The film world can’t stop talking about Weapons, Zach Cregger‘s new horror extravaganza that has audiences spooked and uproariously laughing. Opening at #1 at the box office, the new ensemble psychological horror film carefully dissects the trauma of a small town grappling with an inexplicable freak occurrence while also going completely ballistic as a chills and thrills machine, unafraid to play for big macabre laughs and shocking moments. Described by Cregger as a cross between Magnolia and Hereditary, Weapons wears its influences on its sleeve, but it wholly belongs to a singular and unique vision.
From a visual perspective, no film looms as large as Prisoners, Denis Villeneuve‘s bleak crime thriller that contrasts tonally with Weapons in some measures but shares a similar direction in its cloudy and unsettling depiction of an average American suburb on the brink of collapse amid a tragedy involving children.
Zach Cregger Was Influenced by the Cinematography of ‘Prisoners’
Before graduating to a sci-fi master and having a steady hand at crafting major blockbusters like Dune, Denis Villeneuve was synonymous with gritty crime dramas and psychological thrillers like Enemy and Sicario. He operated behind the camera with the clinical and calculated precision of a Stanley Kubrick or David Fincher. Prisoners, a cold-hearted crime procedural about the father of a missing girl, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman), taking matters into his own hands by investigating the whereabouts of his daughter concurrently with the investigation by Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), is perhaps the best film Fincher never got to direct.
The film’s gripping and steadily-paced plot sets a high floor of quality for any film, but what separates Prisoners from its various crime-thriller counterparts is its visual aesthetic. Shot by frequent Villeneuve collaborator Roger Deakins, arguably the most celebrated living cinematographer, the film evokes the dreary spirit of the textual backdrop. It doesn’t take an expert in cinematic visual language to identify the parallels between Prisoners and Weapons, with the latter’s director citing the former as an influence.
“The cinematography of Prisoners is so gorgeous,” Zach Cregger told Letterboxd. He praised the “washed-out, somber, cloudy, rainy” look of the film. “I really wanted to evoke everything visually that the movie evoked,” Cregger continued, revealing that he and his DP (Larkin Seiple) would watch Prisoners constantly. “It’s very lived-in,” he said, vowing to capture the same sense of authenticity, especially in how Villeneuve and Deakins captured the messiness of the homes and general feeling of disorganization.
The Contrasts and Similarities Between ‘Weapons’ and ‘Prisoners’
Weapons, which takes place in an average suburban town, looks like it’s been cursed. Prisoners‘ dreary visual design registers on the screen in Cregger’s film, with the spirit of the quaint neighborhood decaying as a result of the disappearance of 17 kids. The nighttime sequences during the film’s five vignettes reflect the atmospheric dread of a town’s crumbling spirit amid grave trauma and uncertainty. Cregger’s use of shadows, responsible for many of the film’s startling jump scares, is more pronounced than the director’s visual influence, as Weapons lacks Deakins’ exquisite depth of image. What it lacks in painterly image-making is matched by Cregger’s spooky, shadow-filled portraits of a town losing its soul. The master shots and gliding camera movements capturing the kids running down the street evoke an uncanny phenomenon existing in an all-too-real world.
The plot and thematic similarities between Prisoners and Weapons are also impossible to gloss over, with both films following the despair and desperate search for abducted kids in a small-town neighborhood. Where Villeneuve, working with a script by Aaron Guzikowski, takes a sorrowful approach to his meditation on grief and personal justice, Cregger leans into the absurdity of this freakish event, so much so by having an ostensible witch in human form as the perpetrator behind the mass child walkout. However, both films agree that learning about the truth behind these events is far more agonizing than the obsessive need to unlock the mystery.
The chapter in Weapons dedicated to Archer Graff (Josh Brolin, a Villeneuve regular), a construction manager whose son, Matthew, is one of the 17 kids to disappear at 2:17 AM, is Cregger’s homage to Prisoners. Archer takes it upon himself to play detective, tracking the whereabouts of Matthew via home security footage and lining up the intersecting point where all the kids met up. The film would’ve been perfectly serviceable as a gritty procedural, but Cregger’s fascination with the communal aspect of grief and the psychological longing that the mass disappearance arises out of the neighborhood (Archer’s emotional vulnerability in his dream) elevated Weapons to something more profound, even with all its farce and horror extremism.
Zach Cregger, infusing horror classics of yesteryear with dramas and crime thrillers of the present, concocted an indelible recipe in Weapons. The writer-director cemented his status as an auteur, and no matter what he touches, audiences are expecting gold.
