I wanted to call it "Remind-me-when"
for example: "remind me when Weapons movie has less than 7 days to be released"
or "remind me when the site something.com goes down"