Zach Cregger’s new horror movie Weapons is the silver lining of a horrible tragedy. “That chapter of my life was terrible,” says the Barbarian director, reflecting on the 2021 death of his close friend and longtime collaborator Trevor Moore. “[Writing the movie] was just me kind of interacting with those feelings in a way that wasn’t self-destructive.”
Cregger can’t, or maybe won’t, describe how he rewired mourning into a two-hour character-driven odyssey that’s like Magnolia by way of Stephen King. But the screenplay exploded out of him. The story begins on a fateful night when 17 elementary school kids, all from the same class, run away from home and disappear. The town is bewildered, the teacher blamed. Told through multiple perspectives, tinged with dark humor, and with an element of the supernatural bubbling under the surface, Weapons is proof that Cregger isn’t a one-hit wonder. And like Barbarian, it’s filled with images of terror that should leave Shudder sickos in stitches.
Before emerging as a premier horror director, Cregger was best known for his work in The Whitest Kids U’Know, the anarchic sketch comedy group that earned a cult following thanks to the emerging art of web video. (Full disclosure: I was privileged to actually help produce season 4 and witness the Kids in action.) Alongside Moore, the troupe carved out a specific niche of over-the-line, genre-infused comedy — a sensibility that, surprisingly, still informs his filmmaking today. “The more careless and fun you are, the better it is,” he says of writing, whether it’s a comedy or a horror script. “The spontaneity and the capriciousness of it all is valuable.”
Actor Julia Garner and director Zach Cregger on the set of Weapons
But unlike in WKUK’s careless days of batting around sketch pitches, the gang wasn’t there for Weapons. When Moore passed away unexpectedly in 2021, it was a seismic loss. “I’m still digesting it,” Cregger says. “It still feels like it just happened.” In the aftermath, he turned to writing as a form of psychological triage. “You just have all this emotion, and it’s better for me to just start writing characters that are feeling the emotions I’m feeling and letting them go kind of crazy and bounce off each other and do everything I can’t do. It feels good. It was cathartic.”
Cregger may not recall the exact numbers that added up to Weapons, but the equation seems clear: it’s what happens when a comedy-writer brain, entangled in the history of horror movies, processes the unimaginable. In the vortex of Dealing With It came images.
“I’m a huge fan of the David Lynch process of transcendental meditation,” Cregger says. “Incorporating what you get from your subconscious into your art and leaving it alone.” One of the film’s most indelible shots — the specter of an assault rifle floating in the night sky — defies obvious symbolism. “The fact that I don’t understand it is what makes it so important to me.”
Cregger says his process on Weapons wasn’t too far from Barbarian, even if it was more loaded. “I sit down, I start typing,” he says. The first thing he heard in his head was a little girl’s voice, telling him the story of the missing children. So that went in. Then there was a character, a school teacher (eventually played by Julia Garner); then another, a vengeful father of a missing student (Josh Brolin), and then another, an alcoholic cop (Alden Ehrenreich). Eventually, structure emerged from the chaos.
“You have a great time having your woo-woo spiritual, emotional like, oh, I’m just following my subconscious,” he laughs. “And then you get a 70-page mess and you have to become a nerd and put on your thinking cap and get really analytical. That’s when it becomes a lot less fun.”
Many other influences merged into the creative process — all too spoilery to name — but even his next project, a reboot of Resident Evil, felt applicable to fusing all the pieces of Weapons together. Cregger really likes Resident Evil 4. “I think I’m influenced by the Resident Evil games very much,” he says, nodding to 4‘s cult themes and eerie symbols. “That’s fair. I’ll totally own that.”
For all its layers of mystery and genre play, Weapons is clearly a film forged in pain. The characters are shockingly human, the situation… a little less so. And for Cregger, the film is a kind of tribute — not just to Trevor Moore, but to a shared creative spirit.
Weapons arrives in theaters on Aug. 8.
