{"id":315276,"date":"2025-08-03T19:08:16","date_gmt":"2025-08-03T19:08:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/315276\/"},"modified":"2025-08-03T19:08:16","modified_gmt":"2025-08-03T19:08:16","slug":"weapons-one-of-2025s-best-horror-movies-was-born-from-real-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/315276\/","title":{"rendered":"Weapons, one of 2025’s best horror movies, was born from real tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zach Cregger\u2019s new horror movie Weapons<\/a> is the silver lining of a horrible tragedy. \u201cThat chapter of my life was terrible,\u201d says the Barbarian<\/a> director, reflecting on the 2021 death of his close friend and longtime collaborator Trevor Moore. \u201c[Writing the movie] was just me kind of interacting with those feelings in a way that wasn\u2019t self-destructive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cregger can\u2019t, or maybe won\u2019t, describe how he rewired mourning into a two-hour character-driven odyssey that\u2019s like Magnolia by way of Stephen King<\/a>. 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\u2019t a one-hit wonder. And like Barbarian, it\u2019s filled with images of terror that should leave Shudder sickos in stitches.<\/p>\n

Before emerging as a premier horror director, Cregger was best known for his work in The Whitest Kids U\u2019Know, 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<\/a> and witness the Kids in action.) Alongside Moore, the troupe carved out a specific niche of over-the-line, genre-infused comedy \u2014 a sensibility that, surprisingly, still informs his filmmaking today. \u201cThe more careless and fun you are, the better it is,\u201d he says of writing, whether it’s a comedy or a horror script. \u201cThe spontaneity and the capriciousness of it all is valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Zach<\/p>\n

Photo: Quantrell Colbert\/Warner Bros. Pictures\u00a0<\/p>\n

Actor Julia Garner and director Zach Cregger on the set of Weapons<\/p>\n

But unlike in WKUK\u2019s careless days of batting around sketch pitches, the gang wasn\u2019t there for Weapons. When Moore passed away unexpectedly in 2021, it was a seismic loss. \u201cI\u2019m still digesting it,\u201d Cregger says. \u201cIt still feels like it just happened.\u201d In the aftermath, he turned to writing as a form of psychological triage. \u201cYou just have all this emotion, and it\u2019s better for me to just start writing characters that are feeling the emotions I\u2019m feeling and letting them go kind of crazy and bounce off each other and do everything I can\u2019t do. It feels good. It was cathartic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cregger may not recall the exact numbers that added up to Weapons, but the equation seems clear: it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a huge fan of the David Lynch process of transcendental meditation<\/a>,\u201d Cregger says. \u201cIncorporating what you get from your subconscious into your art and leaving it alone.\u201d One of the film\u2019s most indelible shots \u2014 the specter of an assault rifle floating in the night sky \u2014 defies obvious symbolism. \u201cThe fact that I don\u2019t understand it is what makes it so important to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cregger says his process on Weapons wasn\u2019t too far from Barbarian, even if it was more loaded. \u201cI sit down, I start typing,\u201d he says. The first thing he heard in his head was a little girl\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have a great time having your woo-woo spiritual, emotional like, oh, I\u2019m just following my subconscious,\u201d he laughs. \u201cAnd 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\u2019s when it becomes a lot less fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many other influences merged into the creative process \u2014 all too spoilery to name \u2014 but even his next project, a reboot of Resident Evil<\/a>, felt applicable to fusing all the pieces of Weapons together. Cregger really likes Resident Evil 4. \u201cI think I\u2019m influenced by the Resident Evil games very much,\u201d he says, nodding to 4’s cult themes and eerie symbols. \u201cThat\u2019s fair. I\u2019ll totally own that.\u201d<\/p>\n

For all its layers of mystery and genre play, Weapons is clearly a film forged in pain. The characters are shockingly human, the situation\u2026 a little less so. And for Cregger, the film is a kind of tribute \u2014 not just to Trevor Moore, but to a shared creative spirit.<\/p>\n

Weapons arrives in theaters on Aug. 8.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zach Cregger\u2019s new horror movie Weapons is the silver lining of a horrible tragedy. \u201cThat chapter of my…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315277,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-315276","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114966410403464416","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315276\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}