The sophomore effort from writer-director Zach Cregger, ‚Weapons‘ is now playing in theaters everywhere.
***WARNING! The following contains major spoilers for the film!***
Cinematographer Larkin Seiple had just finished shooting Wolfs for director Jon Watts, and was fully prepared to take a hiatus from the hustle and bustle of Hollywood.
Before taking that R&R, however, he received the script for one of the hottest titles making its way around town: Weapons.
The sophomore horror effort from writer-director Zach Cregger (Barbarian) sparked a heated bidding war among the major studios, ultimately landing an eight-figure sum at Warner Bros.’ New Line Cinema under the auspices of Vertigo Entertainment and BoulderLight Pictures (the latter currently enjoys a first-look deal with New Line).Saying yes to Zach Cregger’s Weapons
„I was going to take a break from making movies, but I’d heard about Weapons because it was in the trades and was like, ‘I’ll take a crack at it,’” Larkin remembers over a Zoom call. “It’s a two-hour movie, and I think I probably read it in 80 minutes. I was just transfixed, hypnotized by it. I met Zach for coffee the very next day and we got along great. We saw the movie the same way.“
Cregger (a founding member of the Whitest Kids U’ Know comedy group) offered him the director of photography job on the spot. “I was kind of shook because I was going to have to move across the country and leave my family for five months,” notes Seiple. „It was a very trippy experience, but I was like, ‚I don’t think I’m going to be able to shoot something like this ever again.’ So I just went with it and said yes.”
There was, perhaps, no better choice for the project than Seiple, who served as cinematographer on Everything Everywhere All at Once. Similar to the Daniels’ Oscar-winning multiverse saga, Weapons “was very complicated to make.”What is Weapons about?
More ambitious, yet just as mysteriously titled as Barbarian, Weapons takes the form of a contemporary “Pied Piper” story, in which 17 children from the same class suddenly leave their homes in the middle of the night and never come back. By the time morning arrives in the sleepy hamlet of Maybrook, Pennsylvania only one student, Alexy Lilly (Cary Christopher) remains.
The inexplicable mystery launches a multi-perspective narrative centered around the kids’ ostracized schoolteacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), grieving father Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), school principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong), local police officer Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), heroin addict James (Austin Abrams), and more.
“There’s definitely a malicious nature to it,” Seiple says. “There’s a knowingness that floats with the camera and tells the audience that something is [amiss].”
Seiple wholeheartedly agreed with that sentiment, adding: “There’s so much information that is explained or expressed or seen. I naturally started connecting with, ‘How can we simplify these things and make these seem kinetic?’”
While Weapons does not contain a downpour of amphibians in the third act, the movie’s denouement is no less wildly insane as Magnolia’s, effectively cementing Cregger as the audacious new face of horror in the vein of Stephen King (and indeed, his second feature contains notes of IT and Needful Things).Shooting the best horror movie of 2025
„Overall, we really just went from our gut, which is my preferred way of doing it,” admits Seiple. “The longer I’ve shot, the less I like to be referential, because I think you’re not going to find anything new by doing that … All you can hope for is getting a script that’s so compelling, you naturally start to visualize it. It’s the movies where the script isn’t good and you start having to add visuals to make it better. We were really just getting out of the way and letting the story do its thing.”
For about a month or two before principal photography kicked off in Atlanta, Seiple and Cregger began to shot-list the movie via Zoom.
