Posted in: Movies, Warner Bros | Tagged: film, horror, Warner Bros, weapons

Weapons Director Wasn't Sure About the Film's Last Few Seconds

Zach Cregger’s Weapons delivers a mystery-turned-supernatural horror, and originally, a darker, more ambiguous ending.

Zach Cregger's latest film, after his breakout title Barbarian, Weapons, launches with a chilling mystery: at exactly 2:17 a.m., all but one child from an elementary school class vanish from their beds in the quiet town of Maybrook. What begins as an unsettling disappearance, with police and parents scrambling for answers, soon unfolds across multiple, interlocking narratives. The teacher Justine (Julia Garner), the grieving parent Archer (Josh Brolin), the conflicted cop Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), and the principal Marcus (Benedict Wong) each bear the weight of blame, suspicion, or grief.

As the film progresses, the perspective broadens and intensifies, reminiscent of Barbarian's jarring tonal pivot. Where Barbarian subverted expectations with a bizarre descent into horrors lurking beneath domestic calm at the mid-point, Weapons likewise unleashes a different style of supernatural dread mid-film. And in this case (spoilers ahead), the normality of suburbia turns grotesque when one child's great-aunt Gladys is revealed to be a witch using dark rituals to manipulate and trap the children, and the surrounding adults, for her own vitality. In a violent climax, the hypnotized children rise, chase Gladys, and decapitate her, breaking her spell and freeing their peers.

Weapons Director on the Film's Final Moments

Now, in a recent interview with Inverse, Cregger revealed that the theatrical version with an epilogue-style ending wasn't his original intention for the story. As it turns out, he had originally envisioned the film cutting to black after a haunting close-up of Matthew with no need for a voice-over. "There was no voiceover, and we just ended on the kid's face. The lights went out, and 'Written and directed by Zach Cregger' came up, and a woman in the theater goes, 'What the f—?"

The studio obviously opted to add the voice-over epilogue to explain how the surviving children and Alex fared, offering a measure of closure for audiences. But in his original vision, that unanswered ending, closing on Matthew's look, was the point. He wanted the film to end in that moment of uncertainty, letting viewers sit in the unease rather than be led toward resolution. But, objectively speaking, the epilogue feels mostly necessary after placing it in the film's intro, then ending in a strangely abrupt climax.

Overall, with Weapons, Cregger once again leans into the tonal left turns and unsettling genre mash-ups that made Barbarian a breakout hit. And as of now, its success suggests that this specific, off-kilter style has its share of devoted fans, with viewers eager to pick apart the film's stranger choices and lingering ambiguities.

Weapons is in theaters everywhere.

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