Weapons Director Spills the Childhood Secret That Inspired Aunt Gladys

If you were hoping Aunt Gladys in Zach Cregger's Weapons was pulled from someone's real-life horror story, sorry — she isn't. The Barbarian filmmaker says the character is a mash-up of visual references he loves and some very personal themes he lived through, but not a one-to-one portrait of any real person.

So who is Aunt Gladys supposed to be?

In a recent chat with Collider, Cregger broke it into two buckets: the vibe and the meaning. On the surface, he built her look out of art and TV touchstones. Underneath, she's tied to his own past and the way a family can feel when it gets jolted off its axis.

• Aesthetic influences: Cindy Sherman's photography, the '90s series Twin Peaks, and, as Cregger put it, the general energy of Boca Raton retirees.
• What she represents: something new barging into a home and scrambling the family dynamic — making a safe space feel dangerous, and showing how that lands on kids.

He was asked point-blank if Aunt Gladys was based on anything he'd actually seen. His answer: no. Not a specific person. Not a story he witnessed. The 44-year-old filmmaker did say the idea is autobiographical in one key way — it comes from growing up around alcoholism. Not an evil woman entering his life, but the destabilizing ripple effect that kind of environment brings.

There's also a bit of inside baseball here: Cregger actually wrote an origin story for Gladys and then cut it. He'd rather keep her sharp and unnerving by not over-explaining the character.

"To know a lot about her is to dull the knife."

And for anyone ready to hunt down the real Aunt Gladys: Cregger jokes he's never actually met a "crazy woman with red hair." The bottom line is that she's a carefully designed character — the look nods to pop culture and photography, but the dread she brings into the house comes from something Cregger knows all too well.