Elsewhere in that Entertainment Weekly article, Cregger said that two major things influenced Gladys that might surprise you: a non-fiction book by Wade Davis called “The Serpent and the Rainbow” (not, Cregger specified, Wes Craven’s film adaptation of that very book), as well as a song called “Dancing in the Head” by The Mekons, a post-punk band hailing from England. Sure, the song is set to music, but as Cregger points out, there aren’t really lyrics, per se. “That song is just an instruction manual on how to create a zombie,” Cregger said. He continued:
“It’s no singing, it’s just someone explaining to you this ritual. I love it ’cause it’s a weird ritual where you soak a dollar bill in rum and set it on fire and arrange four mirrors for the four corners of the earth and get a shard of a human skull and all these things. I was like, ‘One day, I wanna make up my own crazy, evil recipe.’ This movie was my chance to do that.”
So, from there, how did Cregger come up with Gladys’ specific magic ritual, which turns people into “zombies” by controlling their every move and subduing them as, it seems, Gladys absorbs their energy to keep herself alive. The word “zombie” actually really works here because, after a second viewing of “Weapons,” I noticed that Gladys’ spell specifically affects people’s brains because the only way to actually kill her zombie creations is to destroy their brains. The entire movie is centered around the mass exodus of 17 schoolchildren at 2:17 in the morning, which remains unexplained until it’s revealed that Gladys and her mysterious magic are behind the whole thing.
How does she do it, specifically? She takes a sharp, thorny branch from a tree she keeps with her, uses it to spill her own blood, and coats said branch with said blood. (The branch also has a personal effect of the intended future zombie wrapped around it.) After ringing a bell, Gladys snaps the branch, which makes the zombie go wild with bloodlust or, actually, do whatever she wants (in the case of Alex’s parents, she’s usually content to just let them sit very still). “It needed to be simple and very digestible. I needed people to get it the first or second time they saw it,” Cregger said of Gladys’ ritual. “Everything I kept coming up with was, like, two steps too complicated.”