'Weapons' Tells a Terrifying Story, but Is There Any Truth Behind Its Plot?

Three years after the tremendous success of his film Barbarian, Zach Cregger is back with Weapons. The movie is set to hit theaters in August 2025 and tells the story of a small town after 17 children get out of their beds at the same time in the middle of the night, never to return.

The film stars Josh Brolin and Julia Garner, among others, but many want to know whether the story at the movie's center is based on anything that actually happened. Here's what we know.

Although the story in Weapons is undoubtedly chilling, it's not directly based on anything that actually happened. In speaking with Entertainment Weekly, though, Zach revealed that he did take inspiration from a tragedy in his own life and from some real stories of missing children.

"I had a tragedy in my life that was really, really tough," he explained.

"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," he continued.

He didn't go much further into the details but said that "[It's] an incredibly personal story. There's certain chapters of this that are legitimately autobiographical that I feel like I lived."

Although plenty of missing children cases likely informed Weapons, Zach said that the movie it most reminded him of was Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, which is not a horror movie.

"I just like that kind of unapologetic, 'This is an epic,'" he explained. "I love that movie. I love that kind of bold scale. It gave me permission when I was writing this to shoot for the stars and make it an epic. I wanted a horror epic, and so I tried to do that."

And, as weird as many people found Barbarian, Zach says that Weapons is a much wilder ride.

"It is more ambitious in almost every way. I don't just mean in terms of the budget, but I just mean creatively," he said. "The story is weirder and it's twistier and it's bigger. I have way more actors to fit into this thing. The set pieces are definitely bigger. It's just a bigger, weirder movie than Barbarian is."

While Weapons is likely to be a pretty harrowing watch, it seems like the most relevant details in the film, at least for Zach, are the ones that are ripped from his own experience. Any movie about the mystery of losing your children is likely to be hard to handle, but Zach has proven that he's adept at managing the tones of his films pretty well.

Whatever Weapons turns out to be, it seems likely to be deeply original and at least a little strange. Hopefully, it can become the same kind of phenomenon that Barbarian was when it was first released.