Weapons: Aunt Gladys' Origins & Plan Explained

This article contains discussions of addiction.

In Zach Cregger's stunning sophomore film "Weapons," the audience watches as 17 children leave their houses at 2:17 in the morning for no apparent reason and run into the night, ultimately vanishing ... and within the film's unsettling universe, the characters in the seemingly innocent town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania are desperate for answers. It all ultimately boils down to an unexpected and deeply mysterious character: Aunt Gladys, the movie's villain played stunningly by Amy Madigan.

Though we briefly see Gladys in nightmares experienced by schoolteacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) and the father of one of the missing kids Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), we don't actually meet her until she's asked to meet the town's school principal Marcus (Benedict Wong) over concerns about her "nephew" Alex Lily (Cary Christopher). (Alex is the only member of his third-grade class, which is taught by Justine, who go gently into that good night.) Gladys ends up casting a spell on Marcus that turns him into a psychotic, murderous bloodhound, which leads to the big reveal: she's some sort of witch who needs human energy as fuel, and those 17 kids are in the Lily basement, acting like her own personal stash of protein bars.

The inspiration behind Gladys is even darker than you might think, though. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Cregger spoke candidly about growing up with a parent suffering from alcoholism, comparing it to the way Gladys shows up, casts a spell on Alex's parents, and turns them into catatonic zombies who can't care for their son ... leaving Alex to feebly feed them soup. "This is more of a diary entry about me," Cregger told the outlet. "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]."

Not only that, but he sees Gladys as a sort of human form of addiction and disease. "This foreign substance comes in and it changes everyone's behavior," Cregger continued. "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." So what is Gladys' deal, specifically? We don't really know.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

Frankly, even though there's talk of a Gladys prequel to "Weapons," the best thing about this villain is that we don't know anything about her. She claims she's Alex's aunt, but that's probably not true. Gladys also conspicuously claims that Alex's parents have "consumption" — a term for tuberculosis that hasn't been used since the 1800s — which might be a pointed clue about how long she's been wandering the earth and using humans as energy juiceboxes. As far as Cregger is concerned, that doesn't matter, and he's right. "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 told Vanity Fair. "I just need to know that it's all possible."

Plus, as Cregger revealed, he gave Amy Madigan a choice when it came to Gladys' story. "I presented Amy with two options of her origin story. I was like, 'You can pick one of these two,'" Cregger said. "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."

As for Madigan, the actress spoke to Kyle Buchanan with the New York Times about her role and said that she's sort of constructed a backstory for Gladys. "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," Madigan demurred.

Still, Madigan went to bat for her character, despite the fact that she's an energy-stealing witch of some kind. "I think she's a very misunderstood woman! For lack of a better term, I am the bad guy in the movie, but a girl's just doing what she has to do to get through," Madigan laughed. "She has a plan, but I don't think she quite knew how that was going to unfold. She's like an artist, she's very extemporaneous." Madigan also thinks that Gladys is pretty enterprising, all things considered. "I think she's moved around a lot," she continued. "She's had to go to different places and when one's not working, she's kind of a creator of invention: 'OK, I'm going to have to reach out to this family.' She's really needy in the sense that she needs all these people, she can't do it on her own, and I found that really intriguing about her."

At the end of the day, though, Madigan says the binary choice given to her by Cregger will remain a secret. I would say it is an amalgamation of things, I wouldn't say it was one or the other. I liked mushing them together and I like the idea of mystery. As long as I'm intentional in my work and what I'm doing, then I'm OK with that."

The most striking thing about Gladys, ultimately, her look — frankly, we can all probably expect to see a whole bunch of Gladyses at Halloween from now on. In an article on Deadline, the artisans behind Zach Cregger's film discussed how they even came up with her distinctive costumes, her wild red lipstick, and what they were hoping to achieve with her visage.

As makeup department head Leo Satkovich told the outlet, "I can't really put into words just how I feel about how she's being perceived," referring to the affectionate Gladys memes populating the internet. "It's something that's so surreal to me that I feel like I'm still processing ... We knew that we were creating a very special character. I personally just do not feel I was prepared for just how much of a chokehold the world was going to be in." Ultimately, though, special makeup effects designer Jason Collins said he wanted Gladys to be scary but approachable, like she "could be somebody's crazy aunt ... somebody's stepmother, where [you're] like, 'Listen, man, you're gonna meet this lady and you're gonna get freaked out a little bit.'"

Satkovich agreed. "It was really important to us that she felt rooted in reality," he added. "It's very important that she didn't feel like some sort of supernatural ghoul, or she didn't feel like some sort of supernatural being. We wanted Aunt Gladys to look like maybe someone that we can all identify with at some point in our lives, someone that you look at and you're like, 'Something is just not right about them; something is off.'" Throughout the process, the "Weapons" team found the joy in creating Gladys, weirdly enough. "I think the fun part, once we realized whatever our natural inclination was as artists when creating a horror villain, was to do the exact opposite, I think it really opened that creativity door," Satkovich said.

It was Collins' turn to agree here. "We don't want to do the tropes, right? We don't want to do the big witch, haggard sort of makeup and the rotted teeth and that kind of thing," he mused. "You want to kind of go the opposite way, where you want to get just enough detail, where it's left of center, and it really, really jars the audience, but not enough to take them out."

What the "Weapons" artists achieved with Gladys is genuinely stunning, and there's no question that she's officially in the horror villains hall of fame thanks to her unique appearance alone. If you want to experience Gladys' full glory, "Weapons" is available to rent or buy on major streaming platforms now.