words by J.A.G. Mabbutt

Often fairytales have a disguised, darker, more sinister seed buried beneath the roots of their fantastical worlds. In the latest Horror blockbuster ‘Weapons’, and the poem ‘The Stolen Child,’ both the filmmaker and poet camouflage studies of innocence and corruption behind gnarly, fairytale influenced narratives.

Having conquered most of the current cinematic social media algorithm , Zach Cregger’s sophomore release Weapons has absorbed an awful lot of attention.  Following his red-hot debut Barbarian, Cregger has illuminated the hopes and dreams of many cinephiles, with the revelation of his latest script igniting a gruesome multi-million bidding war.  Titans of the industry like Jordan Peele, has fought tooth and nail to secure the rights to Weapons, having failed to the financial swagger of New Line cinema. Two years later, and here we have it— Cregger’s promised script in the form of a self-directed dynamite, horror blockbuster.

Pieced together by a whole bunch of various influences and ideas, Weapons is a horror film that is lean, yet lusciously vast in terms of its thematic hunger, that says something deeper. Like all of the best horror films, Weapons deals with bigger ideas, seizing them and working them into the intimate and real, unleashing fear from the domestic and common facets of life. In doing this, it walks the footprinted path of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Ari Aster’s Hereditary.

But in all truth, to condense Weapons into one singular comment would be to regale it with this generation’s The Exorcist. While I’m not attempting to suggest that Weapons rivals the exact quality or contents of William Friedkin’s masterpiece, I feel content in clarifying that Weapons, like Friedkin’s film, mirrors the world of that time with forensic and thoughtful detail. Whereas Friedkin used the periscope of a supernatural lens to approach domestic fears of The Orient, sexual promiscuity and female puberty, Cregger scalps his environment, picking apart the sinews and bony residue of the world we can witness away from the screen. 

America now sloshes itself about in a crucible of fear-mongering and fascistic dread. Cregger’s film, if not on purpose, carries this into his script, examining the grief and trauma of the sudden inexplicable flee of 17 children from their homes, one random night. 

Now, how does Cregger do this? By vivisecting this crisis with a deep, resounding reference to the influences that the external has on the internal. How is the domestic  transformed from placidity to malignancy at the hands of an invader that itself is domestic and parasitic, feeding from the fuel of the white-suburban middle class and in doing so, eroding the innocence of children?

And this brings us to our poem for this fortnight's forked study of both film and poem: 

W.B. Yeats' The Stolen Child

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

I’ve admired William Butler Yeats for many years now, and since unearthing his works in my days as a sixth-form student, I have found myself steamrolled over by his brilliance. ‘The Stolen Child,’ is a poem rooted in Yeats’ own fascination with faerie folk, and their relationship to Irish culture. At the centrefold of the poem, Yeats’ narrator nosedives into a narrative regarding a child being abducted by supernatural beings of immoral intention, like Cregger’s film, musing on not only the reasons why such an abduction takes place, but also the conditions which have triggered it. Both director and poet pose their ideas through the terror-some terrains that exist in fairy tales, speckling their commentary with tropes and topicality we might find either in the minds of Brothers Grimm or James Stephens. 

Nestled within the poem, a refrain that rears its head in most stanzas is “Come away, O human child!”. Undoubtedly from the narrative perspective of the faeries themselves, the tonality is resoundingly coercive without being demanding. In using the word, “human,” as an adjective, to refer to the child, it supports the idea that the speaker is themself non-human, but it also impacts on the reader’s conclusions about the intent of the fairy speaker. The non-specificity of the request, the absence of a name, forces us to see the exchange as predatorial, a being requesting the movement of another, not for comfort or for the sake of being helpful, but instead as a seductive force that cares little for the individual, but more so for the resource that the child provides.

Yeats’ use of the instructional phrase “Come away,” adds to this, as it appears as an invite of migration, lulling the child towards the speaker, but away from their home or safe place. The lack of force or real persuasion in the verbal choices made conjures up the freedom that fairies wish to offer, as they request that the child may move itself without the need for action from the speaker. In this we unlock Yeats’ understanding that the speaker is a coercive, counterfeit being that, like a Grecian Siren, goads the innocent towards their arms rather than the forceful eviction of strength. On parallel tracks to this, Cregger boots fairies aside and embodies his abduction through the presence of a Witch who invades a suburban domicile with the intent of feasting from others’ life force to make herself younger.

Whilst it is hard to pinpoint one exact moment to locate such a similar attention to a nefarious supernatural force that feeds off of children, we can indeed locate a trail laid out by Cregger. Whether it is the repeated evidence of a chalkboard topic subject that reads “Parasites,” in Justine Gandy’s classroom, or the televised, pictorial reference to Cordyceps infecting the brains of ants on Marcus’ television before he is made a pawn by Gladys the Witch, it is clear that Cregger has a negative, almost scientific view of external forces influencing the children of the town.

Yet, aside from this, the most significant visual moment that recognises the same ideas as Yeats poem is the scene where in Alex’s narrative episode, we see Gladys ringing an ominous bell to draw Alex’s classmates to the house. Alex’s covert actions prior to this, in stealing his classmates name cards from their class drawers, is itself a forceful action that assists the violent theft of these children, not only from their homes, but their lives of sentience. Like Yeats’ fairy speaker, Gladys is an entity that exists on the perimeter of the domestic world, inviting children into her web with the intent of benefitting at their sake. The malevolence of such beings boasts this idea that both Yeats and Cregger are aware of liminal threats that pose as hospitable, yet  offer violence and parasitic behaviour. 

In addition to this, Yeats continues the faeries persuasive rhetoric with the phrase “For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.”

In doing this, the fairy is given a hook to steal away the child, with the promise of peace from the restlessness of their life at home. Yet beneath this, there exist two layers. At first we might just focus  on  the environment that exists for the stolen children, a world where either poverty or other pressures might resist the growth of the children involved. For most children in the rural spaces of Ireland, the quality of life might have been limited due to financial constraints or the limitations in their own life and Yeats knew this and thus tethered  it to the argument made by the fairy speaker. At a second, more pessimistic approach, we might see this rhetoric as a fabrication by the fairy, a spin welded together to bury the child in fear, a fear that pushes them towards the embrace of the fairy world that is more menacing than motherly.

This is also looked at by Cregger, as he too, wishes to use fairy tale tropes to architect a more fearsome imagery. Whereas Gladys doesn’t exactly weigh up an offer of saving the children from a damaging reality, we as an audience are shown a world that is indeed fragmented and in turmoil. Whilst ‘peace’ might have been in place before their disappearance, the children are seen to live a life where their stability is chewed at by a serrated jaw of educational scrutiny, dissolved familial bonds and addictive cycles.

We identify a world where teachers are dragged into the spotlight and blamed for being caring, we see an environment where fathers ignore their responsibilities of being explicitly loving (Archer and his son Matthew) and a society where drug and alcohol addiction is entrenched in the lives of everyone. If Gladys was to offer a better option, she would arguably have a decent case for suggesting her indoctrination over the alternative. Additionally, the manipulation of supernatural solicitation is jousted into sight, like the fairy speaker of Yeats’ poem, and is fortuned with coercion beyond the normal strategies. Using a mysterious branch, brand of incantations and blood magic, Gladys is a master manipulator. It isn’t until, her own ritual is turned upon her by Alex, that we recognise a Hansel and Gretel reference, where her victims, the children, chase her and tear her apart.

Rubbed between both the poem and the film is a penchant for diagnosing a culture that is corruptive, yet found close in the quarters of the domestic. Usage of fairy tale symbolism, the filmic and poetic language in both texts, help soften our understanding of a world where radical action is made possible by coercion, by the activity of nefarious actors that camouflage in positions of familiarity and trust.

You might dispense with my accusations of politics being rife within the screenplay and the schematics of Yeats' poem, but in my eyes, the politics is buried in the fabric of anything that touches upon the concept of fear. Children being stolen, abducted or kidnapped, is a fear that fosters attention from all. And if we aren’t smart, we might see more children abducted into the arms of radical, scaremongering cabals that aren’t always as easy to spot as a witch or fairy.