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The only thing you're liable to find lacking in "Weapons" is lore. Otherwise, the movie checks just about every box on the horror inventory. As it begins, you'll quickly learn what has happened to date. At sometime very recently, 17 grade-school kids in Maybrook, Illinois, woke up in their separate homes in the middle of the night, walked out their front doors, and then, with their arms stretched back in identical fashion from their shoulders, as if they were little airplanes, ran off into the darkness, with the neighborhood's many Ring cameras tracking their flight. Why? And where did they go? And what's going on? Because something still is going on.

"Weapons" is the second feature written and directed by Zach Cregger. His first was the already quite scary "Barbarian," and if you saw that one you'll have some idea what you're getting into here -- although "Weapons" is a scarier and more carefully controlled piece of work. Cregger started out in comedy (he was a founding member of "The Whitest Kids U' Know"), but while there are a few fright-lightening chuckles in this new movie, its central intention is to creep you out and to knock you back in your seat with highly persuasive demonstrations of skin-ripping and skull-pulping. (Not since Mikey Madison caught that can of dogfood in the teeth in "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" has facial ruin been so joltingly depicted.)

But this is not a simple run-of-the-woodchipper gore-porn undertaking. It's a fully imagined horror film with fresh new ideas. The horror is muted and uncertain at first as Cregger sets up his characters and their increasingly unhappy situations; it bursts into full bloody blossom in the action-fueled second half of the picture, which is not a lot like any other fright flick of recent vintage.

The cast is a nicely balanced ensemble. Julia Garner (now doing Silver Surfer duty in "The Fantastic Four: First Steps") plays Justine Gandy, a mousy third-grade teacher who lost most of her current class in the mysterious mass disappearance -- lost all of them, in fact, except one, a quiet kid named Alex (Cary Christopher). Justine has a vodka problem and a checkered past at her previous school; she's also having on-and-off sleepovers with a local cop named Paul (Alden Ehrenreich). At the same time, she has drawn the obsessive attention of an angry businessman named Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), whose own son is also one of her students and is likewise among the missing kids.

Justine is as puzzled as everyone else about why Alex was spared whatever it was that took away his classmates, so one day she follows him home. He lives with his family in a big white house with old newspapers taped up over the windows on the inside. Through a narrow slit, Justine is able to get a dim view of the interior, in which she sees a man and a woman sitting eerily on a sofa, staring straight ahead and moving not a muscle. (A simple and effectively unsettling effect.)

Now a hideous new character arrives in the story and alarming things begin to happen almost instantly. The newcomer is Alex's Aunt Gladys (an electrifyingly repellent performance by Amy Madigan) and let's leave it at that. From this point the movie works up a horrific new vibe, which all but cries out for an infusion of lore. To fully appreciate what's happening from here on out it would help to have an idea about the dimensions of the larger universe in which we sense that this story is set. What really is going on? It's not every day that a genre movie leaves us hoping for a swift and well-financed sequel, but this is that picture.

To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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