After shocking audiences (and studio execs) with Barbarian in 2022, a $4.5 million horror sleeper that went nuclear at the box office with over $45 million in returns, comedian-turned-director Zach Cregger found himself with a problem most filmmakers dream about: everyone wanted his next movie. The problem is he didn’t really know what it was yet. That film became Weapons, and if you think it’s just another spooky story about missing kids, you’re not paying attention. “That mystery is going to propel you through at least half of the movie, but that is not the movie,” Cregger says. “By the midpoint, we’ve moved on to way crazier s— than that.”
Zach Cregger on Weapons being personal and more ambitious than Barbarian
Post-Barbarian, audiences (and studios) expected Cregger to either swing harder or swing safe. He did neither. He went weird. And personal. Cregger started writing Weapons after someone very close to him died suddenly. “Honestly, I was so grief-stricken that I just started writing Weapons, not out of any ambition, but just as a way to reckon with my own emotions,” he told Entertainment Weekly. What started as a cathartic vomit of 70 emotional pages became something more structured, layered, and, as he puts it, “epic.” He locked himself in a cabin in the woods for three weeks and hammered it into shape. Weapons was born.
But Cregger isn’t trying to out-Barbarian himself. “I don’t really think that way,” he said to io9. “If I’m thinking result-oriented or what are people gonna think, then I’m doomed.” Instead, he just writes what he wants to see. And what he wanted this time? A sprawling horror mosaic that somehow blends Magnolia with Se7en, with a dash of Children of the Corn.
Weapons stars Julia Garner as a schoolteacher who arrives to class one morning and finds all but one student gone. Security footage shows the kids leaving their homes at 2:17 a.m., arms stiffly outstretched, vanishing into the night. No explanation. No trace. Josh Brolin plays the grieving father of one of the missing kids. Alden Ehrenreich shows up as a cop with a ‘stache and a complicated connection to Garner’s character. There are drug addicts, secrets, conspiracies, and apparently, a nod to Barbarian buried in an in-world news article.
Could the two films be connected? Cregger’s not telling. “I don’t want to definitively say any way or the other.”
Maybe that’s part of the fun. Like Barbarian, Weapons seems designed to be watched blind. No spoilers. No previews. Warner Bros. even worked closely with Cregger to keep the marketing tight-lipped. “They were interested in keeping the mystery intact,” he says. “There were a couple of moments where they showed me cuts. I was like, ‘Can we lose that shot and that shot?’ And they’re like, ‘No problem.’”
So here we are, with Weapons hitting cinemas August 8. It’s weirder, riskier, and more ambitious than Barbarian. “I promise you,” Zach Cregger says, “when you watch it, you will agree with me. It is.”
But what is Weapons really about?
In Zach Cregger’s Weapons, the horror doesn’t come from what lurks in the dark. It actually comes from what adults refuse to see in the light. What starts as a disturbing missing children case morphs into a story about parasitic evil, broken adults, and one kid who decided he’d had enough.
Weapons takes the shattered-glass approach to storytelling. We jump through timelines and characters. Justine the teacher, Archer the desperate dad, Paul the sketchy cop, and James the addict. All roads lead to one deeply unsettling figure: Gladys. She’s introduced as Alex’s aunt, a helpful presence while his parents are “sick.” But don’t get too comfortable. Gladys is a witch. And not the metaphorical kind.
Gladys isn’t just spooky. She’s actively draining the life out of people. First, it’s Alex’s parents. Then, she targets the kids in his class, summoning them at 2:17 a.m. Alex, being the only one not summoned, watches helplessly as she keeps his classmates frozen in the basement, feeding them soup to keep them alive. This is what he’s been living with. And no, no therapist in the world is trained for this.
The film’s climax is pure chaos. All our main characters converge at Alex’s house, walking straight into a trap Gladys had rigged using salt lines and spellbound humans. When Justine accidentally triggers the trap, Paul charges at her like a demon linebacker, while James goes feral on Archer. It’s messy, violent, and weirdly funny at times, especially when Justine tries to fend off a grown man with a potato peeler. Thankfully, she eventually gets hold of a gun.
Meanwhile, Archer fights his way to the basement, looking for his son, Matthew. He finds Gladys instead.
And then there’s Alex, the quiet hero of Zach Cregger’s Weapons. He sneaks into Gladys’ room, grabs one of her cursed thorny branches, wraps her hair around it, and performs a spell he’d watched her do a few times. Just as she’s got Archer strangling Justine upstairs, Alex snaps the branch. Gladys knows immediately that something’s broken. She bolts from the house, only to be chased down and ripped apart by the very children she kidnapped. No sympathy here.
What’s left is trauma. Two years later, the child narrator (yes, this is her story) fills in the blanks: the kids are recovering, sort of. Some have started speaking again. The parents? Not so much. They’re described as needing to be fed soup somewhere else. They’re still catatonic and still stuck in that spell. Archer’s son may be physically back, but mentally? We’re not sure.
Even Gladys’ backstory is intentionally fuzzy. She tells Marcus, the school principal, that Alex’s dad has “a touch of consumption.” Not exactly modern phrasing. Either she’s really into 19th-century euphemisms or she’s way older than anyone realizes. Her own origins shift. Is she Alex’s “aunt,” “great-aunt,” or something even more ancient and sinister?
The real horror in Weapons isn’t the spells. It’s how easy it was for Gladys to get away with it for so long. The adults around her failed. They were distracted, selfish, indifferent, or just didn’t care enough to connect the dots. See, Weapons is about how trauma festers when no one deals with it. Gladys might be the witch, but she’s also a twisted mirror held up to the film’s adult characters. These are people who use others, ignore warnings, and pretend things are fine until it’s too late. The kids remember. They whisper the truth. Because if no one else will tell their story, they’ll find a way to make sure it’s never forgotten.
And that’s what Zach Cregger’s Weapons is really about.
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