Weapons (2025)

directed by Zach Cregger

Derek Heckman

I’d been a teacher for three years when I had my first active shooter training. 

At the time, I was living in Boston, and the school where I worked—a high-pressure Ivy League-feeder, the kind you read about in tell-all nanny memoirs—utilized a method of emergency responsiveness known as “the ALICE trainings.”

ALICE (an acronym for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate) took the form of a series of videos that I watched during a Work Week afternoon. Bucking against the conventional wisdom around active shooter situations—or “Violent Critical Incidents” in the parlance of the trainings—ALICE encouraged a move away from the old “shut the lights off and hide in a corner” method of dealing with an active shooter. Instead, the trainings urged everyone to be proactive when an armed intruder was detected:

• Don’t Alert people with codes! the training videos advised. Broadcast the shooter’s location and description in clear words!

• If you are able to leave safely, Evacuate!

• If it isn’t safe, Lockdown! Use what you can to barricade the door! 

You are empowered to participate in your own survival! 

the motto of the trainings ran, sung out with gusto by a confident female voice at the beginning and end of each video. The trainings in each module gave important survival information—such as how to effectively break open a window and how to stack your desks into a barricade—but more than anything, the goal of ALICE was to drill that slogan into your head. The people behind this system wanted me to feel powerful, capable of leading my students and colleagues through an imminent threat to their lives.

Instead, it made me feel like I was having a nervous breakdown.

I started kindergarten in 1997, two years before the Columbine shooting, and I became a teacher in 2014, two years after the shooting at Sandy Hook. School shootings have been a regular, horrible happening in the United States for basically my entire life, but it wasn’t until I took this training that I saw clearly how ridiculous, how Kafka-Camus-Orwell absurd the situation in the U.S. had become. You simply could not look at those videos and think that things here were okay. A country that had decided—despite the one, huge, glaring, obvious solution we could choose to enact—that it would ensure its students’ safety by teaching them and their teachers how to drop out a window with the minimum risk of injury, or loop a belt around a door handle to make it harder to open, was simply not a country interested in actually keeping people safe. The idea of training for a shooting the way I’d trained for tornadoes as a kid in the Midwest—treating them like forces of nature, as powerful and chaotic as they were simply unpreventable—made me feel like a character in any number of dystopian novels, suddenly and mind-snappingly aware that my country did not give a shit about me, my students, or reality.

I was so shaken up by the ALICE trainings that when I finished, I took the drastic step of actually sharing all these feelings with a coworker.

The woman I talked to, a veteran teacher with many more years of this shit under her belt than me, listened to me quietly, and then turned to me with a shrug.

“I get all that,” she told me. “But we have to do them anyway.” 

I thought things might get better when I finally moved out of Boston, trading a fast, crowded, noisy city for slower-paced suburban Maryland, but I still had to do active shooter drills here, and they were somehow even more demoralizing than ALICE. 

Still employing what I now thought of as the “backwards” model of locking the door and hiding with the lights out, my new school encouraged us not only to watch but to show the children a YouTube video outlining our strategy. In the video, a cartoon rabbit, aptly named “Mrs. Rabbit,” gave a pun-filled speech to her class of cartoon children about what to do during a “safety drill.”

I watched the video while my own students were at a recycling-themed magic show, spending most of it trying not to scream. If ALICE made me feel like I was staring into the abyss, Mrs. Rabbit made me feel like I was actually losing my mind. In a chirpy little sing-song she instructed her class to “burrow like a bunny,” showing a picture of an actual, living child folded into a ball in the corner. She led her children in a playful chant, reminding them what to do when a safety drill was called. “Locks! Lights! Out of Sight!” Mrs. Rabbit’s class recited, while down the hall my own kids shrieked with laughter at their eco-magician’s patter.

Roughly every two minutes during my time with Mrs. Rabbit, I had to get up and pace, making use of the same “calming breaths” I teach the children to use when they’re upset. Being prepared for a Violent Critical Incident was one thing, but normalizing shooter-prepardedness so completely it becomes a game, teaching my kids rhymes and slogans the way we do for fire-safety or hand-washing—I wanted to throw Mrs. Rabbit out of my classroom by the ears.

Still, as my colleague said, I simply had to do it. I finished the videos and talked to my kids (though I declined to actually show them a Mrs. Rabbit video), and whenever we’ve done a “safety drill,” it’s all gone pretty smoothly. At my current school, we run them twice a year, and between those days, my feelings about them drop from a heart-pounding sense that the world is out of control to a dull sort of back-burner itch.

It was therefore a bit surreal, as this past summer drew to a close, to experience all these emotions while watching Zach Cregger’s Weapons.

It doesn’t take much critical ingenuity to read Cregger’s second film as a metaphor for school shootings. The haunting shots of empty desks, flower-draped memorials, and police officers pacing school parking lots are images that have been haunting American news channels for decades, and if the very idea of an elementary classroom being here one day and gone the next feels for some reason too subtle, that dream sequence image of an AK-47—floating in the darkness above a cluster of suburban homes, time-stamped with the exact minute this town’s nightmare began—underlines the message with an ALICE-approved directness.

Yet what I felt most while watching this movie wasn’t the devastation that comes from hearing the news of a shooting, but the crazy-making cognitive dissonance that comes from doing active shooter drills. While obviously a little bit calmer during those chapters not dealing with the school, the sections that focused on Archer and Justine made me practically nauseous in the same way as ALICE and Mrs. Rabbit. These two characters are, after all, the ones most engaged in solving the movie’s central mystery. Sure, the cops are looking for the kids. Sure, other parents are just as upset. But, for the most part, the world around these two has pretty much kept on turning. Children are going to school again and the cops are busy punching out drug addicts, but Justine and Archer are unable to look away from how gnawingly little sense their situation makes. Both of them know, on a gut level, that the tragedy that befell their town wasn’t merely a tragedy. It wasn’t an accident or coincidence or even the will of God.

It was an act. 

Someone did it.

And if that’s the case, there must be something to be done. 

For both, however, attempts to get this message across are met with the same unphased responses that meet my own occasional freak outs. Stick to school policy, principal Marcus tells Justine. We’re doing all we can, police chief Ed reminds Archer. At every turn, this team of parent and teacher are told that continuing to question things isn’t going to get them anywhere. Of course everyone knows what a horrible thing this is, and of course they want to fix it, but at a certain point, they have to accept things, and trust that all of this, broadly speaking, is pretty much par for the course.

They can’t, and as the movie goes on, the number of people our heroes can turn to narrows until it’s just the two of them, alone in their conviction that, whatever it it that’s happening, it’s completely fucking insane.

—and it is fucking insane! One of the things I appreciate most about Weapons is that, when the secret of what happened is finally revealed, it’s about as crazy an answer as a filmmaker could have come up with. Audience opinion seems to have varied on how much they liked the reveal of Aunt Gladys, but for me it seemed right in line with the rest of Justine and Archer’s story. A large piece of both characters is, after all, their certainty that, somehow, they should have been able to stop this. Archer is a commanding, Josh Brolin-sized man, and Justine takes pride in the compassion she has for her students, but despite both their strength and insight (and despite their neighborhood's Ring doorbells), Gladys takes their kids away as easily as snapping a twig.

It’s the aspect of these active shooter trainings that I’ve always found the most absurd: that despite how thorough or well thought-out they are, if someone wants to come in and shoot me, there’s not that much I can do to stop them. Even being as prepared as I can be, the best I can do is basically what Principal Marcus does—lean on the protocols my school has in place, crossing my fingers that today isn’t the day something wicked comes knocking on my door.

It’s the absurd nature of this reality that, for me, Gladys immediately embodied, and the way she makes the adults in the story behave in patently absurd ways—from stabbing themselves in the face to smashing their husband’s head in—felt, on an emotional level, absurdly familiar.

It makes me feel completely crazy to have to go through these trainings, and I’m sure there are teachers across the country who question their sanity when they do them, too.

Of course, the psychic effect of this absurdity on grown-ups is only one small part of its horror, the easiest part to talk about, because the larger part is so much worse. Weapons doesn’t forget this, and it makes sure to remind everyone in its closing sequence: Alex. Here we get to see Gladys and her destructive power in full, all through the eyes of the eight-year-old whose world the witch’s magic tears to shreds. It is awful to watch the misery that Alex’s life turns into as a result of having Gladys in it—walking home alone with that unbearable burden of soup, spooning broth into the mouth of the catatonic classmate who bullied him—but for me it was somehow even worse to watch Alex, with no choices left, fight back.

This, after all, is the C at the end of the ALICE system: Counter, as in Counterattack. When a Violent Critical Incident has become its most violent and critical, when your attempts at locking down or evacuating have failed and you stand face-to-face with your attacker, the trainings advise distracting the shooter, specifically by throwing things at him.

It’s hard for a shooter, especially an untrained one, to stay focused during a VCI. Throwing him off balance by lobbing objects such as books and staplers can give you a chance to escape or possibly even disarm him.

Leaving aside the effectiveness of classroom objects vs. fucking bullets, or the actual amount of focus needed to kill people with an automatic weapon, I remember thinking how nightmarish it seemed to actually teach children how to do this, not just “Locks! Lights! Out of Sight!” but “Do not go gently into that good night!” The videos showed children practicing by throwing red rubber balls at a water gun-armed assailant, and while I never ran a training like this, I’m sure there are places that have.

It was impossible not to think of these trainings during the movie’s final moments, when Alex, barricaded in his bathroom, is forced to make a counterattack that saves his family and friends, and it was impossible, too, not to think of my own students, and how it feels to watch them do a safety drill.

To be honest, they always do a great job with it. They follow directions, stay quiet and calm. But whenever we get back to work when it’s over, I end up feeling depressed. They will have to do oh so many of these over the course of their academic lives, and they will be increasingly more ALICE and less Mrs. Rabbit. They will be taught how to lock and barricade a door, and how to jump safely out of a window. They will be taught to throw a stapler at an intruder wielding a gun, and it is a horror worse than anything in Weapons to consider that someday, they actually might need to.

Sometimes I think that it might be better if they didn’t follow my directions. If they screamed and stomped and let everyone know that hey, this shit is fucked up!!!

They don’t, though. 

They accept it. 

Because, I guess, their teacher has, too. 

Like theater-goers everywhere, I had to stop myself from actually cheering when Alex’s plan finally came together, when that horde of wronged school kids went barrelling through their sunny neighborhood and tore Gladys limb from limb. It shouldn’t be a surprise that I thought a lot about my own students during that comically cathartic sequence, but it was therefore all the more of a gut-punch when the mood of that scene shifted, and Archer finds the children, standing quiet, and soaked in blood. Wisely, Cregger ends the movie, not in a moment of triumph, but with the full, weighty understanding of the trauma this situation implies, of the years of damage and slow healing these kids have waiting ahead of them, of the knowledge of what they, and they especially, have been through since Gladys walked in.

What would those kids say, I wondered, when they finally did start talking? What will our kids say when their school days are over and they start to look back on these “safety drills?” What will they think of the teachers who encouraged them to hurl projectiles and “burrow like a bunny” in the corner? How will they feel toward the country that so massively failed to defend them, the world that left them no choice but to participate in their own survival?

Like Cregger, I can’t offer any answers to these questions. I only know what his characters know as they stand harrowed at the end of the film: that the world we live in is full of witches, and they’ll take everything if we let them.

Derek Heckman was born in Peoria, Illinois, and holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Montana. His journalism has been featured in Slate, and his flash fiction has been published in Milk Candy, Wigleaf, and Trampset. You can find him making greatly underappreciated jokes on twitter as @herekdeckman and the same jokes on Bluesky as @derekheckman. He currently lives outside of Washington, D.C.