It’s the horror everybody’s talking about. The latest film from Zach Cregger tells the story of a small town left reeling after a class of schoolchildren mysteriously vanish one night.
All, that is, bar one. As the community tries to find out who’s responsible, suspicion falls on their teacher Justine (Julia Garner), who — along with one of the victim’s fathers, Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) — sets out to find out what actually happened.
Cregger has talked before about what inspired him to write Weapons. In an interview with Slash Film, he said that it was "an autobiographical movie in a lot of ways."
In 2021, Cregger’s close friend Trevor Moore died in an accident aged just 41. The pair had met years before at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where they eventually co-founded the sketch group The Whitest Kids U’Know.
While Cregger was grappling with the loss of Moore, that grief found its way into the screenplay. He told Rolling Stone that he began “a blitz of writing, over about two weeks or so… I just started, sentence one: ‘This is a true story. Half of my hometown, all of these kids bailed.’
“You know, I’m writing this cold open, and I don’t know where the kids went. I’m just like, ‘OK, let’s go. Let’s see if I can solve this. What happened? Who were they? What was left behind? What does it feel like?’”
Cregger is of course also responsible for Barbarian: the 2022 horror film in which Tess (Georgina Campbell) finds herself trapped inside a house with a killer known as The Mother.
According to Cregger, Weapons is a different beast.
"If Barbarian was an outward-facing movie, a movie that had a lot to say about society — that sounds so pretentious — but it was a movie that was looking out and talking about the world,” he told Slash Film. “Whereas Weapons is a movie that's very much like me looking inwards and inventorying my shit, my life."
In a chat with Variety, he also explained that writing the film hadn’t "exorcised any demons", but the process of writing had “given me an opportunity to engage with those feelings in a healthy, constructive way.
"Rather than going and drinking myself to death, I’m able to write a character that drinks herself into a problem. I can take my anger and have Josh Brolin freak out, and that’s better than me freaking out."
Weapons is out now in cinemas
