SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains massive spoilers for writer/director Zach Cregger’s Weapons. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
Audiences have seen some pretty exceptional big screen moments thus far in 2025, but there are few movie moments that can compare to the insanity that is the ending of Weapons. This film hits a climax as Justine (Julia Garner) and Archer (Josh Brolin) enter the Lilly house and get attacked by Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) and James (Austin Abrams) while young Alex (Cary Christopher) evades his entranced parents… but everything changes when Alex successfully casts a spell targeting Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan). In an instant, 17 children locked in a basement are driven to attack the woman responsible for their abduction, and the result is riotous and glorious.
I’ll never forget my screening and feeling the movie theater erupt all around me as over a dozen children on screen start savagely plowing through, windows, doors, and walls so that they can tear Gladys to pieces – so I naturally felt compelled to ask writer/director Zach Cregger about filming it when I sat down with him late last month during the Los Angeles press day for Weapons. I inquired how the filmmaker was able to pull off the magnificence that is guaranteed an instant place in horror history, and he explained that the answer was preparation. Said Cregger,
Oh, dude. Brutal. First of all, four days of shooting that sequence. Seventeen kids running through glass and all these crazy things. And I mean, every one of those little beats is a lot of prep. Prep is the answer to that question. It’s like we have to do a ton of rehearsal and we have to have VFX rehearsals and we have to have stunt rehearsals and we have to… it just took a long time.
I can imagine that the children on set performing the stunts had a blast making the new horror movie (I would have loved the opportunity to smash my way through a series if fake doors and windows when I was a third grader), but I can also appreciate the ridiculous challenge of the production process. Anyone with experience around kids knows that corralling 17 of them for a very specific activity that can extremely difficult – let alone getting them to do that activity repeatedly with major resets required after each take.
Julia Garner was on set to witness the insanity, and she was certainly impressed by how it came together. When I asked her about seeing the kids rampaging after Aunt Gladys, she noted that there was a lot of exhaustion on set, but as soon as there was work to be done, everybody perked up. Said the actress,
It was amazing to watch. And I saw that they kept on having to reset and everything and every single time when it happened. In between, everybody was like tired, ’cause I don’t remember what hour it was, but then, as soon as all the kids… everybody was like, boing! Everybody just woke up and was amazing.
It took a great deal of work for everyone on set, and each and every single person can be proud of what they accomplished in the making of Weapons – but the experience did also have some unexpected side effects. It was such an ordeal to put together that even weeks after production was finished, Zach Cregger continued to have nightmares about orchestrating the sequence. The filmmaker continued,
It was really stressful. And I had for about a three week period after we wrapped, every time I fell asleep, I would be ported back to set trying to get kids to jump through things, like, ‘Please focus! Please jump!’ You know? And I’d wake up and be like, ‘It’s not real. It’s over. I already shot the movie. I don’t need to be doing this.’ I could not get out of that mental rut of like corralling children through windows.
It’s perhaps a bit callous to say, but Zach Cregger’s nightmare is our gain, because the ending of Weapons is a special cinematic experience, and I will never forget the palpable energy that I felt growing in my theater during my screening after Alex snaps the stick and targets Aunt Gladys. Not only is seeing kids blindly rampage as they do utterly hysterical, but the way they tear apart Gladys is also ridiculously cathartic, as the audience is delighted to see the orchestrator of extreme nightmares get her proper comeuppance.
The satisfaction from the ending of Weapons is a perfect example of why people love going to the movies, and it not only left me totally blissed out as I first left the theater, but I am psyched to witness it over and over again in the years to come as the film gets properly deemed a modern genre classic. It’s special and a proper result that is worth every ounce of energy that was put into its creation.
