"Weapons" Teaser: Zach Cregger's Follow-Up to 'Barbarian' Teases Suburban Nightmares and Missing Children

Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian takes viewers on a spine-chilling ride into suburban terror.

With Ryan Coogler’s Sinners currently smashing records at the box office this weekend, it’s clear that moviegoers are hungry for horror. Perhaps it’s because horror is the one genre where filmmakers have the freedom to create original, boundary-pushing stories. It’s also been a playground for young filmmakers to push the envelope and experiment with innovative concepts.

Take Zach Cregger, for instance. A sketch comedian known for The Whitest Kids U' Know, he made his bold debut as a writer-director with the 2022 hit Barbarian. Much like Jordan Peele before him, Cregger successfully transitioned from comedy to becoming a rising horror filmmaker.

This summer, fans are eagerly anticipating Cregger’s follow-up, called Weapons. If Barbarian tapped into our fears and anxieties about booking a place to stay through an online app, where you have no clue who’s behind the rental, Weapons seems to delve into the panic and terror of not knowing what’s going on in your own neighborhood.

Warner has released the first official Weapons teaser, offering a quick peek at what might become one of the biggest horror films of the summer, certainly one of the most anticipated.

The teaser opens with a close-up shot of a bedroom clock that reads 2:17 AM. It’s the dead of night.

The camera quickly pans across the room of an empty house, clearly the residence of a suburban family. The shot then pulls forward into a wide view of a typically normal, yet dimly lit neighborhood. It’s eerily quiet. Soon, we are presented with a haunting montage of darkening silhouettes of children running, their arms strangely stretched out to their sides, as if possessed by something. They seem to be lured away from their homes to somewhere they don’t yet know or understand what they’re fleeing.

There’s a voice narration in the teaser. We hear the voice of a father, referred to as Mr. Graff (possibly voiced by Josh Brolin, who leads a cast that includes Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, and Toby Huss). Mr. Graff, clearly stunned by what he’s witnessed, seems to be speaking to a detective or a police officer.

Graff calmly states, “Those kids walked out of those homes. No one pulled them out. No one forced them.”

The teaser ends with an unsettling black-and-white security camera footage, the kind of Ring camera footage we've all seen online these days, showing a young child running across their backyard, away from their home. The child quickly fades into the black shadows of the darkened neighborhood.

The voice of the police officer asks, “What do you see that I don't?” as the ticks of a clock mark the end of the teaser. Some creepy stuff, if you ask us.

The teaser also promotes a mysterious website for anyone looking for more information: www.maybrookmissing.com.

The website, an amateur-made landing page, is reminiscent of early online campaigns like The Blair Witch Project. It’s here that the filmmakers are trying to create a sense of mystery, pulling viewers deeper into a puzzle they need exploring. It’s very old school. Pretty cool, though.

Official Synopsis:

This is where the story really starts…

When all but one child from the same class mysteriously vanish on the same night at exactly the same time, a community is left questioning who or what is behind their disappearance.

The New Line Cinema film stars Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Cary Christopher, with Benedict Wong, and Amy Madigan.

Weapons is written, directed and produced by Zach Cregger, and is slated to open in theaters August 8th.