“It’s a very personal movie,” says Zach Cregger about his auteurish horror blockbuster Weapons.
“Weapons is autobiographical in a lot of ways,” he tells us on the latest episode of Deadline’s Crew Call.
How’s that for a movie about a twisted, witchy aunt (Amy Madigan’s sublime Gladys) who has a lock on an entire small town’s young children?
“The Alex chapter, the final chapter,” explains the comedy guy turned genre maestro, “He’s very much how I felt as a kid. Anyone who grew up in a household of addiction can smell what’s going on in that chapter.”
“I know what it’s like to live in a house where a foreign substance comes into my house and turns my father into a different person, and I know what it’s like to go to school and act like nothing’s wrong, and then come home and have a scary, scary house with a dad I don’t recognize.”
Cregger was prompted to write Weapons during post on his first horror movie Barbarian; a best friend of the director’s having died tragically.
We talk with Cregger about getting Barbarian made by the seat of his pants for $4.5 million, the financing coming together at the last minute (“I aged ten years in that weekend”); the whole meaning and inspiration of Weapons‘ children running in the middle of the night to George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness”; reassembling a cast largely from scratch post strikes, landing Madigan, his next movie for Resident Evil (“I’ve never seen a Resident Evil movie”) for Sony/Constantin, the vibrant state of horror at the box office, and what’s up with his Gladys prequel.
Weapons, which Cregger wrote in his garage next to a noisy washer and dryer, was made for a net of $38M and has grossed over $268M at the global box office, a late summer savior. He not only wrote, directed and produced the horror pic, but also co-composed the score as well.
Listen to our conversation with Cregger below: