“Every character in this movie is a little piece of me.”
You may not expect a movie as unhinged as Weapons to be particularly autobiographical, but Zach Cregger used the film as a conduit to process his own grief.
“I was in a place of extreme emotional pain,” the writer-director admits in Director Zach Cregger: Making Horror Personal, a featurette that accompanies Weapons on home video.
“My best friend died in a very sudden accident, and I was feeling very intense grief, and I like to process my emotions through art. And so I sat down to write; not to write a movie but to just write my feelings.”
The friend in question is Cregger’s longtime collaborator Trevor Moore — both founding members of the comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know — who passed away suddenly in 2021.
“I really had no idea where the story was going. It’s kind of my favorite way to write,” Cregger notes.
“I know that I feel acutely missing someone, and this was a way to just be indulgent in that feeling of grief and of people missing someone and not getting to ask what happened or how it happened or why. Just having no answers.”
Cregger says that, although he wrote the movie quickly, it was difficult to put the story together. In addition to processing the death of a friend, the film explores a childhood trauma.
“It’s just an incredibly personal movie, and the final chapter with Gladys and Alex is, in a weird way, the most autobiographical chapter,” Cregger acknowledges.
“As a child of an alcoholic, I think a lot of people can identify with a family unit where a foreign substance or entity comes in, and it turns the parent into something like a zombie.
“I would go to school every day and act like everything was cool, and I would come home and I would hide in a scary house from my zombie dad.”
Cregger adds, “Weapons is these two kind of moments of pain and grief in my life in dialogue with each other, which is something I don’t care if anybody experiences when they watch this movie. I hope people watch the movie and they have a really good time and it’s a thrill ride, but for me, it’s a diary entry.”
Weapons is available now on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital.
