Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #2,360
Written 8/27/25
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Buy it... because you have witnessed too much wonder and glamour in
life and you need bleak music to remind you that the world is actually a
terrible place.
Avoid it... to hear amateur composers regurgitate many
fundamentally typical horror techniques of sound design without
distinctive deviation.
Weapons: (Ryan Holladay/Hays Holladay/Zach Cregger)
Filling the late summer void in 2025 is Zach Cregger's popular horror
flick, Weapons, beating far more expensive competition at the box
office. Its premise is fairly standard for low-budget mystery horror
tales, but its execution has helped confirm that Cregger has a
distinctive knack for capturing the genre in his writing and directing.
The non-linear plot tells that most of the children in the class of a
small American town elementary school all disappeared at the same time
one night, each leaving their home and going somewhere together for some
unknown purpose. Years later, the teacher of that class and others in
the community are still searching for the children, with no help from
the inept police. (Such a case would make national news in reality, and
federal agents would have exposed this plot immediately, making this
whole film rather silly.) There is witchcraft and the harvesting of life
force involved, of course, and the story takes this turn towards the
supernatural as people in the town are essentially hypnotized to make
them killers. It's not hard to imagine why the children ran away. After
much of the cast is dispatched for no good reason, a vaguely happy
ending results. The story makes no sense even if you suspend all logic,
but audiences sucked it up and generated immediate discussions about a
possible sequel. The movie utilizes prominent song placements over the
opening and closing sequences, but there is an original score composed
in part by the director himself and his old bandmates, brothers Ryan and
Hays Holladay. The three had known each other for a long time and
performed in the band Sirhan Sirhan. The Holladay brothers moved on to
become sound artists with live shows featuring immersive music
technologies, and they've dabbled in just a few scoring assignments
along the way. Their approach to Weapons is highly conventional
of amateur horror music techniques, yielding a score with few uniquely
enticing characteristics. The soundscape is partially organic, with a
string section joined by piano, harp, and a variety of struck percussion
to go along with the usual synthetic embellishments to produce droning
ambience. While the plucked elements are the dominant personality of the
work, the majority of the cues consists of percussive clicking and
banging of various intensities. Although this sound design may be
basically effective, it's doesn't make for interesting or sustaining
music, and on album, it's a laborious chore. Very high gain levels on
that presentation make its stingers unusually pronounced.
The base sound for the music in
Weapons reverts
to atmospheric muck, a cue like "Newspaper" remaining anonymously
minimal until a stinger at the end. The tandem of the very long "Where
Are You?" and "The Flight" offer little musical value whatsoever. Around
these cues are the attention-getting splashes of dissonant despair, led
by highly abrasive string-scratching techniques heard in "What Could've
Happened," "Snip," "Room to Room," "Drag," and "Locked." These
performances are outrageously awful in "Are You Watching?" and "One
Shot." Likewise, metallic shrieking and grinding are highly unpleasant,
as in "Nightmares" and "Gasoline." Pervasive rhythmic noodling on
percussion accomplishes little in "Troubled Person," "Map," "Waiting
Game," "Stop Right There," and "Serious Hot Water," such tones getting
angrier in the manipulated "Gasoline II" and "Into the Lair." Synthetic
loops are highly annoying and simplistic in "Donna," "James," and "What
Did I Tell You?" There are two related themes of a sort in
Weapons, one for Maddie (presumably the narrator) utilizing an
ascending series of six-note phrases in a somewhat chromatic atmosphere.
There's no consistently clear harmonic progression that the listener can
latch onto in this idea; it's not unpleasant but also lacks substance.
The idea opens "Maddie" with watery keyboarding and moves to plucked
harp later, and it struggles to complete that same keyboarded phrasing
in "Following" against invasive thumping. This theme is manipulated into
a more frantic plucked variant in "Don't You Find It Odd?," supplies
underlying chords that barely emote in "Daybreak," and then strangely
disappears in the score from there. The main theme of the film is
technically different, using ascending figures distinct from those of
the Maddie theme but following a similar stylistic strategy. Expect
little from this melody as it simply repeats the same phrases with only
one notable chord shift before meandering into secondary confusion.
Opening "Main Theme (From Weapons)" on plucked harp over celeste and
piano waltz rhythms, this identity loses focus as it navigates
suspenseful shifts later in the cue. It barely enunciates itself during
the quiet stewing late in "I Think She Cut My Hair" and occupies low,
keyboarded synth tones throughout "Homesickness" with nothing to support
it. That mode continues with the same bleak demeanor in "Soup," but the
composers provide a little more warmth to it in the plucked, childlike
tones during "If I Got Better." There is absolutely no closure for these
themes during the marginally melodic conclusion in "I Found You."
Listeners do receive distinctly rambling tonalities from harp and synths
in "Swarm," which stands apart from the rest of the music. In the end,
Weapons is a dismal score with no highlights.
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