Weapons, The Death of the Suburbs, and Leila and the Wolves

Hard Light Newsletter Readers! Hello! I hope you’ve had an awesome week full of movie-watching and other miscellaneous hobbies and activities. This newsletter will have a spoiler-free review of the new hit movie Weapons with something I’m calling the subverted suburb syllabus. I assume most of you have already seen the film or don’t want it spoiled, so I’ll add some context to the vein or subgenre this movie is playing in that’ll be useful to all. Finally, we’ll have a piece that previews Leila and the Wolves, our next Hard Light screening on Friday night. Leila and the Wolves isn’t quite as “buzzy” as our previous nakba film No Other Land, but it’s an incredibly important film that recently got restored, and we’d love to have you there for it. It’ll be a “pay what you can” screening with all proceeds going straight to the director and to Gaza’s Roots. RSVP here.

Weapons (2025) and the Subverted Suburb Syllabus – Warner West

I come from a small town in Arkansas of about 5,000 people. Basically everyone knows everyone and most remain in the town for the majority of their lives. It’s cliché to cite Twin Peaks, but it truly has that vibe with lots of farmers and a diner in the middle of town. It felt safe and secure until a high schooler just a year younger than me went missing one day. When you heard about murders on the news, it was always in some far-off metro and not right down the street from you with the step-father being the prime suspect. It’s this fear of the darkness hiding in your neighborhood that Zach Cregger mines in both his debut film Barbarian and the box office success, Weapons, which came to theaters this month.

I’m going to keep this spoiler-free, sticking mainly to what is revealed in promotional materials or trailers, but it shouldn’t be any surprise that a movie about a small class of students going missing and the teacher being the suspect fits perfectly into the subverted suburb mold. The movie claims to be “Magnolia meets Hereditary” and it mostly lives up this claim; familial trauma, a rotating cast of central characters, and hurt people hurting people are present in each of the films. The movie’s central premise is a little like Picnic at Hanging Rock but where that movie preys upon the fear of the unfamiliar (the Outback, frontier, and the new), this movie takes the domestic and familiar space of the suburbs and flips it on its head. The horror of the domestic space has been around for centuries with tons of Victorian Gothic plots being about the “madwoman in the attic” or ghosts in the closets, but Weapons follows in the vein of post-WWII American horror where the suburban space becomes hostile.

There are two main veins of this subgenre: white collar/picket-fence malaise and “the monsters on maple street”. We’ll explore each, but as a brief overview the first is about the American Dream going wrong and the second is about the American Dream becoming a literal American Nightmare with monsters or the supernatural popping up. The white picket fence malaise has been around as long as the American Dream itself with its beginnings in Death of a Salesman and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. It often consists of a seemingly-happy middle-class family having dark secrets or trauma hiding just beneath the surface. Some notable films to fall into this vein are American Beauty, Paris, Texas, Ordinary People, The Swimmer, Peyton Place, The Virgin Suicides, Ghost World, The Ice Storm, and Blue Velvet.

The second vein, the one angled more toward explicit horror, can be found in movies as varied as Halloween, Poltergeist, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Something went wrong-a neighbor went crazy, the actual land is cursed, parents are abusive, a monster moved in next door, etc-and the neighborhood that was once safe is no longer secure. If you look at the history of horror, a startling amount of movies fit into this mold because there’s something inherently terrifying about not having safety in your own home. Even when you exclude the apocalypse/dystopia films like The Purge, Signs, and Dawn of the Dead, you still have a massive list including Fright Night, It Follows, The Faculty, Hereditary, and more.

These movies, at their best, deconstruct the American Dream by intentionally attacking the conformity it attempts to enforce. Weapons, mainly through a dream sequence, makes the audience wonder what if something happened to my children? What if my child was the reason it happened? Similar films like Donnie Darko or I Saw the TV Glow takes central characters and submits them to danger or punishes them for their inability to conform. Weapons may not be set in the Reagan or Bush era, and it may look a little different when there are video doorbells, but it still attacks the insecurities that come modern suburban life.

I found it a real treat and definitely recommend it if you’re one of the tens of people who haven’t gotten a chance yet. It may not be an arthouse movie or international hit like what we usually recommend, but it’s an original film by a horror auteur that’s layered with homages to the greats. Give it a try!

Leila and the Wolves (1984) dir. Heiny Srour – Tommy Jenkins

This Friday, August 22nd at 7:30pm, we will be screening the newly restored version of Leila and the Wolves, a radical anti-Zionist film by Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Srour. The screening is free, and all proceeds from donations and merch sales will go directly to Gaza’s Roots, a grassroots mutual aid organization that provides desperately needed meals to people in Gaza.

In a world full of false, performative, or counter-productive gestures towards anti-imperialism and feminism, Srour’s first feature film shines bright as a committed, radical, and prescriptive text on the history of organized resistance. This film builds a personal history of Palestinian and Lebanese women’s role in resisting British, American, and Israeli imperialism, incisively questioning how their contributions have been erased from history by reactionary patriarchal power structures that persist even within resistance movements. It is a moving, deeply personal reflection on the task of resurrecting a forgotten history and finding one’s place within it, and we hope you’ll join us! For years, the movie was impossible to find or streamable only in a poor 240p rip, but we’re now excited about the opportunity to present the film in its newly restored state thanks to Several Futures!

Grab your (free) tickets here and join us this Friday at Studio Two Three at 7:30 for the international classic!

What’s Up Next?

August 22nd: Leila and the Wolves at 7:30PM at Studio Two Three.
August 23rd: Catch us at the ICA Open House before our upcoming partnership and screening series at the ICA this semester! We’ll be there tabling from 1-4!
September 5th: Our next Hard Light Staff Pick; you’re gonna love it!
September 7th: The first Hard Light library screening at Richmond Public Library’s Main Branch. It’ll be a series of Slow Sundays with transcendental arthouse hits, and I genuinely can’t wait.