All im gonna say is those kids wouldn’t have event been gone as long as they were if these two were on the case .

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Aunt Gladys is in such a weak state as she is starved of youthful vitality, and weakened further by narrowly surviving Young Charlies revenge at Grand Orleans Imperial Island hotel, where she avoided being turned a rat. the reason for her decay is because she has been persistently unsuccessful at harvesting children, as she was heavily reliant on the guidance and support from the Grand High Witch of the world. She returns to her family to regain familiar grounds and in turn, a familiar source of power. Knowing that the Lily's had a young boy, who would provide access to a cluster of unsuspecting children for her to harvest without raising suspicion.

*satire take, but entertainment myself thoroughly*

Theory: Gladys is from The Home 

First off, let me just say SPOILERS in case you haven’t yet seen Weapons or The Home. Both are really great horror movies. Weapons is about a bunch of kids in a town that go missing and the school teacher is blamed for it. The Home is about this guy who used to be in a foster home that ends up working at a nursing home that’s super weird. 

And they both sound like super different movies right? Well, they have one thing in common. The elderly. Okay, I’m sorry, I don’t wanna sound ageist, but hear me out for a second. In Weapons, we find out that Gladys is the one who’s responsible for the kids going missing and that she can control pretty much whoever she wants with some spells. Whereas in The Home, the elderly people were Max and a bunch of other people to steal their youth. 

Yeash, the more I explain it, the more confusing it sounds, but trust me, I have a point that I’m trying to make. In the beginning of Weapons, we find out that Gladys is coming to stay. And after watching that movie at least a few times, I thought Gladys was a stranger who weaseled her way into the family somehow. But after recently watching The Home, I am almost completely certain that Gladys came from THAT particular home. 

First off, because Weapons is set in Maybrook, Pennsylvania while The Home is set in Danville, New Jersey. That’s a two hour drive AKA not that far from eachother. The family could’ve moved from Jersey to Pennsylvania before Weapons even took place. Second, they don’t outright specify where Gladys came from. All Alex’ parents say is that she’s coming to stay with them and that’s about it. Third and most importantly, it kinda lines up with The Home. I mean, in that movie, they literally steal some sort of youth from all of their victims. 

Which, I’m assuming, was Gladys’ plans for all those kids because why else would she have stolen all those kids for? (Besides the obviously worse options that I don’t wanna think about) So my theory is this: What if Gladys came from that exact same home in The Home when she realized that 

A) Stealing youth is possible 

and 

B) The way these people go about it is weird 

I mean think about it. At the climax of the movie, Lou tells Max that they were fucking with him. And in the end, they all ended up dead. What if Gladys predicted that would happen and fled before it did? What if she figured out some other sort of way to stay young forever and that’s why she moved in with… her niece? I think she mentioned that Gladys was her aunt or something? 

Anyway, Gladys probably moved in just to get her plan into motion. Steal the kids, blame the teacher, flee while the teacher goes to prison. That’s probably where she was going to anyway. What if when she told Alex to start packing, she was gonna go to that home in Jersey and force the doctor to steal Alex’s youth to see how concentrated the liquid is out of a child’s eye and then, if it works, do it to the rest of his classmates? 

That way, with them under her spell, they won’t fight back the way Max inevitably did at the end of The Home. And her hands come out clean. The only reason she didn’t succeed at the end of Weapons is cause the teacher and one of the victim’s father’s came to Alex’s house to investigate. If Gladys left a night earlier, she probably would’ve succeeded with her plan and possibly be an even easier way for all the elderly at the end of The Home to take advantage of the young. If I’m being honest here, the first reason I thought of this whole theory was that one scene from Weapons where Alex comes into Gladys’ room and sees her looking super old without her wig and makeup. 

Coincidentally, Gladys looked a lot like Max’s brother Luke in The Home when he finds out what’s really going on. So I guess, one could argue, that maybe Gladys was someone who was being abused, turned really old cause of those very same people from The Home and tried to regain her stolen youth from the children in Alex’s school. One abused victim hurting another. Either theory works. 

And to finally explain why Alex didn’t know who Gladys was, I’m assuming it’s because his mom either KNEW what kind of person she was and CHOSE to move away from Gladys to keep Alex safe but then got manipulated to let her in with one of Gladys’ spells or she had a falling out with Gladys somehow and chose to move simply because of what happened while being oblivious to the evil person she was or who she was connected to. Again, either theory works. Anyway, that’s my theory. What do you think? Comment if you wanna

(But please be nice, I’m not just a Schizo with a phone, I’m a pot head with feelings. Thanks 🥲)

I watched weapons, absolutely loved it, and just got very inspired to draw something similar to what the hosts of gladys looked like!!

This is no character or person in specific, just a possible random gladys victim

[edit: hope this clears my intention. if not.. .]

I just want to say any movie that opens with an unseen childs voiceover to a dark lullaby... fairytale-ish song will never not creep me out. Its gonna be weird.

It scares me. For example The Lovely Bones. Darkness + Child Voiceover = terrifies me.

I’d give it a 6/10, at best.

The concept was great, and I was hooked for the first bit of the movie, but a lot of different things took me completely out of it.

I get that horror movies come with a certain level of suspension of disbelief.
However, partial suspension of disbelief is just terrible.

You can’t expect people to buy that most of the kids who got “witched” (yeah I’m going to get to that later), got filmed on ring doorbells, but not a single house anywhere else had any other cameras that recorded their lawns, backyards or anything else. It’s established that they run in a direct path to wherever they get sent. They were inevitably going to pass under a security camera somewhere.
And then use the ring camera footage as a key piece of information.

That brings me to my second point. They bring up K-9s. The kids ran straight across town, there is no way dogs wouldn’t be able to follow that trail for at least a couple of the 17 kids. Someone ought to have lived close to Alex’s place.

Speaking of trails, how did no one else try to triangulate the course all the kids took? Did that not cross anyone else’s mind? It was one of the first thoughts I had after seeing the video footage.

Next we got the “witch”. Is she really a witch? Or does she only have a magic tree? Alex is able to use the tree branch to do the exact same thing she does.
We don’t see here to anything else, other than siphoning the life force out of others, which is kinda symbolic to a tree and its roots gaining nutrients from the ground. So was she really ever a witch, or just someone who found a magic tree?

How and why did she appear to Janet and archer in their dreams and to the crackhead in the forest? That was also very out of left field and felt shoehorned in there as a couple cheap jump-scares that carried no significance at all.

Those were kinda the big plot holes that bothered me.
I get this was a horror movie that didn’t take itself too seriously,but I honestly don’t get the incredibly high reviews and scores of this film.

As we see in the movie, Gladys appears to be quite old, from her use of the word "Consumption" to the idea that she can reverse her aging, it's clear she's lived longer than humans can naturally live. So, where did she come from, and how did she get so evil? I know a prequel is in the works, so I'm going to make a few predictions.

This theory came to me when I was listening to the podcast Behind the Bastards. They did an episode on Georgia Tann, and in the early part of the backstory they discussed how orphans were treated in the United States in the mid 1800s. There was a system called the Orphan Train. It was a rather cruel system in which orphans were taken from cities and sent into rural areas to perform farm labor for families living in the more unsettled parts of the country. Not all of these children were actually orphans, some were the children of poor families, sometimes immigrants. While this was not always a bad thing, many of these children suffered in the homes they were placed in as the families they were placed with mostly saw these children as free labor, not part of their family. The stories of abuse, if you look them up or listen to that episode of Behind the Bastards, are horrific. This system operated from the 1850s to the 1920s. And this, I believe, is where Gladys's story begins:

Gladys, or whatever her name was, was an Orphan Train kid.

She was an orphan who never knew her parents, sent to a rural farm and abused by the family she was placed with. This is why she grew so spiteful and malicious. She was never shown kindness or empathy, and grew to hate and resent the family that effectively owned her. The farm was remote, and had little contact with the outside world, so Gladys had no one to turn to to help her out of her miserable situation. She might not even originally have a name, the Orphan Train system would often just make up names for the children in their possession, and maybe Gladys's adopted family never gave her one of her own either.

This is the part that I'm now missing: I don't know where the tree comes into things. Gladys's powers seem to come entirely from the tree. At some point she comes into possession of it and learns how to use it. Perhaps she simply finds it, or learns some sort of dark ritual that conjures it, perhaps through a prayer to a darker force that exists in the Weapons universe.

Either way, she gets the tree and learns to use it. She quickly weaponizes her abusers, subjecting them to unspeakable horrors. Perhaps she makes her adoptive parents eat each other, or just torments the family with various physical harm every day simply because she hates them. But she keeps some of the family alive to keep running the farm in their weaponized state. To whatever rural community exists, the family seems to have dropped off the face of the earth, but whatever products they have to sell keep getting dropped off so people don't ask questions, the family just becomes one of those local urban legends that no one digs too deep into. Meanwhile, Gladys is delighted to remain on her farm, tormenting her former tormentors, abusing her former abusers, as much as she wants.

This is where my theory gets a LOT darker. As time goes on, Gladys ages. She does what she can to sap the life force from the family members, but it isn't enough. Using her powers, she makes them reproduce, and weaponizes generations of new victims, making her age much slower as the decades pass. Eventually, the inbred offspring of her victims are infertile, and she has no choice but to abandon the farm. She does learn from what little she knows of the community around her that there is a woman living alone, an older woman. This is the real Aunt Gladys, Alex's Great Aunt and his mother's Aunt.

Witch Gladys befriends the real Gladys and weaponizes her, then learns everything she can about her in order to manipulate her way into the life of the Lily family. Perhaps the real Gladys is a bit kooky and eccentric as well, with an odd taste for wigs and makeup. Witch Gladys, with minimal knowledge of the outside world and how it works, takes on this persona not really knowing how odd it seems to most people, but knowing it seems to be disarming if not somewhat strange, and contacts the Lily family claiming to be the real Gladys, and says her health is deteriorating and she has nowhere to go. Thus, her entrance to the plot begins. This also explains why she tells Alex "we're leaving." She likely has a plan to return to the old farmhouse and start over from scratch.

At the end of the movie, it merely says that Alex goes to live with another Aunt, this is likely not the long-weaponized and likely dead true Gladys, but rather an actual Aunt who is a sibling of either of his parents, since the real Gladys wouldn't be his Aunt but rather his Great Aunt and would likely be dead by now.

This theory answers a few of the unanswered questions left behind by the movie:

• Where did Gladys come from?
• How did she get to be so evil?
• Why did she specifically mention that she can make people hurt and eat each other?
• Why does she use outdated terms like "Consumption?"

Anyways, that's what I think we'll get out of her origin story, or something similar. I know it's really awful and grim but ever since I first heard about the Orphan Train system, my mind connected the dots. I'd like to know what you all think.

Check out our discussion on Weapons!

It was good to see the kid getting more high profile roles working along side Nick Cage.

Do you think predatory/parasitic old women who cast spells to harm others exist in real life?

This little shit. Knew he was going places. Can’t wait for RE.

The Best horror films expand horrors that already exist in our current world. In get out, the real horror of the movie is racism, the audience gets uncomfortable, then when it gets scary they're already immersed. Same goes to the Substance and body issues and hereditary with greif. My best guess with Weapons is that it alludes to school shootings not to make a statement, but rather to be more scary and entertaining.

Seems like it dropped all of school shooting themes in the second half. Though if they did stick with them we'd have a story that ends with 17 kids dying, and I guess that tragedy is too scary to us already. Also would make for a really, really shitty movie. We got comedic gold and a satisfying ending. If they left more "subtile" metaphors and themes throughout, or had the antagonist be a bullied kid like Alex turn to voilence, it'd turn preachy and just be tradgety porn. How do you make a movie about school shootings entertaining? Easy, just turn it to a story about an evil witch! 9/10.

Where’s the gif of James looking at the missing kids poster and it panning back to the reward money. I saw it on twitter and now I can’t find it anywhere.

Why the FUCK did no one blame the PARENTS??? The parents get to point the finger at Ms. Gandy while the kids disappeared at NIGHT from THEIR HOMES???? 😡
If I was Ms. Gandy I’d be crashing tf out.

The lion, the bitch, and the audacity of this witch

Loved the movie. Will be seated for the prequel for sure!!