Zach Cregger’s smash hit Weapons intrigued audiences with a story that was equal elements thriller and horror. The disappearance of a whole classroom full of kids strangled a city with worry and paranoia, and whereas its residents pointed fingers at one another, an unseen evil labored its darkish magic.
The mysterious evil was ultimately revealed to be a girl recognized solely as “Aunt Gladys”, who launched herself as the nice aunt of Alex Lilly, the one boy in his class who did not get out of his mattress and disappear into the night time. Performed by Amy Madigan, Aunt Gladys’ startling, clownish look was sufficient to unsettle even the hardiest horror followers, however the bloodshed she wrought was no laughing matter.
A part of what makes Aunt Gladys an impressive horror villain is that there’s so little data given about her. Context clues present some semblance of clarification for the way and why she manipulates the individuals of Maybrook, however by and enormous we’re left in the dead of night about her origins. Luckily, we could obtain extra details about her within the close to future, if Cregger has his manner.
What Weapons Reveals About Aunt Gladys’ Origin
Aunt Gladys launched herself because the aunt of Alex Lilly’s mother, and primarily based on the dialog that his mother and father had when she first arrived, it does seem that his mom is a minimum of accustomed to her as a member of the family. Past that, we’ve got virtually no manner of understanding if she is in actual fact associated to Alex, and she or he appears to haven’t any points harming his mother and father (or him).
We will be pretty sure that Aunt Gladys is in actual fact a witch, particularly considered one of Celtic origin primarily based on her powers. She makes use of what seems to be a blackthorn bush to enact her blood magic, which is historically related to witchcraft in Irish and Western European folklore. Her look in goals and visions of various individuals on the town additionally reinforces the notion that she’s a witch plaguing the whole city.
Whereas the mechanism is rarely revealed, we all know that she is in Maybrook to feed off its residents and restore her personal vitality (one other frequent witch tactic). That is the core cause why she pulls Alex’s classmates out of their beds and hides them in Alex’s basement: to feed off their life drive.
Due to that capability, she additionally seems to be far older than the typical human lifespan. A giant giveaway is that she makes use of the time period “consumption”, which is a Nineteenth-century manner of referring to tuberculosis. That will make her centuries previous a minimum of, and there is not any telling how a lot farther again her origin goes.
What Weapons Director Zach Cregger Has Stated About Aunt Gladys’ Origin
Director Zach Cregger has largely left Aunt Gladys’ narrative origin as much as interpretation, and that is even true for Amy Madigan herself. In an interview with Self-importance Truthful, Cregger famous that he gave Madigan two decisions for Gladys’ origin as she fashioned her interpretation of the character, by no means requiring her to even inform him which she selected.
“I offered Amy with two choices of her origin story. I used to be like, ‘You’ll be able to decide considered one of these two,’” Cregger says. “They’re very totally different choices. And was like, ‘You don’t have to inform me, however it’s both this or that.’ I don’t know which one she picked.”
Madigan’s choices have been that Gladys is both an everyday human who’s turned to and been consumed by darkish magic as a last-ditch effort to avoid wasting herself as her life slips away with a deadly sickness, or she’s an precise creature who’s attempting to approximate the looks of a human (therefore the horrible make-up work).
For Cregger, Aunt Gladys helped present him with some self-therapy, as he claimed her involvement was metaphorically autobiographical for him. As a baby who grew up in a home with addicts, he likened Gladys’ affect to habit itself, with Alex standing in for Cregger because the baby afraid to go dwelling and stay with mother and father who have been successfully zombies.
A Weapons Prequel Film About Aunt Gladys Is In Growth
Following the runaway success of Weapons, Zach Cregger revealed that he’s in actual fact engaged on a prequel film that particularly offers with who Aunt Gladys is and the way she got here to Maybrook. After Weapons grossed a whopping $268.3 million on a finances of simply $38 million, there was a pure urge for food for Cregger to revisit that world once more, and Aunt Gladys is the pure level of entry for additional exploration.
Because it stands, Warner Bros. has not formally introduced the prequel film but, so there are not any ensures that it’ll really come to fruition. If it does, it will not be for a minimum of a few years, as Cregger is simply ending up work on the Resident Evil reboot and has a pair different initiatives within the tumbler.
Nevertheless, he has made it clear that he intends to revisit the world of Weapons, noting that he had the Aunt Gladys prequel story in thoughts earlier than Weapons even hit theaters. Assuming it does ultimately get made, it appears possible we’ll get lots of the solutions in regards to the peculiar girl that we have been denied in Weapons.
- Launch Date
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August 8, 2025
- Runtime
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128 minutes
- Director
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Zach Cregger
- Writers
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Zach Cregger
- Producers
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Roy Lee, Miri Yoon, J.D. Lifshitz