The New Witch Triad of Longlegs, Bring her Back , and Weapons

Viewing Alex Cregger’s Weapons on its opening weekend at my local AMC back in August 2025, I could not have been aware of the film’s imminent critical and financial success: 93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and over 150 million at the box office. 1 But looking back, the hard-to-please Midtown Manhattan audience’s intent absorption in Cregger’s film should have been a canary in the coal mine. A surprisingly quiet canary: not a single voice talked over the movie as it spent two hours peeling away its multilayered onion of a mystery: the chilling disappearance of seventeen schoolchildren, all from the same third-grade class, told in parallel chapters, each narrating overlapping periods of time from a different character’s point of view: Justine (Julia Garner), the missing students’ teacher; Archer (Josh Brolin), the father of one of the missing students; Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), Justine’s cop ex-boyfriend; James (Austin Abrams), a drug addict living on the outskirts of town; Marcus (Benedict Wong), the principal of the elementary school; and, finally, Alex (Cary Christopher), the lone member of the missing third-grade class who hasn’t disappeared. The culprit behind the kidnapping turns out to be Alex’s sickly but sinister Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan). The child-nabbing spinster gains a foothold in town by exploiting Alex’s mother’s kindness, pleading for a place to stay while she convalesces from illness. Once implanted in Alex’s home, Aunt Gladys, played with metamorphic virtuosity by Madigan, sheds her massive orange wig, Tammy Faye Baker glam, and daffy personality to reveal herself as a connivingly cruel, sallow-skinned witch casting a spell that empties Alex’s parents of their free will, converting them into zombies over which Aunt Gladys demonstrates complete bodily control. In conceptualizing Aunt Gladys’s magic, Cregger told the press, he took inspiration from The Serpent and the Rainbow, the heavily criticized (and largely debunked) 1985 ethnography (not to be confused with the even more infamous feature film of the same name) documenting Haitian voodoo practices used to create putative zombies. However, the very specific, indeed iconic, system of sympathetic magic Cregger gives Gladys should be considered less a representation of any religious practice than the latest in a long line of popular cinematic myths surrounding voodoo. 2 To commandeer a person’s body, making them her “weapon, ” Gladys must purloin a personal item from their possession and wrap it around a branch taken from a magical tree she keeps potted in her room. Then, from her weapon’s intended target, Gladys must obtain a piece of hair, wrapping it around the same branch. When Gladys pierces her finger on the branch’s thorn, slathers the branch with her blood, and snaps the branch in two, the personal item’s owner, the weapon, launches an attack at the hair donor, the target, not stopping until they or their quarry is destroyed. 3 Notably, however, Gladys’s zombies or weapons appear more like puppets or dolls than “heat-seeking missiles” (as one character describes them), whether running with outstretched arms, simulating the flight of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys, or stiff legged and straight armed, like a paper doll moving to and fro in a playing child’s clutches. After Aunt Gladys installs herself in Alex’s home and mesmerizes his parents, she sits at the family’s dinner table and commands Alex to “watch” as his parents repeatedly stab themselves in their own faces with forks until the frightened little boy agrees to do the witch’s bidding. If not, she says, “I can make them eat each other, if I want to. ” Alex is Aunt Gladys’s hostage until, one day after school, he comes home to find the witch vomiting in a bucket. Sick and desperate, she reveals that her intention behind zombifying his parents was to drain their life force and restore her health. Her plan evidently not working, Aunt Gladys strikes a deal with Alex: if he delivers to her a personal item from each of his classmates, allowing her to zombify them, keep them in the basement, and devour their youthful fund of vital energies, she will leave Alex’s home and, also presumably, free his parents. Alex agrees, promoting himself from hostage to accomplice. The movie’s conclusion is a karmic Grand Guignol. Aunt Gladys’s magic is turned against her as the seventeen schoolchildren descend upon their own magical parasite, chasing Gladys through homes, backyards, and lawns in a madcap passing of the baton from tracking shot to tracking shot, such that the audience itself is propelled through the town along with these life-size human weapons. When they finally catch up to Gladys, the children pull her to the ground, rend her flesh, and—of course, in delicious irony—begin to eat her (as she threatened to cannibalize Alex’s parents). Looking around the theater at the audience during Cregger’s masterpiece of an ending, I could see their bubbling satisfaction on their faces. They love it, I remember thinking. Outside, in front of the movie theater, I overheard a horror fan enthusiastically describing the film as “like Osgood Perkins’s 2024 horror thriller Longlegs … but better. ” I bristled at the unflattering ranking of Perkins’s film (a problematic fave), but this curbside review touched on the indisputable fact that the genre’s most successful movie of the year, Weapons, whose ending credits roll in front of a neon triangle, might be viewed as the third film of a cinematic triad along with the Philippou Brothers’ Bring Her Back (2025) and Perkins’s Longlegs—all of whose monster-villains collectively represent a specific subspecies of witch. These three contemporary witches diverge from the prototypical spell-casting Satanist of traditional horror films whose magical powers, according to feminist film scholar Barbara Creed, emanate from women’s monopoly on “reproductive functions. ”4 This new cinematic coven’s witches are not maidens coming into their power as mothers, like Carrie White (Cissy Spacek) in Brian De Palma’s 1976 filmed adaptation of Stephen King’s first published novel, Carrie, whose fearful telekinesis activates amid the onset of menstruation. 5 Instead these new witches are feminine-presenting magic users who evoke but also complicate another common witch trope, one embedded elsewhere in Creed’s exegesis of the “monstrous-feminine, ” as literal or figurative crones representing a failed femininity that is mutative and virulent, arguably post- or subhuman, infecting and corrupting, or parasitically feeding on, the gender-normative suburban family. In the New Witch Triad, the physically feeble crone, usually associated with transformation in neopagan tradition, is so fearfully dangerous because she reflects and breeds a disjunctive relationship between bodily form and spiritual content. The horror of the New Witch Triad lies in these films’ widening of this disjunctive gap to reveal human ontology as that of a doll, hauntingly hollow but for the paradoxical occupation of a diabolic other, figuring consciousness itself, even in its default form, along the lines of American horror’s mythologization of voodoo. In a shared theme of violently pessimistic deconstruction, the crones further demonstrate that this foreign homunculus, which occupies the human subject, is itself empty but inhabited by yet another “cuckoo”-style parasite. This structures the New Witch Triad’s voodoo-doll model of humanity in terms of a Russian doll, a toy simulacrum of a child containing a smaller version of itself that in turn contains a yet smaller version, ad infinitum. In the final analysis, exteriority and interiority and body and soul are collapsed, leaving human agency nothing other than a self-negating form of mimicry. The triad’s most literal crone—Cregger’s sinister spinster, Aunt Gladys—figures the inevitable disjunction between human subjects and their own embodiment, which comes with old age, infirmity, and illness. Perkins’s Longlegs is performed by Nicolas Cage as a gender-ambiguous crone, a problematic choice that I prefer to lean into, in more detail, below, although the director has clarified his personal disgust with antitrans politics in absolute terms. In Bring Her Back, Laura (Sally Hawkins), also something of a spinster, takes up dark magic after the accidental drowning of her partially sighted preteen daughter, Cathy (Mischa Heywood). For Laura, Cathy’s death is a traumatic dislodging from the normative life cycle in which parents are necessarily survived by their offspring. Once having loved and raised Cathy, Laura cannot imagine herself as not being a mother. She lives in a state of painful paradox, where tragedy forces her to live as something other than herself. Laura’s system of magic, a form of demonology, is a horrific expression of this paradox. In the long, involved preparation of a ritual for resurrecting her daughter, Laura kidnaps a child, Connor Bird (Jonah Wren Phillips), whose body she uses as a vessel for a ravenous, all-devouring “angel” (whose glowing red eyes, the audience understands, are very much those of a demon). The demon living inside Bird’s body will eat, masticate, and swallow Cathy’s corpse to regurgitate Cathy’s along with her into the body of child (whose she after the child’s the also partially sighted preteen is the demon will Cathy’s soul by as their making the ritual a form of In the same Laura on like a doll of Cathy for popular Cathy in her and back her hair from her like Cathy used Laura her children the demon body is a that turns out to be her body in from the film but for a in an old home of her kidnapping of Connor Bird while having the little body around her as a to the to its body or Laura, the as failed her child to her own state of paradox, living as something other than they by each of their as or dolls for something or she or in my is the most of the whose of (as is an to himself the and of one his American a of between himself and his The is a to but diabolic children who the literal out with glowing red not Connor as they the of suburban that have the for with its in which a is a to of the like its Longlegs in a as contemporary femininity as than that to themselves as making a to this on to it his who is is a piece of and it be to not be confused with a piece of problematic of the as is the Perkins’s like its films in the New Witch Triad, the disjunction between body and The fact that Longlegs himself to as a and, cannot be by other than the most of his disjunctive a Longlegs even represent so to this politics in I that Longlegs in the of this to as a a representation of in to or in the the is a to the of the and the film’s problematic in a of In the a witch in the of the in the single to her the the single as his accomplice. Alex in Weapons, agrees to this in to her loved on the of as a a from the doll of the family’s with the hair or by while at her day as a are of suburban who and who in Once into these traditional homes, dolls the of the mothers, and into The by the of them, in their own while and finally is inside the their own point for a (and and, on this Perkins’s film the of he himself in his The could also be a and his a single could be as a the of the family’s (as as such as and and them from the A that the film that and are not to the traditional but are of a from course, if this to Longlegs as of such in it But Longlegs is more than The lies in the film’s and is the the failed Laura, and the sinister spinster Aunt Gladys, to to a of … to the gap between and that is in of by not or a new of it or an To the Perkins’s that could be or that is more like a form of the film in this to violently with the of (a of the between and humanity into a of in and as the body that the of or on and of so that the audience can as reveals itself to have been an for that has the disjunction between itself and the body that it with as who and who in dolls even their out of these even them to in their final as and each other and themselves in an of and This that the of and was the first in the of and the first in their In this the film’s of by their own and (as I will in further inhabited by not their own a of and is subjects most their embodiment, and subjects most their through their of However, as in a and of a on as has the fact that with a gap between their and their The New Witch Triad as a witches to make dolls of their to more as a disjunction between and embodiment, and more from these in be viewed as the of that surrounding more the of those who shared disjunction between form and in the terms it most problematic it could be viewed as a of that the of the New Witch Triad, this also for Aunt Gladys as sinister spinster and Laura as failed their as other of not necessarily that the disjunction between and in a of the of it, as in her all of humanity as by in which the is to make for the of be is to do for at own to as is like one of its a inside of each an is of or in these of the little and allowing Longlegs to in the of his who as of all for an In finally herself to that she is one of with her own doll by little of in but in that has propelled her up the of the is a of consciousness embedded inside her which her where to for Longlegs while her of his her doll, is to a also like her doll, is as another doll, of … is a between to Longlegs and the in Perkins’s such that and witch to and one When Longlegs at home in of for he himself as of a … that lives … a of the as a However, strikes her Longlegs himself … to live and in basement, another a of the The horrific reveal of Longlegs is not that and her have been and all is it the of a children and the family. is chilling is the of human consciousness as with an but for the consciousness of another that is itself even or are in this pessimistic of is hollow but for Longlegs is empty but for the and the is nothing but the that are all empty dolls of the film’s is are by something diabolic and that subjects as their it also a that might be by the a force of (as Longlegs and the as a point for If the human are not its it at In a and that the cannot and, that the human but such To the the film all but its audience that the this This in terms of the film’s relationship to contemporary but it might to at of the film’s in the specific that the that violently and is as For are the as as his witch’s and this fact to the of his attack on in with the of his that Perkins’s to The can be viewed as less problematic as its a for the diabolic doll, a which the horror of in the place of Longlegs and and of little with a much critical model of as a is also into the form of of chapters, each the of the seventeen missing schoolchildren from the of a different in time each character’s the the same the failed by the In the of the film each character’s the Aunt Gladys’s the that them all and the one inside she as Aunt Gladys and inside and that Weapons is a for in the press, Cregger out the ontology of the doll as in terms of the of a child’s home a Aunt Gladys as a … and have to deal with this new that Aunt Gladys, as a for the herself in and through each of the other the common between all seventeen missing their an for Aunt Gladys’s and from her Justine turns to for In one in Justine’s and chapters, after to her Paul for Justine has Paul her for a at a the fact that Paul is a and living with his to Justine Paul to with and they have which will leaving their relationship in a the father of one of the missing on Justine’s he the target, if for the like Gladys, is a exploiting her to his and his relationship with his she also his as a his the is his the as a of the witch that inside Gladys’s spell over the She also might as a of Gladys, the of that have been on those of But Cregger’s is his of to for of absolute Gladys, like and on the inside them, the into another Justine’s and the of the Justine’s his own of a cop in his of The of are as of Aunt Gladys through up in the he Gladys was theme movie on as Gladys uses Marcus and his to be against them so they the spell that Marcus for and parallel Paul with his used infecting the like Gladys the and and as smaller of Longlegs that also as even they do not or to do The model of Cregger’s and Perkins’s crones reveal is not of hollow or but also Russian each character is a of a that contains it and the of a smaller consciousness that like the in the doll containing the is also the doll them the between and and leaving an In the press, Cregger Aunt Gladys an he has she will her own as he in playing his Cregger two Aunt Gladys was a who turned to dark magic in an to her or Aunt Gladys’s orange and could be that Gladys was not human at all but a not Stephen King’s her and her human in to and upon a human to he told Madigan, have to but it is this or he “I which one she he not the that might have at Aunt Gladys, the of all containing all of them and embedded inside them, is herself an keeps but to by his and not two of the most horror of and Aunt of of an and her are nothing but Bring Her witch as failed her magic by of Russian in a When Laura of the demon she has she the into the and the of the on the to the demon back her an of or magic, Laura must through the to complete her The failed can be that she is like the magic she performed on the In another the demon inside Connor Bird’s body, Laura can I in if I see another one if soul is inside their body, one a soul and body in the This is an and the is the but The the the is the three films to that the of is the ontology of a where even the of their are in Bring Her Back, Laura the demon a of and her hair, it the demon to on the and to his and in the The magic, like spell is a form of and its of Cathy’s soul into body is a The the demon magic that it is Cathy’s that the demon from her and that it is a simulacrum of Cathy that the demon will into that Laura will to Cathy by her she will not be to the at not and so she will not the In a of the by which she the demon in the Laura Cathy in body if she Weapons, Aunt Gladys, herself an playing the of a sickly old spinster, uses magic that a to by any ending Archer and Justine into Alex’s home in of Aunt Gladys and the missing children she in the Archer and Justine do their but they have Aunt Gladys’s magic They a allowing Alex to Aunt Gladys’s so that he can pull a of Gladys’s hair from its himself in the where he the hair around a branch of Gladys’s magic tree to his seventeen and snaps it, the children in his at Aunt Alex’s is a back to the in which Aunt Gladys Alex to “watch” as she performed the ritual to his parents and to make he his parents themselves at her her magic is nothing but a of ritual in her power over Aunt Gladys gives that power Alex Aunt Gladys by through the like the of the New Witch Triad films in to more their shared They as to a of but by an of such that any and all of agency are making human a form of of by which she is out at own and, the of is of an and her voodoo-doll she cannot the doll, the that she might be living out plan for Bring Her Laura cannot through with and to her she in her Cathy’s as the the audience’s satisfaction with Weapons I it on opening the film’s ending is Alex’s parents and classmates, from Aunt Gladys’s are that is not out of the theater as the credits roll on Weapons, the of those tracking in which the audience through town as an of the of the film’s final Archer the his living but very much who at the audience from over his The in the New Witch Triad as they out of their to in it to the of cinematic humanity might its as nothing but the of in that and is who is the most the between and the ontology of the When one of the of the has a of the The toy in a dark but for the of a that to as much in as it the of in Lost but also not a movie theater The horror of the and shot with the audience’s that they are not in fact the doll at all but its comes the and that the the and with the audience’s final that they see the in the the as they see themselves in that The and quiet of this so on my first in of the of the usually audience at the Midtown Manhattan AMC as they Cregger’s The of the whose the doll that the doll in for to its them and as it into their This model of horror in the audience like a the audience like the and yet with the of the film the New Witch Triad, see their own on the they love