After ‘Weapons’ and ‘Barbarian,’ Zach Cregger Seems Ready to Join the Horror-Auteur Movement

Compared to a couple of years ago, where it seemed like almost any horror movie with a wide release could make a metaphorical killing at the box office, 2025 has been a little less of a boom year for the genre. Plenty of horror movies still come out on thousands of screens—I co-host a horror podcast, and we’ve had a mainstream new release to cover almost every week this year—but they’re not hitting as big as, say, 2023, which kicked off with M3GAN doing nearly $100 million domestic, and saw big numbers for Scream VI, Five Nights at Freddy’s, The Nun II, Insidious: The Red Door, Talk To Me, Saw X, and Thanksgiving. Jump forward two years and we have Blumhouse undergoing a round of layoffs in the wake of M3GAN 2.0’s entire box office run failing to match even the opening weekend of the earlier film.

Yet there have been plenty of horror admissions this year, despite middling-to-bad numbers for the likes of Bring Her Back, The Woman in the Yard, Wolf Man, and I Know What You Did Last Summer. (Some of those are good, too! Wolf Man is underrated! Woman in the Yard is masterfully made!) It’s just that they’ve mostly been concentrated on a few films: Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (a Christmas release that played well into January), Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, and especially Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. They’re about to be joined by Weapons, writer-director Zach Cregger’s follow-up to 2022’s surprise hit Barbarian, and of course Jordan Peele has already become one of the biggest directors around. Welcome to the auteur-horror era.

Obviously good old-fashioned brand-name horror can still hit it big. Fun as it is, Final Destination Bloodlines does not exactly herald the arrival of a bold new voice in the genre, and it’s one of the year’s biggest movies. But it’s only made half as much as Sinners. And it’s wild to realize that Cregger is poised to make a mint for the same horror-centric Warner Bros. shingle now that New Line has released Weapons this week.

To some extent, these directors simply function as tonier brand names than horror mainstays like Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers. (It’s probably not a coincidence that two of those three have long been absent from the big screen thanks to rights snarls.) But the Christopher Nolanificatin of horror still feels like a big deal. Cregger, in particular, is a case of a filmmaker who has solo-directed one previous movie and shot to brand-name status on its pure inventiveness and originality. By the time Robert Eggers was making it a goth Christmas with Nosferatu, his old-timey deal was well-established by three arthouse-genre hybrids. Part of the thrill of waiting for Weapons has been the mystery over what, exactly, Cregger’s deal as a horror auteur is going to be.

After seeing the movie, that mystery lingers, in a tantalizing sort of way. Cregger has mentioned Magnolia as an early influence on his multi-character horror drama, and while Weapons may not auger the arrival of the next Paul Thomas Anderson, it’s got a similarly propulsive anything-can-happen energy. The premise is laid out immediately: At 2:17AM, almost every member of a local third-grade class mysteriously rose from their beds and ran out into the night, leaving behind some furious parents, a baffled (and targeted) teacher (Julia Garner), and a single kid seemingly unaffected by whatever happened. After a narrated preamble, Cregger starts the story proper with Garner’s character, before repeatedly switching points of view for a fuller view of this unnerving mystery.

To say more might break the movie’s winding, beguiling narrative. It doesn’t seem too spoiler-y, however, to note some superficial similarities between Weapons and Barbarian, including attention to the creepy contents of a basement, stories that are willing to proceed as “normal” dramatic narratives before swerving into more horrifically heightened territory, and a healthy dose of hagsploitation. Thematically, tying the movies together feels a little knottier, at least upon first viewing. Barbarian’s exploration of toxic masculinity was deviously playful, and while there’s certainly some wild horror-movie catharsis at hand in Weapons, how it connects to a story at least partially about parents and children feels a little more obtuse.

At the same time, it’s thrilling to watch a filmmaker explore his narrative and thematic interests without one eye on making an accessibly easy-to-read metaphor or serving a pre-established brand. Weapons doesn’t zig-zag as often or obviously as Barbarian; its dark-fairy-tale energy remains constant underneath the action, even when it seems more grounded. But like Sinners and 28 Years Later, it’s horror on a big canvas, made with the boldness of someone certain that they deserve that leeway. It’s too early to tell whether Cregger will turn into a genre-jumper like Coogler or Boyle; neither of them started in horror or seem likely to do two horror movies in a row (unless Boyle doesn’t fit anything in between 28 Years Later and its planned threequel). Weapons isn’t quite as moving as either of their 2025 films, less boundary-pushing about where the genre can go. Put together with its fellow auteur-horror entries, however, it seems clear enough that this may be the one genre safe from franchise caution.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.