Weapons: Aunt Gladys' Origin Explained By Director Zach Cregger

If you decide to have any adult Halloween celebrations this year, you'll probably see a lot of people in red wigs and crooked red lipstick with tinted glasses. Why? They'll be dressed as "Aunt" Gladys Lily, the main (and terrifying) antagonist of Zach Cregger's second horror flick "Weapons." Gladys, who may or may not be the aunt of either elementary schoolkid Alex Lily (Cary Christopher) or his mother (Callie Schuttera), arrives in the fictional town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania to terrorize its residents and steal their life forces through apparent magic, is played to perfection by Amy Madigan and has already joined the hall of fame of great horror movie baddies. So, where did Cregger get the idea for the witchy, creepy Gladys in "Weapons?"

Cregger has gone on record and said that "Weapons" doesn't "work" without Madigan's Gladys, and even though some of her origins are incredibly personal to Cregger — who also separately revealed that she represents parental alcoholism, something Cregger dealt with in his childhood — she actually came from another draft he'd abandoned.

"I had written another script many years ago that was kind of the Gladys story," Cregger told Entertainment Weekly. "It was told from a child's perspective, and this crazy woman picks him up at school and takes him home and has subsumed his parents. It's about him trying to figure out how to get out from under her oppression." Cregger said he shelved the idea, but when he first started writing "Weapons," he was struggling to find an answer to where the kids went. "I had no idea. I was just kind of following the mystery. I was about 50 pages in when I realized I always loved that little kernel of the story I had, and I was like, 'That can fit perfectly onto this.'"

Elsewhere in that Entertainment Weekly article, Cregger said that two major things influenced Gladys that might surprise you: a non-fiction book by Wade Davis called "The Serpent and the Rainbow" (not, Cregger specified, Wes Craven's film adaptation of that very book), as well as a song called "Dancing in the Head" by The Mekons, a post-punk band hailing from England. Sure, the song is set to music, but as Cregger points out, there aren't really lyrics, per se. "That song is just an instruction manual on how to create a zombie," Cregger said. He continued: 

"It's no singing, it's just someone explaining to you this ritual. I love it 'cause it's a weird ritual where you soak a dollar bill in rum and set it on fire and arrange four mirrors for the four corners of the earth and get a shard of a human skull and all these things. I was like, 'One day, I wanna make up my own crazy, evil recipe.' This movie was my chance to do that."

So, from there, how did Cregger come up with Gladys' specific magic ritual, which turns people into "zombies" by controlling their every move and subduing them as, it seems, Gladys absorbs their energy to keep herself alive. The word "zombie" actually really works here because, after a second viewing of "Weapons," I noticed that Gladys' spell specifically affects people's brains because the only way to actually kill her zombie creations is to destroy their brains. The entire movie is centered around the mass exodus of 17 schoolchildren at 2:17 in the morning, which remains unexplained until it's revealed that Gladys and her mysterious magic are behind the whole thing. 

How does she do it, specifically? She takes a sharp, thorny branch from a tree she keeps with her, uses it to spill her own blood, and coats said branch with said blood. (The branch also has a personal effect of the intended future zombie wrapped around it.) After ringing a bell, Gladys snaps the branch, which makes the zombie go wild with bloodlust or, actually, do whatever she wants (in the case of Alex's parents, she's usually content to just let them sit very still). "It needed to be simple and very digestible. I needed people to get it the first or second time they saw it," Cregger said of Gladys' ritual. "Everything I kept coming up with was, like, two steps too complicated."

Ultimately, no matter how well-written Gladys might be or how carefully Zach Cregger crafted her story and the details of her magic "tricks," it all came down to the performance ... and Amy Madigan absolutely delivered on that front. We "see" Gladys a few times while she provides two of the movie's freakiest jump scares courtesy of in-universe nightmares, but when we meet her in Alex's dedicated chapter towards the end of the movie, she seems, at first, like a harmless (albeit weird) old lady. Once we see her perform that aforementioned ritual on Alex's elementary school principal, Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong) — before having Marcus murder his own husband and immediately make a beeline for Alex's teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) — we realize that Gladys isn't just a socially awkward older woman who can't apply lipstick normally. She's a deeply malevolent entity, and Madigan plays the character's ups and downs so beautifully that she fully disappears into this difficult role.

"Amy just brings Amy to it," Cregger told Entertainment Weekly. "This firecracker but total precision. Amy is able to play in these two extremes and alternate between them effortlessly."

Finally, it's hard to discuss Gladys without talking about her fitting conclusion, wherein Alex performs the ritual himself so that all of the children she's kidnapped and enchanted turn on her, leading to a hilarious and wild chase sequence that culminates in Gladys being literally torn to shreds by the possessed kids. Cregger has zero regrets. "I had to put a lot of my own money back into this movie, and I think that final sequence is a large part of what demanded that," he remarked. "Dude, I'd do it all over again because it makes people laugh, it makes you smile at the end of this traumatic journey that we've been on." Honestly, he's right ... and even though we're probably getting a Gladys prequel, that would have been a satisfying last look at Madigan's masterful performance.

"Weapons" is available to rent or buy on streaming platforms now.