Weapons is Zach Cregger’s 5-star follow-up to Barbarian, and stars Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, and Alden Ahrenreich have revealed why they think the movie will scare you senseless.
Zach Cregger hit big thanks to debut debut movie Barbarian, and with follow-up Weapons arriving this week, he’s officially two-for-two.
Revolving around a group of kids going missing at the same time on the same night, we wrote in our Weapons review that the film “does everything a good horror movie should, delivering chills and scares via a story that gets under your skin, before concluding two hours of tense set-up with a truly wild pay-off.”
The horror comes in a variety of shapes and forms, so we asked the stars what specifically got them interested in the material, and why they think it will terrify audiences.
The Weapons cast on when they knew they had to be in the movie
We spoke to the Weapons cast about joining the film’s ensemble, and Fantastic Four star Julia Garner said she knew she wanted to play the protagonist teacher “by page five.”
Alden Ehrenreich, who plays a troubled cop in the film, concurred, saying: “Yup me too. Just the opening narration – especially the way it was written – was so unique and I’d never read anything like that. So I was really enthralled by 15 pages in.”
Josh Brolin, who plays a parent looking for his kid, says it was all about meeting with writer-director Cregger: “I got together with him I was really taken by the design of the script – I thought it was really smart. I thought it was really well written. But it wasn’t until we got together and personalised the whole thing and I watched Barbarian, then I was like ‘alright!’
Why Weapons will give you nightmares
We also asked the cast what’s scary about Cregger’s script, and while they gave different answers, Garner, Ehrenreich, and Brolin all came back to that central conceit:
Julia Garner: “The idea of children missing is scary enough. Sending your kid to school and they’re missing – that’s terrifying. I think just that is going to scare people.”
Alden Ehrenreich: “One of the things that I think makes all the things that happen in the film – all the crazy stuff that happens – land so much harder is how emotionally involved you are with these characters. The fact that you’ve spent all this time intimately getting to know these people in their darkest most private moments.
“Something that really stood out to me when we were shooting is there’s a lot of scenes where people are just alone in their things and so the audience is just alone with that character. So when crazy stuff goes down for these people, it feels more like you’re inside of that world that it’s happening in.”
Josh Brolin: “It’s your worst nightmare come true. Having four kids and imagining something like this happening… I can’t imagine anything worse. That’s why we have story – to put yourself in that position then you get to release yourself from that position. Like a dream.
“That’s what’s so wonderful about Zach’s story. It’s an emotional story and I know that it was written from a very emotional place for him. These characters are based on reactions he had to something horrible that he had happen in his life. So I think ultimately being able to live something for two hours and being able to walk away from it gives us perspective of how good we’ve got it.
Alden Ehrenreich: “It’s a really unique tone. Somebody said to me recently that it’s almost like Stephen King-adjacent in a sense that you’re in a small town with these characters and it’s as much about these human beings as it is about the other things that happen. It’s not just a jump-scare movie. Although there are jump scares in it. Boy-oh-boy.”
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