Roughly one in seventeen movies turns me into an evangelist. This year, I had the fortune to have the literal crap shocked out of me by two one-word titled films, each starting with the letter ‘W’: Alex Garland’s Warfare in April, and more recently, Zach Cregger’s Weapons. Even more surprisingly, both occurred in theaters, which I’d presumed to be a wasteland barren of innovation, littered with the woke retreads like Snow White and Superman.

Mr. Cregger is a former cast member of The Whitest Kids U’ Know, a sketch comedy show that aired on IFC from 2007-2011. His career is following the trajectory of Jordan Peele (the Oscar nominated director of horror films like Get Out) who also began his career as a cast member of the sketch comedy show, MadTV, known for its irreverent, politically incorrect and raunchy humor.

Though many feel called to be funny, few are chosen—and once funny, always funny. Creeger and Peele did forsake their gift of humor for mindless horror; rather, they recognized its overlapping tropes. Stand-up shares DNA with sitcoms, which create empathy through character. Sketch comedy, by contrast, treats people as props for absurd scenarios—and that sensibility translates neatly to horror, which mocks life at its most basic level: we are dust, and before dust again, we are bags of spillable liquid.

In its opening sequence, a child narrator informs the audience that “lots of people die in this story in weird ways,” before explaining the premise: in Ms. Justine Grady’s elementary school class on a regular Wednesday morning, all of her students were absent because, “the night before, at 2:17 in the morning, every kid woke up, got out of bed, walked downstairs and into the dark. And they never came back.”

What follows is a montage of police investigations, traumatized parents, and a floral memorial of the missing kid’s photos in front of a banner stating “Maybrook Strong” and culminates in a surreal sequence: slow motion cinematic shots of kids springing from their homes, arms flung straight behind their back, as George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” plays. It feels more like a haunted fashion ad.

Weapons is brilliantly told out of sequence, beginning at the plot’s turning point: the disappearance of the children. Structured in episodic chapters titled after key characters, it blends horror with mystery, layering its story through fractured timelines, like a Quentin Tarantino movie.

Weapons is no mindless slasher; Its characters are more than props for bloodshed, and the fractured structure heightens both mystery and dread. The narrative begins with Justine Gandy, the classroom teacher. Though she is not suspected by the police, the parents do not trust her, and, a month after the disappearance, without any police leads, they choose to scapegoat her at a public meeting. She is put on administrative leave—she has no class left to teach after all—and we feel sympathy for her, even as she drinks too much and reconnects with an ex-boyfriend. Restless, she begins stalking Alex Lilly, the lone student who remained in class that day, uncovering more questions than answers. Meanwhile, Archer—the father of a missing boy—launches his own investigation, lashing out at Justine while police stumble, portrayed as paralyzed, even neutered, by a climate that prizes appearances over action.

Playful, grotesque and suspenseful, the film ends with a gory climax that rivals Cannibal Holocaust.

Weapons teases being a true story to heighten the mystery, but it isn’t. However, the grief that inspired Cregger is true. In 2021, Cregger’s close friend and co-star Trevor Moore died suddenly in a tragic accident, joking only weeks before that he requests his obituary describe him as a “local sexpot.” Tragedy or sketch?

Cregger offers no tidy lessons or political metaphors, but the classic horror trope remains: never trust suspicious strangers. Hospitality, trust, and gullibility become cracks where darkness seeps in. As I write this, a real headline mirrors the film—a man asking to charge his phone was let inside by an elderly couple. He murdered them both and set their home ablaze. He is still at large. Horror plot or comedy sketch? The difference is only a matter of tone.