The massive box-office success of writer-director Zach Cregger’s “Weapons” is an encouraging sign for original horror and original movies overall. By carving out a distinctive sensibility, first with his debut film “Barbarian” and now with “Weapons,” Cregger has built a following without relying on reboots or recycled IP.
“Weapons” succeeds because it’s an unsettling, engrossing, well-acted story that both scares and delights the audience. Cregger presents the intriguing premise of 17 children suddenly going missing in the middle of the night, as they simultaneously flee their houses. Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich and Amy Madigan all give great performances in Cregger’s small-town horror tapestry.
If you were enthralled and horrified by “Weapons” and are looking for some similarly haunting takes on trauma, tragedy and spooky suburban goings-on, here are five more movies like “Weapons” to check out … at least until “Weapons” comes to streaming.
‘Barbarian’
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Cregger may possess a unique vision as a filmmaker, but after just two movies, he’s also demonstrated certain clear stylistic and narrative tendencies. The jumbled timeline, tonal shifts, shocking plot twists and grotesque villain that Cregger brings to “Weapons” are all present in his first film, in slightly different form.
The story is more self-contained, largely set in a single isolated Detroit house, where two guests (played by Georgina Campbell and Bill Skarsgard) are inadvertently booked at the same Airbnb. That’s just the jumping-off point for a story that goes in several surprising directions, with the same audacity as “Weapons.”
The characters face expanding horrors while remaining in the same deceptively quiet neighborhood, where long-buried secrets come to the surface in violent, terrifying bursts.
Watch on Netflix
‘Longlegs’
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Along with Cregger, Osgood Perkins is part of the vanguard of current horror, and his 2024 hit explores some of the same themes as “Weapons,” about generational trauma and manipulation by amoral agents of chaos. Here, it’s Nicolas Cage as the title character, who stays nearly as hidden away as the ultimate culprit in “Weapons,” pulling the strings on a series of horrific murders committed by people seemingly under some kind of hypnotic spell.
Perkins draws influence from 1990s psychological thrillers like “The Silence of the Lambs” while adding his own supernatural spin. Like Cregger, he utilizes fractured storytelling to keep the audience off guard, along with the main character, Maika Monroe’s FBI agent Lee Harker. When the pieces finally come together, it’s both brutally violent and emotionally devastating, which makes the terror all the more effective.
Watch on Hulu
‘The Virgin Suicides’
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Although “Weapons” is primarily a horror movie, it also deals with the deep scars of a town losing a group of innocent children to a seemingly random act, and Sofia Coppola explores the same kind of ripple effect in her debut film. There are no mysteries to solve here, other than the mystery of the teen-girl mind, as the five Lisbon sisters all take their own lives in a quiet Michigan suburb, not too different from the town in “Weapons.”
Their reasons are internal and inscrutable, but their actions linger on even after they’re gone, affecting everyone who was part of their lives. Coppola captures a sort of tragic beauty in both the doomed sisters and the friends, neighbors and family members who never truly understand them.
Watch on Paramount Plus
‘It’
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No one does small-town horror like Stephen King, and this adaptation of his epic story about a group of friends taking on a demon who manifests as a clown called Pennywise conveys the scope and intimacy of his work.
Director Andy Muschietti focuses on the first part of King’s sprawling novel, when seven teenage friends face off against the evil Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard), who is abducting children in their sleepy Maine town. “Weapons” owes a lot to King, and its multifaceted portrait of a damaged town has roots in “It” and other King tales.
Muschietti shifts King’s story to the 1980s, mixing a nostalgia-filled, pop culture-fueled coming-of-age story with the harrowing experience of children discovering a malevolent force and realizing no one is around to help them.
Watch on HBO Max
‘Who Can Kill a Child?’
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“Weapons” isn’t exactly a creepy kid movie, but it incorporates aspects of that long-running horror tradition. This Spanish cult classic is one of the most disturbing examples of the subgenre, an incredibly eerie, suspenseful and downright nasty movie about a vacationing British couple finding themselves on an island full of kids who’ve turned homicidal.
It’s tense and well-acted, full of impossible situations as represented by the title question, the answer to which is always bad news. The filmmakers never hold back on depicting the atrocities committed by these coldly murderous children, as the adults have to contend with the implications of defending themselves from their youthful attackers.
The eventual depiction of violent children in “Weapons” offers a sort of catharsis, but here it’s the opposite, a destabilizing force that destroys a fragile sense of what little innocence is left in the world.
Rent/buy at Amazon
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