Zach Cregger On His Viral New Horror Movie [Interview]

Here at Dread Central, our Digital Features give us the chance to spotlight the creators, projects, and talent pushing horror in bold new directions. These profiles let us dive deeper into the genre stories we can’t stop thinking about. For this edition, I’m picking up Weapons, the critically acclaimed new horror film hitting theaters on August 8 from New Line Cinema and Warner Bros. To reveal the dark corners of this terrifying release (trust me), I had the opportunity to sit down with its writer/director Zach Cregger, whose previous film, Barbarian, was nothing short of evil genius.

I was one of the lucky critics who screened the film early, and it would be downplaying it to say that Weapons blew my mind. An original vision of macabre madness, unlike the lion’s share of modern horror, this was as much fun as it was terrifying. And the grisly mayhem still, by all means, left me shook. So I couldn’t help but start off by asking Cregger how the first person to read the script reacted—you know, before all the hype.

“The first person that I usually give anything I write to is my wife, and so I shared it with her, and I think her response was, ‘Are you okay?’” he tells me, and I can only imagine. The wife he speaks of is actor Sara Paxton, a horror icon with plenty of genre pedigree of her own.

Millennial genre fans with taste will remember when she starred in Ti West’s The Innkeepers as well as the underrated 2009 remake of The Last House on the Left. The latter has even been described by Stephen King as “easily the most brilliant remake of the decade” and “on par with The Silence of the Lambs“ via EW. So it’s no surprise for me to learn that Paxton is a valuable first set of eyes for Cregger’s scripts. Without giving anything away, Paxton also has quick yet noteworthy cameos in both Barbarian and Weapons, you may want to look out for (or listen in for).

But Paxton wasn’t the only person in Cregger’s life who had an important early impact on the development of the film. The catalyst for Weapons was personal tragedy.

“A very, very dear friend of mine died in an accident,” Cregger tells me. “It was just very sudden, and I was feeling all of the feelings in a really intense way, and so to write something about a town that is reckoning with the absence of something dear to them just felt very accessible to me. I was feeling all that stuff, so it was just a way for me to kind of get that stuff out in a healthy way. I think it opened it up. Honestly, writing this movie felt like an emotional vomit. I just got it out and it was good.”

Once in production, however, Cregger faced some major hiccups in the wake of the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes. In fact, Weapons was almost a very different movie. At least, in its appearance.

“Early on, I had a completely different cast for this movie. I had Pedro Pascal and Brian Tyree Henry and Renata Reinsve and a whole different group, and then we had the writers’ strike, and schedules got complicated, and I ended up losing just about everybody,” he explained. “It was a heavy time to lose my whole cast, but then I was regrouping and trying to recast.”

This is how Cregger found himself building the courage to request one of his all-time favorite actors: Mr. Josh Brolin.

“I didn’t think of Josh Brolin early on because I was so intimidated by him, and I didn’t think that a big movie star would even want to do a horror movie,” Cregger tells me frankly. “But I figured, let’s roll the dice. Let’s just see if this guy would be interested.”

When Brolin did show interest, there were still challenges before signatures hit the dotted line—one of which sounded fairly embarrassing.

“It didn’t get off to a great start,” he tells me, and of course, this has me leaning in. “I was scheduled to go to his house in Malibu and sit and talk to him, and I was at home, and I was supposed to meet him at noon. So it’s like 11 or something like that, I’m getting ready to leave and my phone rings and it’s somebody being like, ‘Where are you? Josh has been waiting for you for half an hour.’ I had the time wrong, and I live like an hour away from him, so I was like, oh my God. I had to jump in the car and floor it across town to get out there to his place. Not a good way to make a first impression as a director. I remember he opened the door to his house and he was just shaking his head, like, ‘What are you doing, man?’ But he’s a very cool dude and he gave me a hard time in a very playful way, and we got on great, so it was awesome.”

Of course, there’s one other casting choice I just had to get some more details on. While her role is limited, I’m a huge fan of June Diane Raphael, whose short time on screen in Weapons is downright explosive.

“I didn’t really have anyone in mind when I was writing at all except June,” Cregger shares, to my shock. “I don’t really know June. I know her husband a little bit, but I’ve never met her, and I don’t really listen to their podcast [How Did This Get Made]. I have no real reason to be thinking about her so much, but there was just something about that role where I was just like, this needs to be June [Diane] Raphael. And so there was no audition process. I just offered her the role, and thankfully, she said yes. I think she’s great.”

Finally, I’ve gotta ask. When did the title take shape?

“Yeah, I think it was the first day I started writing. I just called the document Weapons, I believe, and then I just kept it. It was never, as far as I can remember, anything but Weapons. And nobody ever really gave me a hard time about it.”

Weapons will hit theaters on August 8. And oh boy, it’s sure to cause quite the commotion. Let the discourse commence.

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