Warner Bros.In the opening moments of Weapons, the narrator says, “This is a true story.” It is based on real-life events, but it’s not that straightforward.
Some of the greatest horror movies of all time are based on true stories: The Conjuring (and its sequels) is inspired by Ed and Lorraine Warren’s case files, The Strangers has elements of the Keddie Cabin Murders, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre famously drew inspiration from Ed Gein for Leatherface.
If you go into Weapons completely blind, it has a compelling (and frightening) set-up, with a little girl explaining how 17 children disappeared in the middle of the night, they never came back, and the case was never fully solved.
If that was true, it’d be crying out for a true crime documentary on Netflix. Thankfully, there’s more to it than that.
The true story behind Weapons
Warner Bros.Weapons is inspired by real events in the life of director Zach Cregger; specifically, how he responded to the loss of his best friend, Trevor Moore. However, its story is entirely fictional – in short, 17 kids didn’t go missing in a small American town.
You could be excused for thinking Weapons’ story happened in real life. After all, Warner Bros launched the MaybrookMissing.com website with fake news articles within the world of the movie, and the premise isn’t unbelievable.
No spoilers, but the film goes to some pretty weird and crazy places by the end – all of that (no spoilers) is made up by Cregger, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t come from somewhere deep within him.
“I had a tragedy in my life that was really, really tough. Someone very, very, very close to me died suddenly and, honestly, I was so grief-stricken that I just started writing Weapons, not out of any ambition, but just as a way to reckon with my own emotions,” the filmmaker explained to EW.
“There’s certain chapters of this that are legitimately autobiographical that I feel like I lived.”
Warner Bros.There are scenes in the film that revolve around characters trying to process how the children could simply vanish, like Josh Brolin’s Archer having a frightening nightmare and sleeping in his son’s bed.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, Cregger opened up a bit more about the loss. “I was working on postproduction on Barbarian when my best friend died very suddenly in a really awful accident,” he said.
“Look, like the rest of the world, I don’t want to watch another horror movie about grief. That whole horror-as-a-metaphor-for-grief is so f**king played out.”
Nevertheless, Cregger wanted to achieve two things: write a story that “rips” and make a film that’s honest. “I found that as I kept writing, and the more I identified with all of the people I was writing about, the more this became something like an honest diary of my inner sh*t,” he continued.
“It’s funny, I was talking to Ari Aster [director of Hereditary and Midsommar] about this, and was like, ‘I don’t know about the personal stuff.’ And he was like, ‘The personal stuff is what makes this work. Don’t be ashamed of it!’
“Hearing him say that… it’s part of the DNA of Weapons. The town is dealing with a loss. And so was I. It was the biggest direct hit I’d ever taken.”
Warner Bros.In another interview with Slash Film, Cregger also compared its development to his previous film, Barbarian. “If Barbarian was an outward-facing movie, a movie that had a lot to say about society — that sounds so pretentious — but it was a movie that was looking out and talking about the world,” he explained.
“Whereas Weapons is a movie that’s very much like me looking inwards and inventorying my sh*t, my life. It’s an autobiographical movie in a lot of ways.”
As it turns out, “This is a true story” is the first line Cregger wrote in his script. “I just started, sentence one: ‘This is a true story. Half of my hometown, all of these kids bailed,'” he explained.
“You know, I’m writing this cold open, and I don’t know where the kids went. I’m just like, ‘OK, let’s go. Let’s see if I can solve this. What happened? Who were they? What was left behind? What does it feel like?”
If you haven’t seen it yet, find out when to take a bathroom break during Weapons. If you’ve already watched it, check out our breakdown of Weapons’ ending.
