Julia Garner‘s new horror movie Weapons has landed a terrifying first trailer.
The film, which comes from Barbarian director Zach Cregger, is described as an “interrelated, multistory horror epic” that revolves around a small community which is left reeling after a group of schoolchildren mysteriously disappear overnight.
Teasing “police corruption, generational trauma, witchcraft, blood rituals, and religious abuse”, Weapons also stars Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan, Austin Abrams and June Diane Raphael.
The trailer introduces us to Garner’s schoolteacher Mrs Gandy, who enters her classroom one morning to find that none of her students have shown up.
“Mrs Gandy’s room was totally empty,” recounts the voice of a little girl. “Because the night before, at 2:17 in the morning, every kid woke up, got out of bed, walked downstairs and into the dark and they never came back.”
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Mrs Gandy is quick to find herself at the centre of suspicion, as Brolin’s character angrily states at a community meeting: “Why just her classroom? Why only hers?!”
The trailer concludes with a montage of disturbing clips, including possessed children running into the dark with their arms outstretched, a deadly car chase, and a woman stabbing herself in the face with a fork.
Teasing Weapons during a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Cregger said that the mystery of the missing children is going to “propel you through at least half of the movie, but that is not the movie.”
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“The movie will fork and change and reinvent and go in new places,” he added. “It doesn’t abandon that question, believe me, but that’s not the whole movie at all. By the midpoint, we’ve moved on to way crazier shit than that.”
Comparing it to his 2022 horror hit Barbarian, the filmmaker continued: “It is more ambitious in almost every way. I don’t just mean in terms of the budget, but I just mean creatively.
“The story is weirder and it’s twistier and it’s bigger. I have way more actors to fit into this thing. The set pieces are definitely bigger. It’s just a bigger, weirder movie than Barbarian is.”
Weapons is due to hit cinemas on 8 August.
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Freelance Reporter, Digital Spy After completing her joint honours degree in Journalism and English Literature at Cardiff University, Iona joined Digital Spy as a Content Production Intern in 2022. In that role, Iona wrote across both news and features, specialising in TV and movies. Following her internship, Iona now contributes to DS as a freelance reporter.
Iona has reported from the Black Adam red carpet, and interviewed celebrities ranging from Love Island stars to the cast of Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid.
