Weapons is now officially a top contender for being ‘best horror movie of 2025.’ That’s an achievement, as the year in horror has had stiff competition from films like Sinners and Bring Her Back, with highly anticipated films like Keeper and Predator: Badlands still waiting to close things out. Now that Weapons is streaming on HBO Max, a wider pool of viewers is getting to check out Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian (2023), and like so many of us who went to the theater, they have questions.
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We’ve gone the length of explaining Weapons‘ entire storyline in proper chronological order. Now, we’re here to share even more information on the backstory and powers of Weapons’ main villain, the witch named Gladys (Amy Madigan), with the source being writer/director Zach Cregger himself. In an interview breaking down Weapons’ story, Cregger delved deeper into how the Gladys character came together, and all the lore about her origin and powers they came up with, even if it wasn’t shared onscreen directly.
Gladys’ Origin Story: Ma’am or Monster?
Cregger has since revealed that when it came to coming up with an origin story for Gladys, he actually came up with several. He gave actress Amy Madigan options for which version of Gladys’ backstory she wanted to build her performance on, with the requirement of informing Cregger what she ultimately chose:
“I presented Amy with two options of her origin story. I was like, ‘You can pick one of these two,’” Cregger explained to Vanity Fair. “They’re very different options. And was like, ‘You don’t have to tell me, but it is either this or that.’ I don’t know which one she picked.”
According to the reports, one story was that Gladys had been a regular person until her life-threatening illness pushed the elderly woman to seek outlandish cures, ultimately finding witchcraft to be the method. “She had to adopt this methodology that she uses out of a place of emergency to keep herself alive,” Cregger said of his story arc. “I won’t say any more than that.”
The other option Cregger offered was that Gladys is not a true human person, but rather a dark supernatural entity that takes hold of the Lilly household, and then the town. In that sense, Gladys’ weird clownish appearance would be an ode to something like Pennywise the Clown, from Stephen King’s It: an inhuman creature trying to mimic a person. In that scenario, Gladys’ witchcraft is more than just learned knowledge spellcasting: it’s the mysticism of a dark force, a metaphor for the darkness of doubt and hate that lurk in people. “That’s an interesting way to think about it. I like that a lot,” Cregger said in response to the notion.
There have been rumors circulating that Weapons could be extended into a franchise ever since the film was released in theaters, and did big numbers on opening weekend. The most popular idea has been a prequel story about Gladys, which actually makes the whole multiple-choice option of her origin story kind of a pivotal decision. Obviously, if Gladys is an entity and not a human woman driven to witchy desperation (a very singular, but compelling, character story), there’s more franchise potential. Weapons films could be set in any number of prior decades (or centuries); “Gladys” returning from the (seeming) dead for a sequel also becomes much more plausible.
In short, the supernatural route makes Weapons a potential franchise of stories, whose only connective threads need to be the format of offering multiple points of view, as well as the thematic metaphor of social orders that are corrupted and tricked into cannibalizing themselves. Set that against the Fall of Rome, the dark early days of the American colonies, the surge in Satanic worship during the ’60s and ’70s… or more set in today’s world? Yes, it looks like easy money waiting to be made.
Weapons is now streaming on HBO Max. Let us know your thoughts about it on the ComicBook Forum!
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Image Courtesy of Marvel Comics
