The director of arms Zach Cregger reveals the inspirations behind his horror film [Exclusive Interview]

I want to avoid spoilers, but that’s also what I’m starting. “Barbarian” was really a film where you knew, the better the experience was. Earlier this year, you produced “companion”, which in my opinion had a similar approach. And now we have this film, which I think marketing does a very good job to create the mood without giving a lot. So I wonder if you could talk about the importance for you to maintain secret.

Zach Cregger: Yes, I mean it’s crucial. I have the impression that if you overthrow the beans, then you cut half the joy of the viewing experience. So I really want people to be able to enter and see the film as planned, that is to say this kind of detangling mystery. The word mystery has a lot of weight here. It is not a mystery if you know what happened. So let’s keep a mystery.

Could you talk about the film’s format? I saw you say that you were inspired by “Magnolia”, and that reminded me of “Magnolia” and “Pulp Fiction” and Robert Altman films like “Short Cuts” and “Nashville”. Was you wanting to do – a horror version of this?

Yeah, “Magnolia” [is] a big one. And obviously, if I refer to “Magnolia”, then I am in a way there to reference “Nashville” and “shortcuts” just because they are so linked. “Pulp fiction”, for sure, I should refer to this more often because this film really inspired me like a child to think of the structure outside the beaten track, which [Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary] did so well in this film. But “Magnolia” really because it is a big set and it is totally proud to be an epic film and to be a little messy. He paints with all these different colors, but he has such a specific palette, and it’s sad and it’s funny and that’s it. I love the audacity of this film. So when I thought of writing a horror film, not with [something like] “Hereditary” as my inspiration – which, by the way, I love “hereditary” – but when I think of [“Weapons”] More than it is an ancestor of “Magnolia”, so it gives me a license to think differently the way I write it.

I had read that the book “The Gift of Fear” partially inspired “Barbarian”. I wonder if it was something similar here. Again, I know you don’t want to enter the spoilers, but if there was something that inspired this specific story or the stories really because there are many.

Yes, it was a personal tragedy that occurred in my life. It was therefore not like a media element or something like that, but it was just something that happened to me. It is therefore much more, if “Barbarian” was a film oriented outwards, a film that had a lot to say about society – it seems so pretentious – but it was a film that watched and talked about the world. While “weapons are a film that looks very much like me looking for the interior and inventory my s ***, my life. It is an autobiographical film in many ways.