Making Horror Personal – Zach Cregger on the Underlying Grief of ‘Weapons’
“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: […]
“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.”
