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Review of Weapons (Ryan Holladay/Hays Holladay/Zach Cregger)

WaterTower Album

Waxworks Album

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

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.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

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.  *

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 50:45

• 1. Maddie (1:44) • 2. Main Theme (1:59) • 3. Who's There? (0:38) • 4. Following (0:47) • 5. Newspaper (1:25) • 6. Don't You Find It Odd? (1:02) • 7. What Could've Happened (0:56) • 8. Nightmares (0:33) • 9. Snip (1:21) • 10. Daybreak (0:41) • 11. Troubled Person (1:04) • 12. Where Are You? (4:16) • 13. Map (1:00) • 14. Waiting Game (0:49) • 15. Gasoline (1:11) • 16. Stop Right There (0:51) • 17. Serious Hot Water (1:01) • 18. Donna (1:00)

• 19. James (1:13) • 20. Room to Room (1:51) • 21. What Did I Tell You? (0:50) • 22. On a Mission (0:45) • 23. Drag (0:30) • 24. I Think She Cut My Hair (2:45) • 25. Gasoline II (1:40) • 26. Homesickness (1:57) • 27. Are You Watching? (0:27) • 28. Campbell's (1:47) • 29. If I Got Better (1:37) • 30. Nametag (1:07) • 31. The Flight (3:42) • 32. Into the Lair (2:12) • 33. One Shot (0:57) • 34. Locked (1:21) • 35. Swarm (Feat. Mary Lattimore) (1:32) • 36. I Found You (2:32)

NOTES & QUOTES:

There exists no official packaging for the digital version of this album.

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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Weapons are Copyright © 2025, WaterTower Music (Digital), Waxworks Records (CD) and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 8/27/25 (and not updated significantly since).