Zach Cregger on crafting Weapons: How a friend’s death and personal history fueled the film

Weapons has arrived in theaters and is receiving rave reviews from the audience and the critics.

Written and directed by Zach Cregger, the mystery horror film has a 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes, which makes it one of the highest-rated films of the year.

The film tells the story of a town where 17 children of the same class mysteriously vanish on the same night. As the movie continues to achieve critical and commercial success, Zach Cregger has talked about how he came up with the intriguing story.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the director revealed he wrote the script of Weapons as a way to deal with the death of his best friend. He did not create the film out of ambition, but instead used it to express his emotions.

Zach Cregger reveals his best friend’s death made him write the Weapons script

During the interview, Zach Cregger stated that he was working on the post-production of his 2022 film Barbarian when his best friend passed away. To cope with the tragedy, he started writing a script, which made him feel cathartic. He said:

“I was in post on Barbarian, and my best friend died in an accident that was really hard to understand. [Writing] was just like an emotional reaction to that. I was spared, because of my emotional pain, of writing from a place of ambition. I was writing from a place of catharsis. Writing where the process is the reward. Not to write a movie, not to write my next project, but to write because I needed to get this venom out.”

Cregger added that writing proved to be a way to get his pain out. The process was greatly different from other movies as the writer crafted Weapons line by line. He did not have the entire story or the climax in mind and only went with the flow:

“I started typing; I had no idea what the story was going to be. I literally went line by line. This is a true story. What is it? This teacher came to school and none of the kids were there. Okay, why? Yeah, they all ran away the night before. Okay, where’d they go? Nobody knows.”

Cregger further revealed that he was inspired by Stephen King’s idea of not worrying about the result, but enjoying the process of writing, and said:

“Stephen King has that amazing metaphor where he’s like, “You need to be a paleontologist, and you’re unearthing the dinosaur one bone at a time, but you don’t know what the dinosaur is.” That’s a beautiful way to create for me. Remove result from the process and just be discovery.”

Weapons was released in cinemas on August 8, 2025. The film stars Josh Brolin as Archer Graff, Julia Garner as Justine Gandy, Benedict Wong as Marcus Miller, Austin Abrams as James, Cary Christopher as Alex Lilly, Toby Huss as Ed Locke, Amy Madigan as Gladys Lilly, Justin Long as Gary Bailey, Sara Paxton as Erica Bailey, and June Diane Raphael as Donna Morgan.