'Weapons,' 'Halloween,' and Cinematic Attacks on the Suburbs

How 2025's Horror/Comedy Hybrid Plays on Decades-Old Fears

The poster for John Carpenter’s iconic slasher Halloween has to feature prominently in conversations about the greatest movie taglines in history: “The Night He Came Home!”

Much like other great taglines — “In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream,” “You’ll Believe A Man Can Fly,” “An Adventure 65 Million Years in the Making,” — Halloween’s conveys the fundamental appeal of the 1978 classic. The embodiment of evil has come home.

The numerous sequels to Halloween (read more here!) significantly diluted the terror of Carpenter’s original film. Viewed in isolation (without the familial connections or cultic curses), Halloween is a story about a faceless, inexplicable, relentless attack on what was supposed to be a safe haven. It was a story about an attack on the safety and security of suburban America.

Zach Cregger’s Weapons, one of the hits of the 2025 summer season, lent itself to numerous interpretations about what Cregger was trying to say about the state of contemporary America. It was an allegory about school shootings. It was about the impacts of COVID on children. It was about the failures of elder care.

But what Cregger does with Weapons is an update to the themes established by Halloween decades prior. At its core, Weapons is a story about the failure of parents in a bucolic American suburb to keep their children safe. The film plays on decades-old horror tropes about how the suburbs — places where families go for safety, peace, and security — contain their own danger.

Weapons’s grand reveal of its antagonist presents a monster that comes literally from inside the family. Aunt Gladys is introduced as a elderly relative in need of end-of-life care from a central character’s parents (although it’s fair to question whether she’s actually related to the family, or if this was just part of a spell or trick). She quickly takes over the household and bends the parents to her will, proceeding to launch her scheme to draw the children to her.

Cregger cleverly mixes the relatable issue of dealing with aging family members with his emerging brand of villainous elderly matriarchs. But underneath it is the sinister implication that the expectations placed on the parents — to open their suburban home to an elderly relative — completely upends their lives in unpredictable ways.

With how muddled and convoluted the Halloween franchise became, it’s easy to forget just how simple Carpenter’s first film was. Michael Myers isn’t presented as anything otherworldly or supernatural. He is simply the boy who lives down the street and snapped one day with no explanation. He stalks the main characters for no discernible reason, appearing to choose them by chance.

A scene at the beginning of the film drives this point home. When Dr. Loomis goes to a local graveyard, the graveyard keeper briefly recounts to him a story about a father who went insane and murdered his family in a nearby town, remarking to Loomis, “Every town has something like this happen.”

Indeed, Carpenter even positions the town of Haddonfield (named for a town in New Jersey) right outside of Chicago, a city with an extensive history of flights to the suburbs. His Haddonfield is also a mostly empty town, with few extras and empty streets surrounding the characters.

Both Carpenter and Cregger play on long-running themes about paranoia in the suburbs and threats to the nuclear family. For Carpenter, the threat comes from a member of that family. For Cregger, the threat comes from a malevolent force looking to take advantage of expectations of the family.

To be sure, there are a number of other quality suburban horror films that are worth visiting, including many in the haunted house and home invasion genres. But with Halloween serving as the formative slasher movie and Weapons providing the latest entry in the “prestige horror” genre, the pair make for a great double feature. To play on the tagline from Halloween: Weapons is the night everyone leaves home.