Weapons Ending Explained: Why Did 17 Kids from the Same Classroom All Leave Their Homes at 2:17 a.m.?

Weapons is the movie of the moment for horror fans.

Zach Cregger’s highly anticipated follow-up to 2022’s Barbarian has effectively kicked off scary-movie season for lovers of the genre everywhere, promising a wild ride through its genius marketing.

As promised from eerie preview footage — not to mention the very convincing maybrookmissing.com — the story follows a small town turned upside down after the unexplained phenomenon of 17 children, all from the same third-grade class, waking up and running out of their homes one Tuesday night at exactly 2:17 a.m. Only one, a boy named Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), stays behind.

Imagery of the children all running with their arms outstretched through dark, dimly lit suburbia has become the 2020s-era “Blair Witch victim standing in the corner” for many horror fans, and has stoked the flames of the question: What happened to these kids?

“It’s a twisty, turny movie,” director Cregger, 44, teased of Weapons, which he also wrote, at CinemaCon 2025 in April, per Variety. “It’s a movie that unravels and reinvents itself as it goes.”

Here’s everything to know about the end of Weapons.

Warning: Weapons spoilers ahead!

What is behind the kids’ disappearance?

Weapons opens with a voiceover from a female student at Maybrook Elementary School explaining the “true story” that happened two years prior, before going into the aftermath.

The story then jumps among several characters’ points of view, beginning with the affected class’s teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), followed by concerned parent Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), whose son Matthew is missing, and ending with the lone remaining student, Alex.

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Eventually, the audience learns that Alex’s parents have welcomed his mom’s sick aunt, “Gladys” (Amy Madigan), into their home for a temporary stay — only for Gladys to immediately pull some witchcraft that possesses first Alex’s parents and then Ms. Gandy’s third-grade class.

Afterward, several characters see materializations of Gladys around town in different, clownish-makeup-covered images, including Justine on the ceiling above her bed and a homeless drug addict/thief named James (Austin Abrams) in the woods near his tent.

Who is Gladys, and why is she terrorizing Maybrook’s kids?

Gladys is described by Alex’s mother (Callie Schuttera) as a great-aunt who is staying with her and her husband (Whitmer Thomas) for a while due to a serious illness.

After Gladys puts a spell on Mr. and Mrs. Lilly while Alex is at school one day, she forces them to self-mutilate in front of Alex — then threatens to kill them if he tells anyone what is happening at home.

Once Gladys realizes the paralysis of Alex’s parents doesn’t sustain her life force quite enough, she promises to leave Alex’s home for good as long as he brings her an object from each of his classmates, so she can concoct a mixture that brings them all to his home — which eventually ends up happening at 2:17 a.m. one night.

One of the later sequences, from Alex’s point of view, shows the kids all barreling into his home and right down into the basement, where Alex feeds them soup over the next several weeks as Gladys is implied to feed off their health.

What happens to Justine? Does she get possessed? Survive?

Poor Justine is not only the immediate object of the Maybrook Elementary School parents’ ire — to the point where the principal, Andrew Marcus (Benedict Wong), forces her to take a leave of absence — but she also takes to binge drinking and gets attacked by a jealous wife (June Diane Raphael) for hooking up with old flame Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), after he lied about being single.

But she and Archer are soon digging into the case of the missing kids on their own as Paul and his fellow police officers aren’t working up to scratch, in Justine and Archer’s eyes. And while Archer and Justine face the wrath of Gladys near the end of the film — mainly, through possession of both Paul and James — they both come away with their lives.

What happens to Gladys?

In a particularly satisfying end to Gladys’ sinister agenda, Alex holes himself up in the guest bathroom his aunt has been using as his possessed parents attempt to rip down the door.

With some quick thinking, Alex manages to use a bewitched stick Gladys has been using to control her “weapons” — wrapping some of Gladys’ hair from the bathroom floor around it and snapping it in half to kick off the insane climax of the film.

Immediately, the 17 children in Alex’s basement flee the home, jumping through glass windows and anything else standing in their way and chasing Gladys through the community.

They eventually catch up with her … and the rest of the scene plays out not entirely unlike how a lion might tear apart a (rabid?) wildebeest.

What happens to the possessed adults and kids?

While many characters don’t make it — including Paul, James and Marcus, who also kills his partner Terry (Clayton Farris) in a particularly chilling manner — all the kids do, albeit with major trauma. According to the child narrator, though, some of her affected schoolmates have already regained their ability to talk as of a year after the incident that shook Maybrook.

Alex’s parents, however, have been institutionalized, while he goes to live with an aunt who is described as being much nicer than her predecessor.

Weapons is in theaters now.