Even Director Zach Cregger Was Freaked Out This Scene in ‘Weapons’: “Too Much”
We’ve reached the part of the year where we begin to take stock of what’s unfolded over the previous months in horror cinema. That means looking back on all of the year’s standout films and singling out the best performances, the best writing, the best craftsmanship, and of course, the best moments. So naturally, we’re thinking about Weapons a lot.
Writer/director Zach Cregger’s sophomore feature was one of the year’s most-anticipated horror films when it premiered, and it did not disappoint. The film’s secretive marketing campaign led to payoff after payoff when it was finally time for the full theatrical experience, and that includes one of the year’s most unforgettable climaxes. If you were freaked out by the last major scare in Weapons, you’re definitely not alone. That’s one moment that, even for Cregger, got especially intense. Beware, there are spoilers ahead.
In a recent interview with IndieWire, breaking down key moments in the film, Cregger recalled what it was like to shoot the film’s climactic sequence, when the captive children are finally released from Aunt Gladys’s (Amy Madigan) control. Because he can’t actually break Gladys’s spell, Alex (Cary Christopher) instead turns it against the witch, using her own methods to turn Aunt Gladys into the target of the kids’ murderous intent. They go tearing through the neighborhood until they finally reach Gladys, then rip her to shreds. In my screening, people were simultaneously cheering, laughing, and screaming in terror, and it sounds like it was much the same for Cregger.
“I think her eye blinks while her face is getting pulled apart, and that’s VFX, but everything else is like… we had a dummy with hoses inside, and the kids pulled the dummy apart and got sprayed with fake blood,” Cregger explained. “They were having the time of their little lives. The only time I felt not in control of the movie was when the kids were pulling Gladys apart. The whole movie I felt very much like I had it under my thumb because I’d photo-boarded it and I knew exactly what I wanted. But with those kids screaming and piling on this dummy, it was too much for me, man. We had two cameras going. We had to shoot at three different times and kind of stitch it together from three different cracks at that thing. It was really hard.”
You know you’re on the right track when you’re directing a horror movie and even you get freaked out by the intensity of what you’re shooting. The Gladys dummy might have been fake, but the carnage was very real, and that translates to the final product. No wonder our own Josh Korngut called the film “an instant horror classic” in his review.
Weapons is now streaming on HBO Max.
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