By Jared Rasic
My whole life, people have made fun of me for my deep and abiding love of horror movies. When I was a kid, running around excited and trying to explain the plot of Evil Dead II to my family, they not only questioned what kind of people come up with such disturbing ideas, but what kind of kid was so enraptured by them. I didn’t have the vocabulary back then to explain that it wasn’t the gore and disturbing ideas I was so in love with, it was that being genuinely scared out of my wits made me feel breathtakingly, wholly alive.
As a middle-schooler, my oldest brother (a bigger fan of horror than I will ever be) ordered a rare and expensive Michael Myers mask out of a catalogue. Once it arrived, he also bought coveralls to complete the costume. So, for a dark summer or two of my childhood, when most kids were going swimming with friends or riding their bikes across the rural countryside, I was stalked around my yard by The Shape, complete with deafening silence and a real butcher knife.
Is this why I’m so weird as an adult? Most likely. At least that’s what my therapist tells me.
Running around a dozen acres, hiding from my brother the serial killer, was terrifying, but also life-affirming in a way that’s hard to quantify. When I see a horror movie that fills me with dread or bombards me with imagery that chills me to my bones, I don’t just get an endorphin rush of fear. I also get the sweet kiss of nostalgia that reminds me that being scared has been a way of life for me for as long as I can remember.
Regardless of how connected I am on an almost cellular level to horror movies, that’s not the only reason why, as a genre, I find them so remarkable. Horror has an elasticity to it that other genres don’t come close to achieving. Just in 2025, for example, we’ve had some of the best new horror releases of the century and to describe them is to examine how dissimilar and expansive they are as pieces of writing and visual art.
Sinners is a bloody and unapologetically horny vampire movie that sheds light on the Jim Crow South and brings the real American monsters kicking and screaming into the light. Together is a gooey, hilarious and disturbing metaphor for codependent and toxic relationships that manages to be frightening and gut-bustingly funny, sometimes in the same scene. Bring Her Back unpacks trauma and grief as a malevolent force of unpredictable nature, featuring an Oscar-worthy performance by Sally Hawkins and a heart-rending ending I haven’t stopped thinking about for months.
Or there’s the allegory for aging in The Rule of Jenny Pen, the generational trauma of Final Destination: Bloodline or the comparison of the nature of evil vs. the violence of a hungry predator in Dangerous Animals. Not one of these movies plays like the other.
At the top of this pyramid of horror stands Weapons, the new film from Zach Cregger, the director of Barbarian, as well as co-creator of the sketch comedy series The Whitest Kids U’Know. Cregger grows hugely as a filmmaker with Weapons, a horror comedy so assured that it feels like the work of a major talent, not someone just releasing his sophomore effort. Go into the film as blindly as possible, because watching the unpredictable story unfold is one of the most sublime experiences I’ve had with a movie all year.
All I will say is this: At 2:17am, 17 children from the same third-grade class in a small Pennsylvania town all run out their front doors and disappear. A month later the town is still grieving and at a loss as to where the children are. Julia Garner (Ozark) stars as Justine Gandy, the children’s teacher; and Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men) is Archer Graff, the father of one of the missing kids. The two of them team up like Nancy Drew and a Hardy Boy to find the kids and solve the mystery.
More than its spookiness or the moments of pure terror, Weapons is also drunk on the possibility of cinema and manages to pack every scene with innovative camera movements, compelling characters that you want to get to know, and a mystery that is consistently fun and original. I already want to go back and see it again, spend more time in this world and pay further attention to how Cregger and his team have crafted such a darkly twisted bedtime story that feels like something the Brothers Grimm would find a little too messed up.
Sure, Weapons can be watched as a fun and spooky roller coaster ride and nothing more, but Cregger also knows how to, pardon my language, weaponize the bottomless potential of the horror genre to tell a deeply personal story about loss and grief. On Aug. 7, 2021, at around 2:30am, Trevor Moore, Cregger’s best friend and co-creator of The Whitest Kids U’Know, tragically fell from a balcony and died.
Horror isn’t just how we get scared, but how we secretly grieve sometimes, too.
Even for those who aren’t diehard horror fanatics, Weapons is an elevated affair without the pretentiousness. It walks a razor-tipped tightrope between exciting entertainment and thought-provoking seriousness—becoming at times both breathtaking and awe-inspiring. I found myself staring at some of the genuinely insane imagery and remembering those months, years ago, running through the fields of my childhood stalked by an unknowable, masked serial killer. And, weirdly, I found that comforting. Thank you, horror movies. You saved me. I owe you one.
