Warning: This post contains vague spoilers for Weapons!Weapons has arguably become the biggest horror movie of the summer following its release earlier this month, marking a huge success for Zach Cregger and the impressive ensemble cast. Weapons has pᴀssed some major box office hurdles and is well on the way to becoming another mᴀssive hit for Warner Bros.

Weapons has found similar success among critics, currently sitting at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and finding itself on many pundits’ shortlists for a Best Picture nomination when the Oscars roll around next year. However, despite Weapons’ immense critical success, it’s not the only horror movie from this year to explore its key themes of possession and witchcraft.

Bring Her Back And Weapons Are Both Secretly Possession Movies

Bring Her Back may not have been 2025’s biggest commercial success, but it’s one of this year’s most impressive hidden gems. The movie follows two teenage siblings who are forced to move in with a friendly single mother after the death of their father, leading them to a house plagued with dark secrets and supernatural rituals.

Much like Weapons, the latest horror feature from Talk To Me’s Philippou brothers keeps the audience in the dark for the majority of the runtime, leaving them guessing as to what’s actually going on behind the scenes. Both projects keep the truth of their horror hidden before eventually revealing a major twist in the final act relating to possession and mind control.

Bring Her Back has been compared to movies like Hereditary and Insidious, with many critics praising its ability to use horror tropes to dissect the family dynamic. It’s a story about parental abuse and generational trauma, using possession and witchcraft as allegories to explore these universal themes. Again, this is something Bring Her Back clearly has in common with Weapons.

While Weapons incorporates more comedy into its story and doesn’t always take itself as seriously as Bring Her Back, Cregger’s tale is just as sincere in its storytelling and touches on many of the same key themes. These thematic similarities eventually morph into narrative ones in Weapons’ final act, as Cary Christopher’s character finds himself in an explicitly similar situation to the siblings in Bring Her Back.

The distinct approaches that Cregger and the Philippou brothers bring to their respective horror movies can make it difficult to catch these similarities at first, but they’re clearly there, and they represent an ongoing trend in the horror genre of using supernatural concepts to explore real, grounded issues. Neither Weapons nor Bring Her Back is solely a possession story; they’re both deeply human stories about people.