Gladys

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Evil-doer

• Disguise
• Witch
• Nightmare

Aunt Gladys is the main antagonist of the 2025 supernatural mystery horror filmWeapons.

She is a parasitic witch and the pretend "aunt" of Alex, who claims to be and or pretended to be a relative of the Lilly family, and is responsible for the disappearance of the seventeen missing children from Maybrook Elementary School.

She was portrayed byAmy Madigan, who also portrayed Miranda Ma in the Hunt.

Appearance[]

Gladys is an elderly woman with wispy, grey strands of hair. She has prominent gums leaving the teeth barely visible, light blue eyes, an enlarged right iris and left pupil, and no eyebrows. She appears extremely thin as well, possibly the result of her supposed terminal disease or a consequence of her potentially supernatural longevity.

While disguised as Alex's great-aunt, she wears a short curly ginger hair wig, large amounts of red lipstick, blue eye shadow, fake eyelashes and fake eyebrows behind thick frame tinted sunglasses. She frequently dresses in bright colors and excessive jewelry to give the appearance of an odd innocent old woman. In nightmares, she appears wearing a red, white, and blue jacket along with messy hair and clown makeup.

Personality[]

Fundamentally, Gladys is a parasite that drains the life of others to sustain herself. Her homecoming after fifteen years away from the family is not due to familial affection but a desperate shot at survival while dying of a terminal illness. She arrives with an odd, ominous tree—a straight conduit to her black magic—and immediately sets a systematic process of sucking life, energy, and power from those around her. Her first target is the Lilly family, on whom she practices evil witchcraft, not due to any inherent savagery, but as a means of "healing" herself, distinguishing herself as a being who is unswervingly fixated on her own survival, regardless of the destructive cost of those around her, showcasing her self-absorbed and ruthless nature. She is also willing to terrorize the town of Maybrook by kidnapping 17 children (including Alex) to forcibly drain them of their souls and use both Marcus and James to kill each other.

Gladys is shown to have a deceptive and conniving demeanor, avoiding overt displays of power or physical force until the sheer necessity of it, instead taking a subtle yet malicious approach. Her takeover of the Lilly house is one that occurs slowly, an insidious vine of control that silently wraps around the parents and then tightens. Her ability to manipulate is shown with Alex, the family's young son, threatening to kill his parents if he does not obey her. That act proves her understanding of human weakness as much as her skill at employing familial bonds and naked innocence to serve her malevolent purposes.

Biography[]

Very little is known of Gladys' background. Her conflicting claims place her as either the older sister or aunt of Alex Lilly's mother. Alex's parents know her and confirm her as the aunt of Mrs Lilly, but they have been estranged from her for over a decade and she never even came to Mr. and Mrs. Lilly's wedding. There are subtle implications that Gladys may be much older than suggested, as she uses the 19th-century term "consumption" for tuberculosis. How, when, and where she learned witchcraft is unknown.

After a 15-year absence from her family, she moves in with the Lilly family after allegedly being diagnosed with a fatal illness. Among her belongings include a thorned plant. She slowly starts to take over the house, before performing witchcraft on Alex's parents in order to heal from her illness. She warns their son, Alex, to never tell anybody about her actions or she'll kill his parents, and tasks him with feeding his parents.

Alex's parents were unable to heal her, so she requests Alex to get a personal belonging from each of his classmates, promising to leave after. She performs a ritual that makes the children leave their own homes for Alex's house, and locks them in the family's basement, ordering Alex to take care of them as well. Gladys hides the students away from her house while being investigated and uses the hypnotized Mr. Lilly to prove that they're still present, blaming his catatonic state on a recent stroke.

She conducts a meeting with Principal Marcus who was tipped by Alex's teacher, Justine Gandy. Marcus arranges for him to take a look at the Lilly household. After secretly snipping hair from Justine, she steals Marcus' award ribbons. Gladys goes to Marcus' home the next day, where she cuts his husband's hair and hypnotizes Marcus into killing him. She then uses Justine's hair to order Marcus to target her, in which he is killed while pursuing her. After local drug addictJames leads police officer Paul Morgan to the Lilly household, she hypnotizes them both.

Due to being discovered, Gladys tells Alex that they'll be leaving the next day, but are secretly spied on by Justine and Archer Graff, a father of one of the missing children. Together, they kill Paul and James, but Archer is brainwashed by Gladys into restraining Justine. Meanwhile, Alex trespasses Gladys' room which was guarded by his parents provoking them to attack him, but he hides inside the bathroom, while Gladys watches Justine getting choked by Archer, she's unaware that her iconic wig would be her doom as Alex uses it to reverse her own curse towards her by ordering the seventeen children to kill Gladys. Gladys is chased by the children for several blocks before the confused sight of the neighbours until she's finally caught, restrained and brutally torn apart. Due to her death, Archer, the seventeen children, and the Lillys, are freed from the spell.

With Gladys now dead, the 17 children are returned to their parents. With the exception of Archer, Gladys' victims are still left in a catatonic state, but some of the children began speaking again. Meanwhile, Alex was sent to live with another aunt outside of town, while his parents remained in a catatonic state and were presumably sent to a mental hospital.

Powers and Abilities[]

• Witchcraft: Gladys is a witch who practices magic geared toward controlling and "weaponizing" people. Her spells are based on the principle of sympathetic magic, requiring her own blood or saliva and a possession or body part of the target(s) to function. Most of her spells also use the branches of a small, thorny potted tree, and are activated by ringing a bell engraved with an occult symbol. All of Gladys' magic ends immediately upon her death.
  • Spell Casting: Gladys can cast a spell to weaponize a person by drawing her own blood with one of her thorny sticks, then wrapping a lock of hair (or other possession, such as a ribbon) around the stick. When she rings her magic bell, the person enters a catatonic state and becomes a weapon. They can then be controlled through a variety of other spells. Weapons are essentially mindless and can only be made to do simple tasks - they cannot talk except to repeat simple phrases and do not move or respond to their surroundings except when ordered to do something. A person in a hypnotized state loses all sense of self-preservation and well-being and does not sleep, eat or move beyond minor spasms until they are given a target. This is when Gladys presumably feeds off their life force to stay healthy. By bloodying and breaking other magic sticks, Gladys can make any or all of the weapons do nearly anything she wishes, stopping the spell by dropping the stick in a bowl of water. Some of Gladys' spells do not appear to use the sticks. She can weaponize an arbitrarily large number of people at once by using a bowl of personal items from each of them, spitting in it, and ringing her bell. She can also draw lines of salt that work as "tripwires" with weapons assigned to guard them, immediately and relentlessly attacking anyone who crosses the barrier. Gladys also seemingly possesses the power to appear in people's dreams and even induce waking visions of herself.
    • Mind Control: By wrapping a person's hair around a bloodied magic stick and breaking it, Gladys can send the weapon associated with the stick after that person. The weapon seems to automatically know where the target is, and relentlessly pursues and attacks them. Gladys can deactivate the stick by dropping it into a bowl of water. Otherwise, the weapon's pursuit continues until either they or the target are dead. A weaponized person does not experience pain or exhaustion and cannot be knocked unconscious. They will cause extreme bodily damage to themselves in order to kill the target and have no awareness of their surroundings which can lead to their death. Even when fatally wounded a weapon will not stop trying to kill the target - the only way to immediately kill a weapon is by destroying the brain as seen with Marcus, Paul and James.
  • Life-Force Consumption: It is heavily implied that Gladys passively feeds off weaponized people in some way, draining their life energy, minds, or souls to rejuvenate herself. The more people she has weaponized and the longer they remain in that state, the healthier Gladys gets. It is possible, though not confirmed, that Gladys has extended her life well beyond its natural span in this way. The longer a person is weaponized, the worse the effects are when the spell is lifted - while Archer recovers immediately after a few minutes of Gladys' control, the 19 people kept as weapons for a month or more remained catatonic for years afterward with very slow recoveries, suggesting that Gladys had consumed something essential from them.

Known Victims[]

• Terry Miller - Used magic to force his husband, Marcus, to headbutt him to death.
• Marcus Miller, Paul Morgan, and James (all indirectly) - Killed while under the influence of her magic.

Enemies[]

• Justine Gandy - School Teacher, Attempted Victim
• Archer Graff - Investigator, Attempted Victim
• Alex Lilly - Attempted Victim, turned Killer
• The 17 Children - Attempted Victims, turned indirect killers

Trivia[]

• Gladys's actions of kidnapping all of her "nephew"'s classmates reflect on a combination of two folkloric figures: the first of which is thePied Piper of Hamelin from German folklore and the second isBaba Yaga from Slavic folklore respectively.
  • The Pied Piper is famously known to have lured children away from their families via a magic woodwind instrument that he played to hypnotize them in revenge against the villagers of Hamelin cheating him out of a promised payment.
  • Baba Yaga is a repulsive and/or ferocious-looking elderly woman who is known to eat children.
• It is suggested that Gladys isn't actually blood-related to the Lilly family because there are inconsistencies as to how she's related. She says she's Alex's aunt and his mother is her "baby sister." Later, Mr. Lilly says Gladys is his wife's aunt. She also mentions remembering Alex as a baby despite it earlier being stated she hasn't seen his parents in fifteen years, long before Alex was born.
• She uses archaic speech that implies she is far older than she appears. One example is when Gladys says that Alex's parents have "consumption", which is an archaic term for tuberculosis.