Is Zach Cregger worshipping at the altar of Stephen King with ‘Weapons’?
As anticipation for Zach Cregger’s Weapons reaches a fever pitch, horror audiences everywhere are salivating at the prospect of a potential new classic.
After all, with Barbarian, Cregger did for Airbnb what Steven Spielberg did for the ocean with Jaws, and he has promised his follow-up movie will be infinitely more ambitious, more fucked up, and more gut-wrenchingly terrifying than his first.
Watching the Weapons trailers made it clear from the get-go that this film would be a vastly different beast from Barbarian. Cregger’s feature debut was contained primarily in one location (as well as the subterranean depths beneath it), and it had a core cast of only four or five characters. Weapons, though, is the story of an entire small town, and it has a much more substantial cast of characters played by Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Amy Madigan, and Benedict Wong.
While Weapons marks a clear departure in style and tone for Cregger, it gives off unmistakably similar vibes to the work of a man who’s defined horror for the past 50 years—and I dare you to watch the first trailer without thinking of Stephen King. In fact, you’d be forgiven for assuming the film – centred on a spine-tingling small-town mystery that tears the community apart and spirals into blood-soaked mayhem – was actually a King adaptation.
Cregger’s Weapons may be an original screenplay, but it still bears the unmistakable influence of Stephen King. The writer/director has even admitted that two of King’s works are referenced in the first trailer alone.
Firstly, the trailer begins with the skin-crawling reveal of an entire class of third-grade children leaving their bedrooms at exactly 2:17am to run off into the night—arms outstretched as if they’re running toward someone, or some thing. Cregger told CinemaBlend that the time, 2:17, is a direct reference to The Shining, because in that book, Room 217 in The Overlook Hotel is where all the horror goes down.
This was changed to Room 237 for Stanley Kubrick’s classic movie, because the proprietor of the real-life hotel where the movie was filmed didn’t want guests to be scared to stay in the real Room 217. However, Cregger chose to stick with the source material to truly pay homage to King, even if he may have mostly done it “subconsciously”.
“2:17 has to have come from that,” Cregger theorised. “It has to. And look: I’m a Kubrick guy when it comes to The Shining; I definitely worship that movie, and I thought of changing it to 2:37. But then I was like, ‘You know what? My first impulse has got to be the one I stick with,’ so I kept 2:17.”
Secondly, when crafting the Weapons script and its first trailer, Cregger had a very specific thing in mind that he wanted to emulate: the first Needful Things trailer. That 1993 adaptation of King’s book starred Ed Harris and Max von Sydow, and focused on a mysterious shop that opens in a – you guessed it – small American town.
Shoppers soon discover that the store somehow stocks collectables and antiques that are their personal deepest, darkest desires. The sinister store owner makes them perform strange deeds or pranks to buy the items, instead of using cash. Over time, this leads to a massive increase in aggression among the townsfolk, who turn on each other and unleash chaos.
Cregger remembered watching the trailer when he was young, and the idea of an entire town being torn apart by one unanswerable mystery stuck with him. The resulting movie didn’t live up to his imagination, but the feeling the trailer evoked embedded itself in his psyche. “I was just really into a small town just imploding over one central mystery,” he mused. “So, I think that might have also been present when I was writing.”
In the end, it’s likely that Cregger’s Weapons will end up being its own unique proposition despite King’s vast influence. The director has already promised that the trailers barely scratch the surface of what happens in his multi-stranded tale of horror, and perhaps this means King helped inspire its creation to a certain point, but then his influence took a backseat.
Whatever the case, Cregger can rest easy in knowing that King is unlikely to be annoyed at the young director worshipping at his altar. After all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and King was a massive fan of Barbarian, tweeting not long after its release, “Yeah, that movie blew me away. It was crazy. Crazy good.”
Will Cregger be able to repeat that trick with a movie that feels much closer to King’s own oeuvre? I wouldn’t put it past him.
