September 2, 2025
Think Pink: On Aunt Gladys and Morbid Intoxication in Weapons
By Harmony Witte
Spoiler Alert: This post contains spoilers about the 2025 film, Weapons.
For people who have seen Weapons (Written and Directed by Zach Cregger) a theme may have emerged from the horror pretty quickly–that of the struggle with addiction, namely alcoholism. Other forms of addiction are also called out including addictions to food, sex, violence, drugs, outrage, and guns. As with any horror film, there are lots of interpretations being posited, that Aunt Gladys represents Boomers in roles in government and in corporate jobs, that Weapons is a metaphor for school shootings or the military taking mindless orders, that Aunt Gladys is a caricature of Trump. The interpretation where Gladys represents alcohol addiction rang the most true to me having grown up with parents active in addictions
In the film, a town in Pennsylvania is beset upon by a witch who calls herself Aunt Gladys. Gladys (played brilliantly by Amy Madigan) initially claims to be dying of cancer, yet preys on the family of a child named Alex, for whom she claims to be a relative. After taking over his parents bodies which does little to heal her so-called illness, she uses a spell to take over the bodies of 17 classmates of Alex and has them run from the safety of their beds, across town, and into Alex’s basement where she holds them captive for over a month. Alex’s parents are inadequate and incompetent when it comes to protecting Alex or the broader community from Aunt Gladys. She is insatiable, there is no low to which she won’t stoop to get what she wants.
. It is very common for children who grow up with parents who abuse substances to take a parenting role for themselves, sometimes extending that role to their siblings and even their parents, a phenomenon called “parentification.” Alex is first tasked with helping care for his zombified parents, and later, for all of his classmates—his parentification total. Using the classic language of abuse and secrecy, she enlists Alex into a conspiracy of silence telling him she will force him to watch his parents eat each other if he does not do as she commands, something she claims to have done before. Gladys uses magic to weaponize people to go after one another in shockingly brutal ways, never using an actual weapon, only their own bodies to inflict harm or death.
Alex walks to and from the grocery store every day where he buys cans of soup, hauls his burden home, then carefully feeds each of the zombified folks –even forced to care for the boy who had been bullying him in school. Alex literally cares in the most basic ways for nearly everyone in his life. This is a situation that comes from a real place of experience, with Creggers speaking in interviews about being tasked as a caregiver at a young age for an alcoholic parent.
Alex is providing caregiving without consent as we so often see from the children of alcoholics. Meanwhile, he is not getting his own needs met while caring for others all the time. His only value to Aunt Gladys is as a caretaker. It is striking to realize that while the audience sees Alex carefully feed his classmates and parents, he is never shown consuming food himself.
This film got me thinking about my own experiences as a child and young adult. Such as being blamed at 10 years old for a parent crashing their car into a tree and totaling it because they were searching for a “Diet Coke” on the floorboard that I had drank earlier in the day while playing outside– never mind that a bottle of Jim Beam was kept under the seat next to where the Diet Coke was supposed to be. It got me analyzing the time I had to call 911 after finding a parent sprawled on the coach, lethargic, and covered in vomit when I was 15 years old and home sick from school. It had me reminiscing about visiting a parent in jail after a drunken, domestic violence arrest that left them incarcerated for months and prevented them from attending my wedding.
Parentification has been a strong theme in my life as well, with my other 2 siblings my age and I expected to homeschool our 3 younger siblings, cook for them, clean, nurse them, and do nearly all the child rearing (except for the spankings) while my parents lived their own dysfunctional, yet hard-working lives. This dynamic has served to nearly cripple all of our sibling relationships with one another as adults. I really felt it when I watched Alex feed his classmates and parents, his despair that things could ever change, his isolation and lack of hope for a future.
This film doesn’t force a happy ending. Aunt Gladys is eventually consumed by her own methods. The folks who survived Gladys to the end are “on a path to recovery.” Not automatically healed once she is out of the picture, many are permanently disabled, both physically and emotionally. Some improved a little over time, others were never the same again. Even Alex did not escape unscathed after saving the world from Aunt Glady’s machinations, he is left still caring for parents who would never be “normal” again. It’s a poignant end to a brilliant film that is certain to leave a mark on the horror genre for some time to come.