Weapons director reveals how Aunt Gladys cast her evil spell

Weapons has been one of the horror events of the year, and now that the movie is making its way onto digital retail platforms, writer-director Zach Cregger is telling all, including where Aunt Gladys came from, and how she performs her zombie ritual.

Weapons is one of the most successful movies of the year, grossing more than $265 million worldwide, from a reported budget of $38 million.

The blackly comic horror movie also scored 94% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, while we wrote in our 5-star Weapons review that it “does everything a good horror movie should, delivering chills and scares via a story that gets under your skin, before concluding two hours of tense set-up with a truly wild pay-off.”

That crazy climax involves grieving parents, missing kids, and the nefarious Aunt Gladys, and in a new interview, Zach Cregger has explained the origins of the film’s villain, as well as where her power comes from. Meaning SPOILERS ahead…

Recipe for zombie ritual in Weapons explained

Warner Bros.

Aunt Gladys uses voodoo to cast a spell over her victims, and Cregger tells Entertainment Weekly that he was inspired by non-fiction tome ‘The Serpent and the Rainbow’ by Wade Davis, and the ritual described in Mekons song ‘Dancing in the Head.’

But he needed to come up with his own “crazy, evil recipe,” and EW describes it as follows:

Gladys fills a bowl with water, she wraps a personal effect from her victim(s) around a thorny branch from her strange tree; she coats the branch in her blood; if needed, she rings a bell inscribed with the number six and a small upside down triangle to paralyze the subject; she then snaps the twig in half to begin the spell; and she drops the twig into the water to end it.

Aunt Gladys originated in an earlier script

Warner Bros.

Cregger also reveals that Aunt Gladys had her origins in an old screenplay that never came to fruition.

“I had written another script many years ago that was kind of the Gladys story,” he explains. “It was told from a child’s perspective, and this crazy woman picks him up at school and takes him home and has subsumed his parents. It’s about him trying to figure out how to get out from under her oppression. I shelved it. This was a long time ago.

“Then, when I started writing Weapons, I didn’t know where the kids went. I had no idea. I was just kind of following the mystery. I was about 50 pages in when I realized I always loved that little kernel of the story I had, and I was like, ‘That can fit perfectly onto this.'”

Weapons is now available to purchase on digital in the US, before hitting and 4K UHD from October 14, 2025. In the meantime, you can check out our breakdown of the Weapons ending, some wild speculation over whether Weapons is demonic, a dark theory that makes the movie even scarier, and a sad detail concerning that hot dog lunch.