Zach Cregger Is Just Trying to Scare Himself

8 min readZach Cregger is a young boy watching a movie he shouldn’t see yet, tracking a five-year-old pedaling around a haunted hotel on a toy tricycle. He watches the child turn a corner, stop dead in his tracks, and lay eyes on ghastly twin girls, blocking the end of a long hallway. Young Zach would never forget it.That was one of the first times, and maybe even the last, that Cregger remembers being truly afraid. He tells me now that he doesn’t scare easily—or, if he’s being honest, ever. But when the director wants to remember what it’s like to feel truly, desperately afraid, he remembers himself as a boy, wincing through Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.“I want more than anything to be scared so badly,” Cregger, 45, tells me over Zoom. “You have no idea.” He’s calling in from his office in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, the actress Sara Paxton. Cregger describes that feeling of watching The Shining like an addict chasing the high of their first hit, knowing that it’s never going to be that good again. So when he wrote the award-winning Weapons, about a witch who terrorizes a suburban neighborhood—or his debut, Barbarian, about a monster who lives in the basement of an Airbnb—he claims it was just to make his own skin crawl.“I’m trying to make what Zach would least want to see happen in this situation, and that’s what goes in the movie,” he says. “I’m not trying to terrify people. I’m trying to terrify me.”Cregger is ascending in the industry just as once-lucrative superhero blockbusters are running dry at the box office. The one constant for audiences? Horror. Between Sinners, Nosferatu, and Longlegs, the genre remains Hollywood’s greatest hotbed of creativity, partly because it doesn’t cost much to net a good scare. Weapons, which made roughly $270 million worldwide on a budget of $38 million, was a risk that established Cregger as a major talent. With his next film, Resident Evil (out September 18), Cregger’s looking to reinvigorate a tired franchise with fresh ideas. “We’re coming to the end of something in Hollywood that has been taken for granted,” Cregger says of Tinseltown’s overdue return to original storytelling. “I’m all for Hollywood showing me something that I’ve never seen before.”Yes, Resident Evil has been around for 30 years, but you can bet Cregger will deliver a feast of new sights. Just look at Weapons. The film follows a schoolteacher (Julia Garner) and a father (Josh Brolin) who search for an entire third-grade class that woke up in the middle of the night and ran away. The haunting, Stephen King–inspired film reveals that all the children were mind-controlled by a manipulative, campy witch named Gladys, played by Amy Madigan. The veteran actress won an Oscar for her performance, shattering another Hollywood presumption: that Academy voters would never give the statuette to a horror flick.Dusan MartincekZach Cregger’s Resident Evil stars Austin Abrams (left) as a medical courier who suddenly has to arm himself and fight legions of hellish creatures.Turns out, Weapons was just the proof Hollywood needed to continue investing in low-budget horror films from young, savvy filmmakers. Curry Barker’s Obsession, a modern monkey’s-paw story about the dark side of dating, made more than $350 million this spring. Same goes for A24’s Backrooms, a trippy film about people trapped in a maze directed by 19-year-old YouTube creator Kane Parsons. Now every studio is racing to replicate magic that neither the C-suite executives nor the box-office prognosticators even understand themselves. Nor may they ever. That’s why they keep coming back to creatives like Cregger.“If you write something deeply personal that you think maybe is only for you, odds are that will be the thing that most people are interested in,” Cregger says.Cregger wrote the script for Weapons during a promising yet turbulent time in his life. Barbarian was a massive success, but the one-two gut-punch of Covid-19 and the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike was about to stall his sophomore effort. He was also grieving the death of his best friend, Trevor Moore, with whom he formed the sketch group the Whitest Kids U’ Know in the early aughts. Moore and Cregger both grew up in Virginia but didn’t meet until they attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City—where they became inseparable. Cregger’s pain fueled Weapons, but he kept the film’s real meaning close to his chest for a long time. He didn’t want to influence anyone’s experience before they saw it. Now Cregger’s a bit more comfortable talking about it.“Weapons is a very thinly veiled metaphor for what I lived through as a kid,” the director says. “I had a great dad, but he was an alcoholic. He succumbed over the decades to alcoholism, and it changed his behavior. It changed the dynamic of my house, and it very much felt like a foreign entity had come in and taken over my dad and turned him into a scary, different person.”This article appeared in the September 2026 issue of Esquire subscribeWhen Cregger’s family staged an intervention, his father left. So they took his father’s favorite cup—the one he used to drink out of—and they smashed it with a shovel. “That was a very cathartic, symbolic thing for me,” Cregger says now. “Those kids chasing Gladys and tearing her apart in a weird way is like me smashing that cup all over again.”Gladys is set to return in a prequel film for Paramount that will reportedly explore the witch’s origins. Cregger created the character for a story that he wrote several years ago, and he even scrapped a chapter in Weapons that dived more into her backstory. Mike DeLuca, co-CEO of Warner Bros. Entertainment, originally told Cregger that he loved that Weapons didn’t talk about where Gladys came from or even what she is. Maybe DeLuca was already thinking about the possibilities for a prequel, but Cregger teases that audiences should expect an entirely different kind of movie from Weapons.“It would be a weird thing for me to move into telling Gladys’s story and be like, ‘Don’t forget, she represents alcohol entering the family,’ ” he says. No one needs that catharsis twice, not even him. But before audiences learn more about Gladys, Cregger has another new fright-fest out first: Resident Evil.There isn’t much that Cregger wants to reveal before the survival horror hits theaters this fall. For now, the filmmaker describes the video-game-inspired film as a real-time, on-foot journey that takes place over the course of one snowy night. The protagonist, played by Austin Abrams, is a medical courier who is caught in a viral zombie outbreak. Cregger’s goal? “Grab you by the throat at minute eight and never let go,” he says. “That was the challenge I set for myself. Can I make a 90-minute movie where 82 of those 90 minutes I am flooring it?”Cregger shot Resident Evil in the Czech Republic during a punishingly freezing winter, where the director went from battling pneumonia to suffering a horrible stomach infection. His crew was basically nocturnal, shooting only at night in below-freezing temperatures. It was killing them. But rest assured, there is still a deeper dimension to the big-budget thrill ride outside of pure survival.“Even though this is about a guy fighting a zombie infection, the through line of the movie and the issues that these characters are confronting are what I’m dealing with in my life,” he says. “That’s what keeps me engaged.”For the most part, the prior seven installments in the Resident Evil film series were their own beasts entirely. They’re edgy action films with nu-metal soundtracks and very little to do with the video games they’re named after. Cregger even admits that he hasn’t even watched them. Cregger’s resistance to the preceding films—and the fact that his movie is yet another original story set within the world of Resident Evil—initially rubbed some fans the wrong way. “I was surprised, to be honest,” Cregger says. “I just feel like it would have been a disservice to the games if I were to try and retell a story that the games tell so well.” Instead, Cregger wants to capture the feeling of actually playing the games.“I want to be right over your shoulder, and as you look right, the camera looks right, and as you look left, the camera looks left,” he says. “It's just much more immersive. Let me move slowly through these terrifying environments. Let me have one shotgun shell. Let me be worried about my health. That right there is begging to be a movie.”That’s not to say that Cregger left out the action. Zombies leap from the rooftops. Hideous monsters lurk in the shadows. The whole film is fueled by “the idea of Austin going through it,” Cregger says. Before filming, the two worked on what they call Abrams’s character’s “three flavors”: John McClane from Die Hard, Marty McFly from Back to the Future, and Kevin McCallister from Home Alone. Depending on what the scene required, they’d dial each reference point up or down in Abrams’s performance. “I’m going full McClane on this one,’’ Abrams would say before a big set piece. In more suspenseful scenes, Cregger would tell him to think of it as 80 percent McFly and 20 percent McCallister. “Mostly, he lived in the territory of somebody who’s just completely unequipped and running for their lives through hell,” Cregger says.Sony is hoping that Cregger’s vision rubs off on Resident Evil, much like how Christopher Nolan transformed Batman for DC. “They knew that they needed to shake up the franchise,” Cregger says. “But they didn’t know if I had another good movie in me.” Maybe Cregger didn’t either. “It was a real leap of faith,” he says.You know who else tossed the car keys to Cregger? Steven Spielberg. Around the same time Cregger was writing Resident Evil, the legendary director signed on to produce his next movie. It was just awkward timing. He was finishing up Weapons and writing Resident Evil. But with the writers strike around the corner, Spielberg told him that he had a week to come up with a new idea for a film that they could push through before Hollywood effectively shut down. Cregger panicked.“I had one week where I was like, ‘Oh my God, I have to think of an idea for Spielberg,’ ” Cregger remembers. He recalls watching the 2019 sci-fi film Ad Astra, which stars Brad Pitt as an astronaut. Cregger’s wife said something along the lines of “There’s nothing scarier than being trapped in space.” It was all he needed. “Really?” he asked her. “What would be the scariest thing?” He came up with an answer and immediately pitched it to Spielberg. He loved it. “Good man,” Spielberg told him. They sold the idea for the film, titled The Flood, two days later. It’s set for release in 2028.“You have to really listen and let your subconscious be open to whatever signals are going to make your creative tuning fork resonate,” Cregger says. Because, for him, it’s always about solving one question:If that didn’t scare me, what would?