20 films to watch next if you liked 'Weapons'

A group of young students disappears without a trace, and the entire town is searching for them. It's the original Weapons, but instead of a suburban maze, the setting is a girl's boarding school in a painterly countryside. A sun-kissed Impressionist backdrop sets the tone for what may be cinema's greatest mystery, which continues to evoke questions to this day--my main question being, how did Peter Weir make such a perfect film?

You thought Weapons was crazy? Wait until you see what's in the basement of Zach Cregger's breakout film. The movie he made before Weapons is just as bonkers, charting the horrid past of a home in a quiet neighborhood. In Barbarian, every square foot of space is calculated to create terrifying laughs.

The missing person's horror movie has long been haunting moviegoers, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that often leads to a heartbreaking conclusion. In The Vanishing, a couple arrives at a busy gas station, and the wife mysteriously disappears. Was she kidnapped, did she leave on her own accord, or is The Vanishing more supernatural? The ending is jaw-dropping, revealing haunting secrets below the surface, but the slow-burning search for those answers is what makes The Vanishing appear in your memory's rearview mirror.

The Substance toes a line between horror and comedy like Weapons , but crawls under your skin in completely different ways. When a fading actress decides to split her life between a younger, sexier body and her withering self (she's played by the ageless Demi Moore, which is itself a comment on body standards), she finds the two meshing together in gonzo body horror ways. It's a tough pill to swallow, but The Substance sticks the landing triumphantly.

This dude should have known something was up when his white girlfriend's parents jokingly said they voted for Obama--hindsight is 50/50, but Jordan Peele's Get Out is 10/10 when it comes to blending horror, comedy and suspense over the course of 140 minutes. How many other movies have you laughed in one second and jumped out of your seat the next?

How is Ferris Bueller's Day Off anything like Weapons? I'm glad you asked--this movie, about students who go missing on ditch day and the search to find them, is a lot different tonally than Weapons. The movie is funny, catchy and full of life instead of death, but when you think about the comparisons between the comedic portions and the hilarious ending chase scene through the suburban streets, the camera tracking through homes the way it did with Bueller, you can start to see the influence it had on Weapons.

What's in the basement is equally terrifying in Parasite. There are levels to this movie about a poor family infiltrating a rich family, including comedy, horror, and suspense. Parasite injects your bloodstream with laughs, then slowly devours your smile with terror.

The villain in Weapons is eerily similar to the spooky old lady in Hereditary. Without giving any spoilers, it's safe to say that Ari Aster's breakout film cast a spell on Cregger and the influence immaculately shines through in Weapons.

Any movie about terror in suburbia is going to have people pointing their fingers back to E.T., which has a lot of similar spooky neighborhood shots to Weapons. There are no Reese's ads in Weapons, however. The alien in Weapons is alienation and the children are noticeably missing.

There's not much comedy in Roman Polanski's perverse horror film about a woman trying to get rid of her demented child, but the horror sections in Weapons strike a similarly eerie tone. There's something about the way Polanski turns daylight into paranoia that Cregger captures in Weapons.

The director M. Night Shyamalan is most known for his twist endings, which makes it ironic that his career has been marked by twists and turns, ups and downs. The less said about The Lady in the Water , the better, but his alien invasion movie Signs is the director at his very best. It's Shyamalan at his most Spielberg, with suburban dread that is partially evoked in Weapons.

Those who are drawn to the gonzo portions of Weapons are likely going to be drawn to House. More akin to Cregger's Barbarian, this house of horrors makes Weapons look like a quaint HGTV show. It's the kind of film where severed heads float around corridors aimlessly like blood-soaked balloons and bananas speak, and you just go along with it.

Blending horror and comedy is no easy feat, but Agatha Christie toes the knife's edge. In her greatest cinematic adaptation, a bunch of quirky archetypes gather on a steamboat cruise and someone is murdered, making for a whodunnit with a who's who of actors.

A masked killer is terrorizing a small windswept town in Halloween --children are going missing, no one is safe. Not least of whom is Jamie Lee Curtis, one of the original Final Girl archetypes in cinema. John Carpenter's mood piece sees people getting slashed to pieces in a horror film that hands out jump scares like Halloween candy.

No, not the Nicolas Cage movie. We're talking about the cult horror classic wrapped in bloodshed and folklore. When a private investigator checks out a rugged island where people have gone missing, he might just find himself next on the murderer's list.

A strange force is turning innocent animals into weapons and only Nausica can stop it. A masterful piece of world building imagination painted in gorgeous poetry, this is Hayao Miyazaki doing what no other director in animation could ever pull off.

There are lots of possessed kid movies out there, but none match the mood of The Shining. An ethereally terrifying film about a father losing his mind and attempting to murder his wife and possessed child, this is horror at its most atmospheric.

The Babadook is a bed story for children aimed at adults, telling the story of a mother trying desperately to parent her haunted child. Set in many of the same settings as Weapons, it finds horror in inherently safe spaces like preschools.

The tones of Weapons and My Neighbor Totoro couldn't be different--one movie is about children vanishing eerily into the night, and the other is about children vanishing into a supernatural world of fluffy animals and cute magical spaces that help them process their mother's cancer diagnosis. Both are missing children's movies, but Hayao Miyazaki paints his story in an optimistic light.

Is there a better fantasy movie out there? Inconceivable! This wonderful movie blends comedy, horror, fantasy, and true love with other genres as well.