Weapons Ending Explained: The Director Reveals the Origins of Amy Madigan’s Creepy Gladys

Endings can be the true killer in a scary movie. The moment all the questions are resolved, a film risks breaking its spell with viewers. But that’s not the case with writer-director Zach Cregger’s Weapons, which built a kind of pre-cult following by amping up that it’s a mystery: why 17 school children in a small town suddenly vanished. So far, critics have praised the Barbarian filmmaker for sticking the landing.

“The last 10 mins will surely be a contender for best scene of the year,” tweeted Empire editor in chief Nick de Semlyen. “The ending is strong and satisfying and leaves you discontented in all the right ways,” wrote Los Angeles Times critic Amy Nicholson. The finale’s been praised for being as original as it is disturbing.

Now that the film has debuted, Cregger is finally willing to share his own interpretation of what that ending really means. Consider this your warning if you haven’t seen Weapons already: spoilers below.

Weapons filmmaker Zach Cregger directs Julia Garner in a classroom scene.

Quantrell Colbert/Warner Bros.

The mystery is established in the opening scene of Weapons: A child narrator explains that one day, 17 elementary-age school kids—all of them from the same class—vanished without a trace at exactly 2:17 a.m. The time was noted by various security cameras that captured their silhouettes darting into the streets of their neighborhoods. Josh Brolin plays an irate father, one of many adults who blame the class’s teacher (played by Julia Garner), while Benedict Wong costars as a besieged school administrator, and Alden Ehrenreich is a hot-headed local cop.

The resolution to the mystery centers on Alex Lilly, played by 9-year-old Cary Christopher (the voice of the lost owl in An Almost Christmas Story). Alex is the only boy from the lost class to show up for school. The reason he didn’t vanish is because an unsettling family member is responsible for the disappearance. A strange woman named Gladys, played by Amy Madigan—the secret weapon of Weapons—has moved in with his family, bringing a bizarre little tree whose branches give her magical power over anyone she chooses.

One downside of maintaining the mystery is that Cregger has had to avoid talking about Madigan’s work in his film. “Look, I’m more than happy to sing Amy’s praises in the press all day long. She’s so incredible in this movie. Without her, the movie doesn’t work,” Cregger says. “She saved me. It’s just hard to discuss her character without getting into spoilers, so it’s tricky.”

Essentially, Weapons is a modern version of an old-school fairy tale. Children wander into the woods and find themselves in the clutches of a witch. “I saw a lot of Pied Piper conjecture online,” Cregger says.

There is an undeniable supernatural quality to Gladys. She takes a piece of hair or clothing, weaves it around one of her sticks, and uses an otherworldly power to turn her victims into mindless drones. She can direct them to attack viciously, almost zombie-like—as she does to Wong’s doomed school official—or she can merely capture them and drain the lifeforce that she seemingly requires.

That’s what she does to the school kids, who are arrayed around the Lilly family basement, standing stock still as the poor boy tries to keep them alive by force-feeding them canned soup. His parents (Whitmer Thomas and Callie Schuttera) are also under the spell of Gladys, who is apparently some kind of aunt to the boy’s mother. They sit all day in a stupor on the living room sofa, doing nothing—except when Gladys makes them hurt themselves (by repeatedly stabbing their own faces with a fork, in one instance) to motivate the boy to keep up appearances outside the home. Gladys doesn’t puppeteer him, since her cover relies on him seeming normal.

The wrecked parents are a detail that Cregger says he drew from his own history. “This is more of a diary entry about me,” he says. “The last chapter of this movie is straight-up autobiographical. That was my childhood. You live with an alcoholic parent, and there’s this inversion of the dynamic. The child can become the [caregiver].”

In Weapons, the destructive force is Gladys. But in real life, addiction is the spell-caster, he says. “This foreign substance comes in and it changes everyone’s behavior,” Cregger says. “The house becomes a scary place. You can go to school and act like everything’s cool, and then you come home and you hide from a zombie parent. That felt so real to me.”

The filmmaker emphasizes that he wasn’t trying to preach a sermon about the children of addicts. Rather, he was simply inspired by things that once terrified him. “I’m trying to just suck the venom out, you know what I mean?” he says.

In the end, Alex musters the courage to use Gladys’s own spell-casting tree against her, sending the platoon of missing children on a house-to-house rampage as they chase down the witch and tear her limb from limb.

It’s a cathartic ending, if not a happy one. In a chilling final line, the child narrator notes that the missing kids may have been rescued, but they never recovered from their brainwashing.

Answers about the true nature of Gladys are destroyed along with her body.

So who or what exactly was this weird old woman in Weapons? Cregger himself has only theories, no solid confirmations. “I don’t know the answer, but I love that I don’t know the answer. I don’t need to know the answer,” he says. “I just need to know that it’s all possible.”

He discussed the possibilities with Madigan as she shaped her performance. “I presented Amy with two options of her origin story. I was like, ‘You can pick one of these two,’” Cregger says. “They’re very different options. And was like, ‘You don’t have to tell me, but it is either this or that.’ I don’t know which one she picked.”

One is that she was once a regular person, but her spells and corrosive actions are a last-ditch effort to heal herself of a life-threatening illness. In that scenario, he said, “She had to adopt this methodology that she uses out of a place of emergency to keep herself alive. I won’t say any more than that.”

The other option was that maybe she’s not a person at all. The off-kilter red wigs and outlandish make-up suggest Gladys is some other kind of creature, trying to simulate what she thinks a normal human being looks like. But she’s doing it very badly. “That’s an interesting way to think about it. I like that a lot,” Cregger says.

This was one of the possibilities he presented to Madigan, which he framed in the context of Javier Bardem’s Oscar-winning role as the uncanny, unstoppable killer in No Country for Old Men. “I talked with her about the Anton Chigurh character. You get this sense Anton Chigurh is potentially an immortal who has come to New Mexico and is doing an impression of the people around him,” Cregger says. “That’s why his haircut is so wrong and his clothes are clean, because he’s doing a bad impression of these Southwesterners.”

Costume designer Trish Summerville (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) dressed Gladys in a style that can only be called “deranged grandma.” Cregger jokes that his immortal witch must have inadvertently drawn inspiration from geriatric retirees when she decided to venture into this small town. “I like to think that maybe Gladys went to Boca Raton and looked around, and then just scraped an outfit together, and was like, ‘This is what a person does, right?’” he jokes. “She didn’t really think it through. Maybe that’s what’s going on.”

The witch’s facade cracks only twice. “Amy does this amazing thing where she shape-shifts throughout this movie. You never really feel like you’ve pinned her down, except maybe when she’s threatening Alex at the breakfast table,” Cregger says. “Maybe we’re seeing the real her, or maybe the real her is this vulnerable thing.” It happens when Alex offers to do what she commands, if only she’ll leave. “Amy looks so hurt by the fact that he doesn’t want her to stay in the house,” Cregger says. “I was like, ‘Is that the real her?’”

Madigan’s unusual appearance was augmented with withering prosthetics from Autonomous F/X and make-up artist Jason Collins. When Vanity Fair visited the studio with Sebastian Stan for our May cover story, Madigan’s sculpted head was on display, allowing pieces of Gladys’s patchy hair and wrinkled face to be applied and tested. “Amy’s actually got a fair amount of prosthesis on her face,” Cregger says. “We didn’t want to go too far. It’s just one toe into the grotesque. That was the balance.”

By far, the most crucial ingredient in Gladys was Madigan herself, who sold the kookiness while maintaining the menace. “With Amy in Field of Dreams, you see this sparky Chicago ball of energy, and it’s got that natural ebullience that I wanted,” Cregger says. “Then you watch Gone Baby Gone, and she has this total command and this stillness in. She’s just magical in that movie. I was like, ‘Okay, so she’s got the weight and she’s got the fluff.’ And then you watch Carnival, and she’s terrifying. I just could smell that she had everything I needed.”

He recalled driving to Malibu to meet her for lunch when he was casting the part. “I was like, ‘Okay, Zach, don’t offer her the role at lunch, even if it goes well.’ Because I’m an impulsive person,” the filmmaker says. “I’m telling you, dude: Within 10 minutes of sitting down at the table—the food hadn’t even come yet—I was like, ‘You have to play this part! There’s no one else. It has to be you.’ It was just so clear just looking at her. I was like, ‘This is it. I don’t need to hunt any further.’”

It may be the only thing about Gladys that came with certainty.