After three years, Zach Cregger followed up his horror debut, Barbarian, with a new film meant to entice and terrify its audience. Weapons hit theaters on August 8, which had a surprising connection to someone very close to the filmmaker. On August 6, 2021, Cregger’s long-time collaborator and close friend, Trevor Moore, died suddenly. Now, four years after the fact, Cregger’s method of grief was released close to the anniversary of Moore’s death. The Weapons director credited the film with helping in his grieving process, as he told Polygon.
“I’m still digesting it. It still feels like it just happened. 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.”
Before contributing to the horror scene, Cregger and Moore were known for their contribution to the comedy sketch group, The Whitest Kids U’Know. Comedy and horror always seem to go hand in hand and have become a calling card for Cregger. He effortlessly combined humor and horror in Barbarian, and Weapons has followed suit.
‘Weapons’ Was a Labor of Love
When Zach Cregger sat down to write Weapons, he was in a different headspace than for Barbarian. Cregger wrote his first movie, starting with a scene that had every red flag he could think of. Barbarian progressed just as Weapons progressed. The director started writing Weapons with no knowledge of where it would end up. He first thought of a classroom empty of children, unsure of what had happened to them. Then he added Josh Brolin’s character of an angry father, demanding answers, and a school teacher whose entire classroom went missing.
Cregger stated that when he started writing the film, he had no idea what the reason was why the children went missing, but by the time he reached the midpoint, it came to him. This was part of his grieving process, allowing characters to feel these darker emotions and act on them while he supervised as the writer. Cregger had many influences, even the most unlikely. He cited that Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Magnolia inspired early sequences of the film, as well as many different perspectives throughout. Through it all, however, is the unquestionable feeling of loss. Weapons wasn’t just a follow-up to Barbarian but a natural progression. Fans can watch Cregger’s second feature film in theaters starting August 8.
Weapons
- Release Date
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August 8, 2025
- Runtime
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128 minutes
- Director
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Zach Cregger
- Writers
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Zach Cregger
- Producers
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Roy Lee, Miri Yoon, J.D. Lifshitz