THE CURSE OF HORROR

“Weapons” and “Harvest.”

- RICHARD BRODY

Children disappear from a suburban community in Zach Cregger's film.

Horror is an accursed genre. Because it promises to deliver a specific sensational effect, its stories are obliged to fit into preordained patterns. Its popularity depends on predictability, and the task of providing the expected thrills renders the genre even more formulaic than superhero blockbusters. Zach Cregger’s new movie, “Weapons,” is, in this regard, an exemplary horror film-reducing social complexity and elaborate fantasy to a narrow outcome. The action starts at 2:17 A.M. on a week night, in a middleclass suburban neighborhood somewhere in Pennsylvania, when seventeen (of eighteen) students in a local elementaryschool class get out of bed, leave their homes, and vanish. A voice-over narration briefly recounts the departure and sets up the subsequent investigations by police, administrators, parents, and the teacher, Justine (Julia Garner), whose students these were.

The parents turn on Justine, blaming her for the disappearances. She, meanwhile, suspects that the one remaining pupil in her class-a quiet, and, if not bullied, at least slighted and aggrieved, boy named Alex (Cary Christopher)—may have been involved. The principal, Marcus (Benedict Wong), puts her on leave, both to placate the parents and for her own protection, and forbids her to have any contact with Alex. As the investigations continue, they lay bare a tangle of neighborhood ties and conflicts: Justine reconnects with a police officer named Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), who is in a relationship with Donna (June Diane Raphael), whose father, Ed (Toby Huss), is the chief of police and therefore Paul's boss; a petty thief named James (Austin Abrams) learns of reward money and works to rescue the children; when the most vociferous of Justine’s accusers, a man named Archer (Josh Brolin), is stonewalled by the police, he gathers clues independently and comes up with his own theory.