If you thought Pennywise the Clown was the only heavily made-up entity whose eerie smile was going to haunt your dreams, you haven’t seen the movie “Weapons” yet.

The relatively peaceful town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania is rocked all at once overnight when, at 2:17 a.m., nearly an entire classroom of children disappears.

Seventeen of the 18 students taught by third-grade educator Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) all rise out of bed at the same time and silently leave their homes.

The expected panic ensues for parents, and even after weeks of investigation, police still have no answers for the phenomenon and no leads on where the kids might be.

Before long, accusations begin stirring as to how and why this horrible thing has happened, with most community members pointing fingers at the young teacher, who has been devastated by the occurrence.

With hopes of salvaging her reputation and mental wellbeing, Justine begins looking into the matter herself, but the more she investigates, the less the whole thing makes sense.

If you’ve seen her as the volatile and verbose Ruth on “Ozark,” you know Garner excels at playing the kind of person who’s sympathetic in their plight even when they’re making awful decisions on the fly.

As a teacher who cares too much, she learns where she stands in Maybrook pretty quickly as whispers grow louder to the point where she fears for her life for something that’s as much a mystery to her as anyone else, especially as she tries to reach out to the one member of her class (Cary Christopher) who didn’t run away.

Josh Brolin is solid as ever as Archer, the parent going after her the most, certain that his child’s late-night egress has to have something to do with her, driven to grief-stricken accusations after a month of seeing little else beyond his son’s empty bedroom.

We see a considerable amount of supporting talent here with Benedict Wong as the befuddled principal, Alden Ehrenreich as the cop with whom Justine shares a regrettable liaison that haunts her, and Austin Abrams as the petty criminal looking for his next score in all the wrong places.

There’s a common denominator among all of them kept obfuscated until just the right time as all their paths finally cross.

Well, hey, there, Amy Madigan! You’re certainly looking… terrifying for at least five different reasons…

With all his characters sharing some level of mutual anger on the surface level and having shared nightmares on a deeper level, writer-director Zach Cregger captures the essence of a town on edge, driving its residents to be their worse selves in a time of crisis while also showing why those kind of character tropes think the way they do.

His story certainly fits in the horror category, yes, but it could just as easily be a straightforward drama about how little prodding it takes to make people turn hateful. Uncertainty and a pervading sense of dread dominate the first half of Cregger’s script as he slowly unfurls this tale.

But the more characters’ vantage points we get to see, the more pieces are added to the puzzle as these lives intersect and overlap, albeit not answering everything about why this situation has transpired.

Much like Cregger’s unsettling but arresting horror debut, “Barbarian,” the buildup is everything, and the tension he manages to create is arguably even better with his sophomore feature in the genre.

The co-founder of The Whitest Kids U Know comedy troupe proves that much like Jordan Peele, the funny guys often know just as well, if not better, how to craft an unnerving amount of suspense and use it well while also finding some moments of hilarity at times.

As is often the case, questions are better than answers, yet that doesn’t mean the answer to this dilemma is unsatisfying, and Cregger isn’t afraid to make that denouement electric and disturbing in a whole new way.

It’s one thing to be scared — it’s another matter to be ready for a scare and have the rug pulled from under you.

Some moments of “Weapons” are played too satirically and too devotedly to an aesthetic — exemplified by the kids’ exiting their houses in the opening exposition in a full “Naruto” run — but it never veers from being riveting.

Much as he showed in “Barbarian,” Cregger isn’t afraid to visit a familiar theme and look at it from every angle, again positing, “What evil lurks within a darkened doorway?”

No matter what you were expecting, you know it wasn’t quite that …