The movie scene that “annihilated” Zach Cregger and how he definitely ripped it off
When making the instant classic horror movie Weapons, Zach Creggar knew that he could only steal from the best.
2025 was an unusually great year for horror films, with horror fans having more than a few modern masterpieces to chew on, between the vampire action in Sinners, the redefined monster movie of Frankenstein, the grizzly kills of Final Destination: Bloodlines, the brutal fatalism of The Long Walk, and the twisted fairy tale of The Ugly Stepsister. However, no other horror from the last 12 months was as scary, surprising, and worthy of discussion as Weapons, the second feature from Barbarian director Zach Creggar.
Weapons felt like a startling original window into the paranoia that has come to haunt contemporary America, but it’s also a film that is in conversation with many other classics, which Creggar has enthusiastically cited.
The structure of the ensemble cast is lifted from the Paul Thomas Anderson drama Magnolia, and the creepy depiction of children was drawn from the Peter Weir classic Picnic at Hanging Rock, but there was a film that Creggar was most guided by in making Weapons, which is The Shining, the horror classic that scared him the most.
Despite an initially mixed response from critics when it debuted in 1980, The Shining has withstood the test of time to be remembered as an all-time classic, and perhaps the greatest horror film ever made. Although there are many horrific scenes that are permanently etched within the memories of anyone who has seen it, Creggar said that the scene of the two twin girls calling to a young Danny Torrance completely “annihilated” him on first viewing, and has stuck with him throughout the rest of his career.
One of the most genius things that Stanley Kubrick did with the film was to subvert any of the comfort that comes from domesticity, so while it takes place at a secluded hotel in the middle of nowhere, the danger in The Shining comes from within the Torrance family unit as Jack, played by Jack Nicholson, becomes increasingly erratic.
The terror of the two girls is an instance in which Danny realises that everything that he’s seeing may not actually be what’s happened, and once the character’s perception is compromised, Kubrick was able to insert even more frightening imagery.
Creggar used similar techniques in Weapons when it came to the depiction of children. The now iconic image of the children running from their homes late at night is terrifying because it implies just a touch of consciousness; while the kids are clearly being manipulated by a shadowy force, they still act in a way that mirrors their true selves. As was the case with The Shining, the suggestion that something shadowy and evil could be hiding in plain sight opened up Weapons to larger questions about what institutions can and can’t be trusted.
Creggar’s film has already begun to earn a cult-like fandom, similar to its veteran inspiration, in which admirers of the film have attempted to discern its meaning. Kubrick was infamously tight-lipped about some of the subtle commentary within The Shining, which came under heavy scrutiny because of how different it was from the original novel written by Stephen King. Weapons started attracting the attention of theorists from the moment that its cryptic teaser trailers first appeared on the Internet, and it is guaranteed to generate more analysis in the years to come.
