Weapons director Zach Cregger has revealed the true personal story of a close friend’s death, which inspired his word-of-mouth hit horror film.
The movie, starring Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Benedict Wong and Alden Ehrenreich, follows the mystery of 17 children who disappear in the middle of the night in a small town in Pennsylvania.
But despite the fictional story following a fantastical narrative, Cregger said it is “an autobiographical movie in a lot of ways” about the death of his best friend and collaborator Trevor Moore in a tragic accident in 2021.
“I was working on post-production on Barbarian when my best friend died very suddenly in a really awful accident,” he told Rolling Stone.
He admitted that processing his grief through creativity could be considered a cliché in some ways, but nevertheless he believed the output is powerful.
“Look, like the rest of the world, I don’t want to watch another horror movie about grief,” he explained.
“That whole horror-as-a-metaphor-for-grief is so f***ing played out. I shouldn’t even be talking about this, but I can’t help myself. I don’t care if anybody gets any of that when they watch it. I want them to have fun. If the story rips, none of that matters.”
He insisted: “But I wanted to do something honest. And I found that as I kept writing, and the more I identified with all of the people I was writing about, the more this became something like an honest diary of my inner sh*t.
“It’s funny, I was talking to [Midsommar director] Ari Aster about this, and was like, ‘I don’t know about the personal stuff.’ And he was like, ‘The personal stuff is what makes this work. Don’t be ashamed of it!’ Hearing him say that… it’s part of the DNA of Weapons. The town is dealing with a loss. And so was I. It was the biggest direct hit I’d ever taken.”
Cregger and Moore were introduced by mutual friends while studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York. They went on to found sketch group The Whitest Kids U’Know, which ran for five seasons between 2007 and 2011.
The director wrote the film in a “blitz of writing” lasting two weeks.
“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?’”
He explained: “Weapons was like me vomiting. And who doesn’t want to get a babysitter and go to the movie theater and spend 120 bucks to watch someone vomit?”
Weapons is in cinemas now.
