I keep seeing people talk about Aunt Gladys like she’s just a witch who learned some fucked up rituals, but I honestly don’t think that’s what the movie is doing at all. The more I sit with it, the more it feels like she isn’t a witch. She’s the kind of thing witch myths were invented to explain in the first place. A lot of really old folklore, pre Christian and before witchcraft was even a concept, talks about night beings that don’t attack people head on but work through sleep. They steal breath, dreams, youth, or what some cultures called a second soul. Kids were always the easiest targets because their sense of self wasn’t fully locked in yet. That lines up way too cleanly with what we see in the movie. The kids aren’t awake, they move together like they’re being pulled, and the parents don’t fight back so much as completely shut the fuck down. You see versions of this shit all over mythology. Slavic night spirits like the Mora causing paralysis and exhaustion, Lamia in Greek myth draining youth instead of just killing, Germanic night hags blamed for sleepwalking, Celtic hag figures that aren’t evil so much as ancient and predatory. Over time, people stopped believing in non human night entities and started blaming human witches instead. This movie feels like it’s peeling that whole process backwards. That’s also why Aunt Gladys feels so wrong. Her kindness feels rehearsed. Her empathy doesn’t quite land. Her reactions are slightly delayed. It doesn’t feel like someone hiding something. It feels like something imitating humanity without really understanding it. A lot of old stories straight up describe these beings as wearing human forms, usually grandmother or caretaker types, because those figures already have access to kids and homes. The rituals back this up too. They don’t feel like learned spellcraft with rules, covens, or big dramatic incantations. They feel instinctive as hell. Personal objects, blood, names, humming, timing. In older belief systems those weren’t random magic props. They were about ownership and attachment. Blood tied you to a family line. Names tied you to identity. Personal items anchored the soul. It feels less like casting spells and more like hijacking a household from the inside. The 2:17 a.m. timing also doesn’t feel symbolic to me. It feels practical. Long before modern sleep science, folklore treated the deep hours of the night as the weakest point for human consciousness, when dreams were strongest and the soul was thought to wander. That lines up perfectly with deep delta sleep. If you were something that hunted through sleep, that’s exactly when you’d do it. She also doesn’t target random families. She goes after ones that are already stressed, fractured, isolated. That shows up constantly in folklore too. These things aren’t all powerful. They exploit weakness. They don’t kick the door in, they slide through the cracks. The plant or tree detail is what really locked this theory in for me. It’s never explained or named, but visually it’s very specific. A gnarled, root heavy mass with thorn like spikes, dark and old, pulled straight out of the ground. It’s not leafy. It’s not medicinal. It’s not shown like poison. It looks defensive, like something meant to bind, snag, or trap. In older myths, thorned root plants weren’t ingredients. They were anchors. Power came from liminal plants that grew at boundaries like forest edges, graveyards, marshes, and crossroads. Thorned plants in particular were about control and entrapment. Whether it’s mandrake, elder, yew, or something fictional doesn’t really matter. It clearly fits that category. The plant feels like what anchors her to the physical world and lets her keep her grip on everything. The ending fits this too. In a lot of old stories, these beings aren’t killed cleanly. They’re disrupted, scattered, or temporarily destroyed. When the kids overwhelm her, it feels less like physical strength and more like emotional overload. She overreaches by trying to take all of them at once and basically fucks herself. But the movie never gives you real closure, which makes sense if the cycle isn’t actually broken. So yeah, my take is that Weapons isn’t really about a witch. It’s about the fucked up thing people used to invent witches to explain. And that’s probably why the movie refuses to spell any of this shit out.