Zach Cregger Says Denis Villeneuve’s PRISONERS Was a Huge Inspiration for WEAPONS
Zach Cregger’s new horror movie Weapons has been drawing attention for its chilling story and wildly creepy visuals. As it turns out, one of the biggest influences on the look and atmosphere of the film came from Denis Villeneuve’s acclaimed 2013 thriller Prisoners, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman.
“The cinematography of Prisoners is so gorgeous. It's like washed-out, somber, cloudy, rainy movie,” Cregger said in an interview with Letterboxd. “And I really, really wanted to, like, evoke everything visually that that movie evoked. And it's very lived in too... The mess in the people's homes and all that stuff. It's great.”
Villeneuve’s Prisoners follows the harrowing search for two missing girls in a small, rain-soaked town. The bleak visual style mirrors the emotional weight of the story, something Cregger wanted to capture in Weapons, which he did.
Beyond the mood and atmosphere, there are also parallels in how both films present villains who operate undetected, blending into the world around them until it’s too late.
But Prisoners wasn’t the only cinematic touchstone guiding Cregger. For the multi-threaded narrative and Alden Ehrenreich’s police officer character, Paul, he drew from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.
“Magnolia, masterpiece, epic. All these different characters interacting, spiralling around one weird central miracle. I love it,” Cregger explained. “I kind of fashioned Alden after John C. Reilly.”
Another inspiration came from Peter Weir’s haunting 1975 mystery Picnic at Hanging Rock. “It's about bizarre behaviour of children and a disappearance, and you're left to just grapple with why. And it's really, it's an upsetting movie,” said Cregger. “It's hard for me not to think about that movie when I think about this movie.”
And of course, Cregger couldn’t leave out the film that made him fall in love with horror, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. “I lift directly from The Shining in this movie. I'm not even ashamed. I mean, it's obvious,” he admitted.
“It's the first movie that made me fall deeply in love with horror… that scene with the twins in the hallway, it just annihilated me. And I have been hunting that feeling ever since.”
With inspirations ranging from Kubrick to Villeneuve, it’s no wonder Weapons feels both visually rich and emotionally layered. The film is currently playing in theaters, inviting audiences to spot the cinematic DNA woven into its unsettling world.