‘Weapons’ director Zach Cregger on the thrills and chills of communal horror
Watching a film in a theater is always a communal experience, but perhaps even more so when it’s horror.
You can hold your breath during a pulse-pounding action scene, or stifle your tears as your heart slowly swells in a drama. But horror won’t give you the same luxury of sitting with your emotions. Fear, shock, and disgust are more instinctive and immediate—manifesting in our bodies before we can fully process what’s happening onscreen.
And when, suddenly, after a long stretch of unease and dread, the audience erupts in screams and your chair rocks with the flinching of neighboring spectators, you realize that this is a roller coaster we’re all on together.
Worth the price of tickets… and a babysitter
For Zach Cregger, director of the hotly anticipated mystery horror film “Weapons,” it’s moments like these—“the thrill, the adrenaline, and the laughter release”—that makes the price of commuting, tickets, popcorn, and of hiring a babysitter still worth it. And we all know enjoying a night out at the cinema doesn’t exactly cost spare change anymore.
“When you’re coming together in a crowd, and you’re forfeiting your attention in unison to the experience and finding the same wavelength, it makes it more fun and engaging,” Cregger says in an interview. “We’re all kind of in a church… We’re not looking at our phones. We’re not talking about other shit. Hopefully. Unless you’re an asshole.”
It’s precisely for this reason that Cregger enjoys watching horror flicks as a viewer and creating them as a filmmaker. And the genre is at an “interesting” point in today’s entertainment landscape, he observes, because it’s one of the few areas in modern film that can still land a decent budget and theatrical release—all while experimenting with “something challenging, weird, and new.”
The critical and commercial success of films like Ari Aster’s “Hereditary,” Osgood Perkins’ “Longlegs,” and Michael and Danny Philippou’s “Talk to Me” proves Cregger’s insight.
“I’m fortunate because my creative tuning fork tends to vibrate the most with horror,” says Cregger, who also wrote the screenplay. “The stars have aligned now in 2025, where horror is in vogue and people are paying attention to it. Thank God.”
“I’m in the sweet spot,” Cregger adds. And that may be putting it mildly. Following his audacious foray into horror with “Barbarian” in 2022, he returns with something more ambitious and mysterious: “Weapons.” And if early reviews are any indication—100 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes as of writing—then Cregger and his team are heading into release day this Aug. 6 ready and well-armed.
A call from the unknown
The story takes place in a town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania. One night, at 2:17 a.m., 17 out of 18 children in a third-grade class vanish into the dark. They get out of bed, walk downstairs, and open their front doors. Arms angled like airplane wings, they spill onto the streets, heeding a call from the unknown—an image that brings to mind the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
The incident sends the community reeling. Parents demand an explanation from the equally bewildered class teacher. Or is she, really? “What is it about this classroom? Some sort of alien mind control? Is it a government thing? A prank? What could be doing this?” Cregger says.
He didn’t have the answers himself when he first started writing. Coming from a “severe, painful place”—the unexpected death of one of his best friends—Cregger wrote this out of “pure need.” He had no idea where the story would lead him, and he prefers it that way. It allows him to stay attuned to each character’s journey, fleshing out their motivations, while letting the pieces fall into place.
There’s no single lead character, Cregger says: “Everyone gets to be the star for their own little 12-minute chunk. So every person I cast… I cast as the star of the show.”
The multiple-POV structure puts the viewers “squarely in the characters’ experience,” keeping them guessing and reassessing the unraveling mystery. “It’s hard to have a story where you don’t see what’s coming from the moment you watch the trailer, or at least after watching the first 10 minutes,” Cregger says. “I’m confident that that’s not the case with ‘Weapons.’”
The biggest victory
Its intricacy isn’t without challenges, though. With so many moving parts, this film is definitely bigger than “Barbarian,” not only in scale, but also in ambition. “I wanted it to be riskier, but just as crazy. Sometimes, when the movie is bigger, you might want to play it safe, but I wanted to really go the other way and get as weird as I could be,” Cregger reveals.
But having already proven himself as someone who can craft smart and unpredictable thrill rides, he dove into the project with the necessary tools—or rather, weapons. He’s grown more confident, allowing him to tune out the noise around him and listen to that “small creative voice” that whispers in when something is amiss.
And amid the chaos of production, Cregger relied on that voice to guide him—even when it meant putting everything to a halt. “Everybody, pause,” he recalls saying on set. “This isn’t right. But I know what we need to do.” That’s something that he admits he wouldn’t have done before.
By trusting his gut, he managed to stay faithful to his vision and protect it despite inevitable production hiccups that threatened to chip away at it. And there’s a sense of pride in knowing that—on set, in front of the monitors, in the cutting room, and finally during the color grading—he was still watching the same movie he had seen in his head from the start.
That will be the same film you’ll experience when it hits the screen. “At that point, I felt bulletproof. People can love it or hate it, but I won, because I made the movie I had in my head,” Cregger ends. “That’s the biggest victory I could ask for.”
This interview was provided exclusively to Lifestyle Inquirer by Warner Bros. Pictures Philippines.
