Weapons: Indian directors are more terrified of making meaningful horror movies than you are of watching them

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Julia Garner in a still from Weapons, directed by Zach Cregger.

The movie has been sold on a premise so tantalising that even the elevator pitch aficionado Aamir Khan would find it undeniable: at exactly 2:17 am one night, 17 children from Justine Gandy’s third-grade class got out of bed, opened their front doors, and ran into the darkness. They didn’t show up to school the next morning. The police looked at the surveillance footage and drew a blank. Nothing could explain this collective psychosis. Stranger still, nothing could explain where the children went. Not long afterwards, a witch hunt began against Miss Gandy. Her past behaviours were analysed; a hug here, a lift there. Why was she overstepping her boundaries with the kids?

One of the parents, played by Josh Brolin, becomes convinced that she had something to do with the disappearance of the children. He has a nightmare midway through the movie; he gets up from bed like his missing son probably did, walks into the darkness just like him, and stumbles upon a house with a large semiautomatic rifle hovering above it. It’s the film’s most explicit acknowledgement of its own subtext. It took Hollywood around two decades to get around to making genre films about a uniquely American issue. For instance, Gus Van Sant’s landmark drama Elephant, inspired by the Columbine High School massacre, was released back in 2003. But it was only in 2020 that Brian Duffield released Spontaneous, a phenomenal dark comedy about a class of high schoolers who begin to spontaneously explode, sending their small town into panic.

Like that film, Weapons uses gallows humour to overcome whatever hesitation it might’ve had about tackling the contentious issue of gun control. The climax is especially deranged. But there is a grave idea at the film’s core: what is worse; the grief of losing a loved one to a tragedy, or the guilt of having to resume regular life after some time has passed? Weapons doesn’t really begin until a month after the kids’ disappearance, by which time it is clear that they aren’t coming back. Everyone, including Miss Gandy and the outraged father, Archer, has started to return to work. Soon, it will be as if the incident never happened. They will erect a memorial, the news will find something else to cover, and the entire community will have to exist under a blanket of grief.

Our cinema has had similar awakenings, but in waves. The 70s-era movies written by Javed Akhtar and Salim Javed subconsciously captured the public’s anger, while the cinema of post-Independence India spoke overtly about issues such as rising unemployment. But the protagonists of these movies were strictly blue collar; they were unemployed artists and protesting mill workers. The film’s anxieties weren’t filtered through the lens of genre. Incidentally, at the same time in Spain, Victor Erice was making The Spirit of the Beehive, a veiled critique of the Francisco Franco regime in Spain, told through the protagonist’s fascination for Frankenstein. More recently, Guillermo del Toro used Pinocchio as a vessel to talk about growing authoritarianism across the world. A year later, Pablo Larraín made El Conde, a satirical movie that presented the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a blood-sucking vampire.

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A still from Zach Cregger’s Weapons.

Truth be told, Indian cinema isn’t entirely incapable of allegory. Amit Masurkar’s Sherni smuggled some delicate social commentary into audiences’ minds by packaging it into a dark comedy about deforestation. The folk horror film Chhori, for all its shortcomings, was able to communicate its message with clarity. But usually, our so-called genre movies are more concerned with melodrama and musical interludes than they are with subversion. Our historical cinema, on the other hand, is so enslaved to the idea of factual accuracy that it doesn’t even realise it can use the past to comment on the present. There was a great opportunity for the Stree universe to be about something more… meaningful. Sure, the titular character in the second film is a feminist avenger, but the world in which the film is set is super-vague. The optimistic moviegoer has no choice but to hope that the upcoming film Thama, in which Ayushmann Khurrana plays a vampire of some kind, is about how women in Delhi are preyed upon by creatures of the night.

What makes Weapons a great horror movie isn’t the subtext; that’s just one of the reasons why it’s so enjoyable. But first and foremost, it’s just a rollicking good yarn. Few things are as fun as watching a filmmaker in complete control of their craft, playing the audience like a piano. You could Weapons half-a-dozen times just to appreciate its unusually ambitious structure, and Cregger’s masterful handling of tone. For an industry that often finds itself blending genres, it would do well to study a movie like it. After all, there is a difference between a perfectly balanced chutney and a parantha made with leftovers. Both dishes are essentially mashups, but one exists by design; the other is a compromise.