‘Weapons’ | Anatomy of a Scene

I am Zach Cregger, writer, and director of “Weapons.” So at this point in the movie, Justine Gandy, who’s the teacher who presides over the class that went missing — She’s by the way, played by the brilliant Julia Garner — She has become so frustrated with the lack of action and satisfaction from the authorities that she’s decided to take it upon herself to get some clarity on this mystery. And the only lead that she has is the little boy who didn’t go missing, [DOOR KNOCK] “Hello?” which is Alex Lily, played by Cary Christopher. So in this scene, she’s arriving at his house. She’s followed him from the bus stop, and she decides to just go ahead and knock on the door because there was something just a little odd about the way the door opened and closed so perfectly when he entered his house. The first little baby clue we get that something is wrong with this kid is that, there’s newspaper up over all the windows, and so she decides to snoop a little bit deeper. And that’s what brings her into the backyard, which is obviously, now she’s transgressed his property and curiosity killed the cat. And we all know this is a bad idea, but this is what people do in horror movies. [CICADA SOUNDS] It was fun to try and create the tension here by just being in her P.O.V. and studying the newspaper as she would have studied it. And also, it was really fun to play with the diegetic sound of the cicadas and kind of crank the chorus of insects to become the score. Obviously, we have this kind of low, droning menace that I blatantly steal from David Lynch, but to be able to let the insects really do a lot of the heavy lifting to create this kind of tone of dread was a fun thing to work on in the edit. It was also a fun challenge here to create a jump scare where nothing moves. The scare is the moment that we realize that there’s two people just sitting still, and that stillness is actually what is perverse about what’s going on inside.