The Weapons director just explained the origins of Aunt Gladys the film never tells you

With the acclaimed and honestly terrifying new film Weapons absolutely smashing it with critics and the box office, a new horror icon has been born in its demented villain – Gladys. Aunt Gladys, played formidably by Amy Madigan, is wreaking absolute havoc in Maybrook, and the film doesn’t give much away about who she is or where she came from in Weapons. There are loads of theories about who Aunt Gladys is and what her backstory is before the events of Weapons, but now director Zack Cregger has just explained her origins and it’s so fascinating.

Major spoilers for Weapons ahead. 

Director Zack Cregger explains the real origins of Gladys in Weapons

Aunt Gladys is a haunting force similar to Longlegs in last year’s film of the same name. Over the events of Weapons, we see that she is behind the school kids all running out of their homes in the middle of the night. She set up shop at Alex’s house, saying she’s the aunt of his mother and quickly does some witchcraft which leaves his parents in a vegetive state. She then manipulates Alex into helping her take the children to feed off their life force and maintain her own, keeping her young.

Director of Weapons Zack Cregger spoke to Vanity Fair and explained more about Gladys, where she came from and what she represents – as well as how Amy Madigan influenced a lot of the decisions around how to play her.  He explains how Gladys and her witchcraft represent alcoholism and claims it to be autobiographical to his own childhood.

Credit: Warner Bros.

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“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].”

“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.”

Zach Cregger explained that he presented Amy Madigan with two origin stories for Gladys and she could choose which to go for, but never had to tell him which. The first of these two is that Gladys is just a regular person who turned to this dark magic as a last ditch attempt to do anything to survive the illness she has. The second is that she isn’t a person at all, but truly a creature trying to behave like a real human – hence the extreme and uncanny costume she puts on when interacting with people.

“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.”

Weapons director Zach Cregger has been quite open though about how he loves the theories about Gladys and he does kind of want her open to interpretation.

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