The horror genre got a new fan-favorite anti-heroine in Zach Cregger‘s “Weapons” with Amy Madigan‘s Aunt Gladys this summer. And audiences loved the character so much that Cregger, Warner Bros., and New Line Cinema have a prequel about Gladys in the works (Cregger’s next project, a new “Resident Evil” movie, comes first). How did the wig-wearing witch originate, though? In a new interview with EW, Cregger revealed where Gladys and her magic come from, and the answers to the latter may come as a surprise.
Cregger first drew up Gladys in an early script that he returned to while penning “Weapons.” “I had written another script many years ago that was kind of the Gladys story,” the director told the outlet. “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.'”
But Cregger needed to further flesh out the character’s use of magic to make “Weapons” work, so he turned to a couple of unusual sources; one may be familiar to cinephiles, the other probably not. First, “The Serpent And The Rainbow“: not Wes Craven‘s 1988 film starring Bill Pullman, a movie Cregger admitted he “can’t necessarily recommend,” but Wade Davis‘ non-fiction book about Haitian voodoo practices from three years prior. The other one? A little-known song by the British post-punk band the Mekons titled “Dancing In The Head,” which isn’t really a song at all.
“That song is just an instruction manual on how to create a zombie,” Cregger continued. “It’s no singing, it’s just someone explaining to you this ritual. I love it because it’s a weird ritual where you soak a dollar bill in rum and set it on fire and arrange four mirrors for the four corners of the earth and get a shard of a human skull and all these things. I was like, ‘One day, I wanna make up my own crazy, evil recipe.’ This movie was my chance to do that.”
Cregger combined the disparate components for Gladys in a brainstorming session with “Weapons” production designer Tom Hammock at the Beachwood Canyon cafe in LA. “Everything I kept coming up with was, like, two steps too complicated,” the director said about Gladys’ magical possession ritual. Eventually, the breakthrough came, and Cregger remembers shouting the sequence to Hammock, alarming nearby cafe patrons in the process. “Tom was like, ‘You were getting really crazy and people were noticing,'” Cregger laughed.
After that, Cregger said “Weapons” script never changed, but the casting of Madigan was what brought true dimension to the character. “Amy just brings Amy to it,” he said of the actress. “This firecracker but total precision. Amy is able to play in these two extremes and alternate between them effortlessly.” Indeed, Madigan’s performance as Gladys is unnerving, darkly humorous, and electrifying — and the reason she’s getting a spinoff movie all to herself.
But Cregger will shoot his aforementioned “Resident Evil” movie before Gladys returns to the big screen. When she does, though, expect another big hit for the director, because the character is easily one of 2025’s most memorable genre stars.
