Weapons has made Zach Cregger the hottest genre director in town. But the film was written from a place of personal catharsis, not career ambition, he tells Screen
Writer/director Zach Cregger became hot property when 2022 horror movie Barbarian crested $45m at the worldwide box office, from a modest $4.5m budget. His next screenplay, another original genre feature entitled Weapons, had been written while he was in the edit of Barbarian, and it sparked a bidding war.
“I sent it to every studio at the same minute [8am on January 22, 2023], so I was able to have a competitive situation,” says the 44-year-old filmmaker. “Everybody said no to Barbarian – even people I have very good relationships with, who I thought would respond. With Weapons, it wasn’t about whether I was going to make it, it was about who was going to make it with me.”
According to Cregger, Warner Bros co-CEO Michael De Luca contacted him to close the deal just 90 minutes after the script was sent out, and subsidiary New Line Cinema had secured the rights within 24 hours, putting up $38m for production and salaries. As writer, director and producer, Cregger was offered $10m, along with final cut. He chose to defer $2m in return for backend participation – a smart move given that Weapons, released in theatres in August 2025, went on to gross $268m worldwide. And yet this absorbing film with a strong mystery hook was not written with an audience in mind.
“I wrote Weapons because a dear friend of mine died very suddenly, so I was in a place of extreme emotional turmoil,” says Cregger.
He is referring to Trevor Moore, who together with Cregger and Sam Brown created New York comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’Know in 2000. Their sketch comedy series of the same name aired from 2007 to 2011, originally on Fuse before moving to then-sister network IFC.
“That emotional state allowed me to write from a place of urgency and self-soothing rather than career ambition. I didn’t know what I was writing. Sentence by sentence, I let the story unravel for me. The kids leaving, and this community left in turmoil, questioning why, was how I was feeling.”
Class dismissed
Set in the fictional town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, Weapons centres on the mysterious disappearance of all but one child in the class of elementary teacher Justine Grady (Julia Garner). Surveillance cameras catch some of the 17 children as they flee from their houses in the dead of night – at 2:17am, to be precise – with arms outstretched to resemble aeroplanes.
Weapons utilises a time-hopping structure, its head-scratching events viewed from six different perspectives, each providing new information with only an occasional overlap to help click together the pieces of the puzzle. The protagonists are scapegoated teacher Justine, grieving parent Archer (James Brolin), police officer Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), homeless thief and addict James (Austin Abrams), school principal Marcus (Benedict Wong) and, finally, surviving child Alex (Gary Christopher), who lives with his Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan).
Fitted together, their stories cut through Maybrook’s fear, guilt, paranoia, recriminations and middle-class malaise to get at… what, exactly?
“To me, it’s about my friend who died, and it’s about my dad,” says Cregger when asked about the swirling theories concerning Weapons. “The whole Gladys thing is very much about alcohol upending a family dynamic, which is my childhood – going to school and acting like everything is cool and then coming home and living in a scary house with a zombie dad. But that doesn’t mean anyone else should have the same conclusion.”
Indeed. School shootings, child abuse and the various threats that lurk on the internet, ready to spirit away our kids, have all been propounded.
“I’m not overly conscious of much when I’m writing,” says Cregger. “I’m trying to let it be what it wants to be. I was aware that people would probably think about school shootings – you’ve got a big, floating AR-15 in the sky [in Archer’s troubled dream] and a classroom of missing kids, I get it. But there are some theories I’ve seen that are like, ‘Holy shit.’ There’s something about Gandhi – the address of the house is the same year, nineteen-fortysomething, that Gandhi… something big happened in India, and then there’s a poster in the classroom about India in that year. I never thought of that.”
As well as being a founding member of The Whitest Kids U’Know, Cregger acted in NBC sitcoms Friends With Benefits (2011) and Guys With Kids (2012‑13), and starred in TBS sitcom Wrecked (2016‑18). Given his background and the fact he has publicly bemoaned the death of comedy as a theatrical experience, might he use his clout to get an original comedy funded?
“I doubt it,” he says. “I’m much more suited for this type of story than an outright comedy. But I don’t understand why [they rarely get made now]. When I was a teenager, I used to love going to the theatre and crying my fucking face off with a roomful of strangers because we were all laughing so hard. What’s better than that? Maybe it’s with the proliferation of TikTok and social media – that sense of humour and taste of humour has gotten so fragmented that no movie can hold a candle?”
Cregger swats away the suggestion that Weapons – which mixes horror with comedy, and also layers in potent drama and detailed characterisation – is in fact a culmination of all his work to date. “I still feel like such an infant when it comes to being a writer/director,” he says. “To me, this is my second movie. It’s more like I’m beginning to find my voice with Weapons, and I hope to continue to clarify that.”
He will surely have plenty of opportunities – horror is enjoying a boom time. The genre continues to yield regular hits in a volatile post-pandemic marketplace, often without sizeable budgets or star names.
Cregger has his own theory about this: “A horror movie is promising you total abandonment of the ego,” he suggests. “If I’m afraid, I don’t have room to think about that fight I’m in with my co-worker, or how much money I owe, or my friend’s medical diagnosis. All I’m able to have the bandwidth for is, ‘Is this kid gonna get killed?’ For better or worse, that’s an exquisite reprieve. That’s the goods we’re offering.”
The filmmaker’s next project will be goods of a recognisable name. A Weapons sequel is in negotiation – “I have a story that I’m into, and I think Warner Bros is into it too” – and he is speaking to Screen International from Prague, where he is shooting a reboot of zombie-apocalypse franchise Resident Evil. Columbia Pictures will distribute the film, produced by Constantin Film, PlayStation Productions and Vertigo Entertainment.
“This is an original movie,” he stresses. “I’m not telling the story of any of the games. I’m telling a story that lives in the universe, to a degree, but it’s a small story, following the slow progression through a hostile environment [as] one person goes deeper and deeper into hell.
“It’s not going to be as narratively tricky,” he adds. “It follows one timeline, chronologically, but it will feel like a Zach Cregger movie. It has my sense of humour, and my taste – what I think is cool and scary.”
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