12 Ounce Weapons
George Harrison did a lot of drugs. He started with LSD during the heydey of the Beatles and got into heavy cocaine use throughout the 70s and 80s. Patti Boyd, his wife for a decade, said the drugs were “hardening his heart.” Harrison’s song “Beware of Darkness” plays during the intro sequence of Weapons, the Zach Cregger horror/thriller that released earlier this year. Harrison croons: beware of the thoughts that linger, winding up inside your head, the hopelessness around you, in the dead of night, beware of sadness – meanwhile, we see 17 children leaving their homes at 2:17 AM, running with their arms eerily angled to their sides. Wacky stuff!
In Weapons, the teacher of the missing students invites her cop ex-boyfriend out the bar. She’s an alcoholic, he’s in recovery: she gets him drunk. She drinks to stave off the guilt and shame from being under suspicion for the 17 childrens’ disappearance (I’ve heard worse excuses). He drinks because he’s a cop in a horror movie. Or, I don’t know, maybe he likes the taste.
Zach Cregger wrote Weapons while grieving his co-star from Whitest Kids U’Know, Trevor Moore. Moore passed in 2021 after falling off a balcony while intoxicated. Cregger had an alcoholic dad – Cregger’s been sober for ten years due to his own issues with the drug. Picking up a trend here? Cregger says the “horror-as-a-metaphor-for-grief [trope] is so f*cking played out,” but Weapons does it a little differently: horror-as-a-metaphor-for-addiction. The kids in the movie aren’t dead, they’re just gone, in a sedated state in the creepy witch-aunt antagonist’s basement. It’s the same way addiction affects a family or community: you lose someone while they’re still there. The one remaining kid from the classroom: the last 1 of 18, sees his parents grow wilted, still, and rotten on the couch of their living room. Addiction usually doesn’t have a moment of realization, a moment of shock, or an “oh my god!”; instead it’s the gradual dulling of their eyes, their growing inability to think for others, the disappointment that builds until you accept it as an unfortunate norm.
It doesn’t have to be alcohol: it might be your boyfriend who won’t get off that damn game, or needing a coffee before reading your emails. Addicts find something to distract themselves, from the thoughts that linger or hopelessness around you, in the end only making their sadness deeper. Anyways, watch Weapons with a group. Maybe with a few drinks. It won’t catch up to you yet. But that creepy witch-aunt’s around the corner.