[COLUMN] Zack Cregger's Weapons is Intensely Personal, Chillingly Universal | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains discussions of Weapons, including spoilers for the movie. It is, like Cregger’s Barbarian, a horror movie best seen completely blind so that one might enjoy its various twists and turns. It’s also great, another strong horror movie in a year of strong horror movies. So feel free to put this piece in the holster until you’ve had a chance to watch the film.

Weapons is an intensely personal film for director Zach Cregger.

Cregger was a member of the comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’Know, and in particular a close friend and collaborator of member Trevor Moore. Cregger’s directorial debut was the film Miss March, co-written and co-directed with Moore. The pair also co-wrote and co-directed The Civil War on Drugs. They were a true creative partnership. Cregger had branched out on his own to make Barbarian, his first solo feature, but the two remained incredibly close.

Early in the morning of August 7, 2021, in a tragic accident, Moore fell from the balcony of his Los Angeles home. Law enforcement responded to a call at “around 2:30am.” Moore was declared dead at the scene. As Cregger related to the podcast The Big Picture, he was working on postproduction of Barbarian at the time. However, he began writing the script that would become Weapons. He wrote it almost off-the-cuff, starting the screenplay with no idea how it would end.

Cregger has been quite open about this aspect of the film, rather than trying to preserve any air of mystery. “I was in post on Barbarian, and my best friend died in an accident that was really hard to understand,” Cregger told The Hollywood Reporter. The script “was just like an emotional reaction to that.” Watching Weapons, one really gets a sense that the movie is much more driven by emotion and experience than by mythology or plot.

Knowing these details about Cregger’s motivations, Weapons makes a lot more sense. The movie was released on the fourth anniversary of Trevor Moore’s death, between August 6 and August 8. Even the premise of the movie, with an entire class of children waking up, leaving their homes and wandering “into the dark” at “exactly 2:17am” is timed to evoke the tragic and senseless early morning passing of Cregger’s best friend.

There are other personal aspects woven into the fabric of the movie. The children’s teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), is a functioning alcoholic, who retreats from a disastrous meeting with the town’s parents to a local liquor store. Her ex-boyfriend, Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), is a police officer and a recovering alcoholic who relapses, cheating on his wife Donna (June Diane Raphael) with Justine. There is a strong sense that the adults are too messed up to protect their kids.

Cregger has talked about the experience of growing up with an alcoholic father. Cregger was been open about his own alcoholism. Cregger and Moore would talk about their struggles to remain sober on their streams together. Cregger was six years sober when Moore died. Alcohol most likely played a significant role in Moore’s accidental death, with his autopsy confirming that he was significantly over the legal limit. All of this is present in Weapons, either on or directly below the surface.

One does not need to know any of this to appreciate Weapons. Like any good movie, Weapons works on its own terms. However, there is something interesting and worthwhile in how candid Cregger has been in explaining what Weapons means to him and where it comes from. It is a reminder that the film is the work of an individual, a writer and director who is approaching the material from a particular perspective and to a particular end – articulating something within himself.

Part of the beauty of Weapons is that the film works with or without this context. The audience doesn’t need to know about Cregger’s personal history or motivations in order to engage with the text. Weapons is a rich enough film that it can be read and interpreted in any number of ways by any number of viewers to be about any number of things, not specifically tied to the tragic death of a talented young comedian in August 2021.

For all the specificity within the film drawn from Cregger’s own experiences, there is a universality to the story. Weapons is bookended by narration from an anonymous young girl (Scarlett Sher), who frames the story as a sort of folk tale. She explains that it absolutely really happened, even though there will never be any official record of it. Weapons takes on the feeling of a classic fairy tale, right down to its literal and thematic preoccupation with witches.

The thing about fairytales is that they provide an oblique and abstracted way of talking about fears that are otherwise difficult to articulate or express. Were stories about werewolves just a way of explaining medieval serial killers? Were these stories about strange and magical beings abducting children just a way to explain away child mortality? Joan Didion famously argued that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”, but we also tell ourselves stories to understand senseless death.

Weapons lends itself to a variety of interpretations, whether intentional or otherwise. In terms of a specific source of anxiety, this is a story about the complete annihilation of an entire class of students, except for one boy named Alex (Cary Christopher). Alex was bullied by his classmates and, as the film goes on, it becomes clear that his domestic life is a nightmare. In a film literally titled Weapons, it is not difficult to read this as a metaphor for the epidemic of school shootings.

As tends to be the case in the aftermath of these horrific events, the local community looks for a scapegoat – anything to talk about that is not the actual cause of the atrocity. The film invites this reading. Archer (Josh Brolin), a military veteran father of one of the missing children, has a vivid nightmare early in the movie, in which he imagines an assault rifle hovering ominously over his house. At the climax, the villainous Gladys (Amy Madigan) has her own weapon turned on her by Alex, like those gun-owners shot by toddlers in their own home by their own firearm.

Interestingly, Cregger has admitted that even he has no idea what that nightmare image of the assault rifle actually means. Citing David Lynch as a key influence, Cregger acknowledges that the idea came to him through transcendental meditation. “The fact that I don’t understand it is what makes it so important to me,” he told Polygon. It’s oddly endearing that Cregger is not only willing to talk about the aspects of Weapons written with intentionality and those that were not.

More broadly, Weapons is about a community that has failed its children. It is about how difficult it is for parents – and teachers, and principals, and police officers – to keep children safe. This is a universal fear, something that every parent has felt at every moment in human history. However, it’s easy to understand why this anxiety would be particularly pronounced at this moment in time, from concerns about protecting children from the internet or existential fears like climate change.

This fear simmers through contemporary pop culture. Taking a step back, Weapons feels of a piece with recent works like 28 Years Later or Adolescence – maybe even Bring Her Back and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. These are all films and shows that are, to one degree or another, about the question of whether parents are able and willing to protect their children in an increasingly chaotic and arbitrary world. It is perhaps revealing that the threat in Weapons comes from inside the home.

Even more broadly than that, Weapons is a worthy addition to what might be termed “the new cinema of grief”, the wave of movies about processing and explaining grief – often either focusing on or through the eyes of a child. This is, of course, tied to Cregger’s loss of his best friend. However, that sense of unexplainable and unjustifiable loss permeates the film. Much like 28 Years Later reveals itself to be a story about 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), Weapons is narrated by a child and gives over its final act to telling the story from Alex’s perspective.

It is to the credit of Weapons that the film supports all of these readings and more. In the era of “metaphorror”, it has become increasingly common for horror movies to shout their themes at the top of their lungs. Together is so aggressively about the idea of co-dependency that there is no room for ambiguity or interpretation. The woman in the yard (Okwui Okpokwasili) in The Woman in the Yard is a very overt representation of depression and suicidal ideation.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. Together is a fun high-concept horror. As fun as it is to joke about Jamie Lee Curtis’ insistence that David Gordon Green’s Halloween is “about trauma”, it is still a hugely enjoyable popcorn crowd-pleasing slasher. However, part of the power of horror movies derives from their ambiguity and unknowability, their slipperiness and uncertainty. Horror films can unsettle their audience by refusing to provide simple, easy explanations.

Cregger’s willingness to talk about what Weapons means to him, specifically, is commendable. Partly because it helps illustrate how so much art is inseparable from the artist. It also underscores the importance of interpretation in processing that art. Weapons means something so specific to Cregger that it cannot possibly mean exactly that same thing to a random audience member, and the film works because it allows that audience member space for their own interpretation.

It is interesting that Cregger cites Lynch as an influence. Asked about whether an audience member can ever “know” what his work is about, Lynch explained that his own understanding of a given project was just one reading of the material. “I should know the meaning for me,” he explained. “But when things get abstract, it does no good for me to say what it is. All viewers, on the surface, we’re all different.” He stated, “So you do know, you do know. For yourself. And what you know is valid.”

Weapons is a remarkable piece of work, in large part because it manages to capture that miracle of mass-media entertainment. It is at once an intensely personal work firmly anchored in the lived experience of its writer and director and a more universally resonant horror story about how hard it is to keep children safe in the modern world. It is pure movie magic, cinematic witchcraft.