Zach Cregger’s Horrifying Secret

13 min readZACH CREGGER TRAINED himself to take wild risks whenever he could. When he was making comedy sketches with his group, The Whitest Kids U' Know, he says “Everything was like, ‘Let's aim for the fences and let's be as weird as possible.’ I'd say half of what we did didn't work at all.” But: “Half of it did, though. And that was really helpful for embracing a weird left turn in my creative endeavors—being able to think, ‘Okay, that would be weird. What would be 10 times weirder than that?’”In the last four years, Cregger has established himself as a premiere voice in American horror and one of the most creative (and bankable) writer-directors working today. His 2022 film Barbarian—about a night in a double-booked AirBNB gone very wrong—was a breakout hit. Last year’s Weapons was a sensation both critically and at the box office, eventually riding its Magnolia-style split narrative about missing children and a divided community to a $270 million box office gross. It also earned an Academy Award win for Amy Madigan, who played Aunt Gladys, the movie’s instantly iconic villain.Even if viewers didn’t have a clue that Cregger came from the escalating world of comedy, you can sense it through the work. Barbarian and Weapons are certainly scary, but their scares often come from situations where the horror is so absurd that the only way to work through the discomfort is by letting out a few nervous chuckles—or covering your eyes in fear.Sony Pictures“When you're writing sketches, you're training your brain to constantly be thinking ‘What would be the most surprising thing to happen right now?’ And that muscle just gets worked repeatedly for however long you're doing comedy,” he says. “For me, it was many, many years. And so basically, I went to the gym for horror the whole time I was doing comedy.”He’ll be showcasing those gains with Resident Evil, a take on the beloved video game franchise of the same name, and Cregger’s biggest gambit as a filmmaker to date. The film has been described as a non-stop thrill ride—Cregger himself says “The whole movie is like one giant sequence.” Despite the pressures of a massive release just around the corner (Resident Evil hits theaters on September 18), the 45-year-old director remains affable and his demeanor cool. Surrounded by beams of natural light in his Los Angeles home, Cregger broke down his career with Men’s Health with a big smile on his face.MEN’S HEALTH: You’ve had a remarkable amount of success in your career to date. Is this the path you’ve always envisioned for yourself?ZACH CREGGER: When I was a little kid, this was what I wanted to do. I always hoped to be in a position to write and make movies. I made one in my 20s, and it was not successful. It was very, very poorly received and I was basically convinced I was in movie jail and that it was not going to happen for me; I blew it, and I focused on acting. And I had a modest career. I don't want to poo-poo my acting career. I made a living, but I didn't feel like I was doing what I was put on this Earth to do, which is, I think, to write and direct movies. And so after almost a decade of just like, ‘Yeah, nobody wants me to write anything. Nobody wants me to direct anything,’ I had this realization of ‘It's not that nobody wants me to write or direct anything. Nobody's thinking about me. Nobody gives a shit about whether I'm writing or directing a movie or not.’That might sound like a disappointing realization, but I found it to be incredibly liberating and inspiring. I was like, ‘I don't matter. Nobody's thinking like, ‘There goes that failure, look at him.' They're not thinking about me at all. So, I get to start over.’ And so I was shooting a show in Fiji and I'd shoot all day, and then at night, I'd go back to my little bungalow and I just decided to write a script. I was there for three months shooting the show, and over the course of those three months, I wrote a script. And it was a script I'll probably never get to make because it has a whole lot of baggage on it, but I loved it, dude.I loved the process of writing it. I fell in love with writing again. I'd written other scripts in the years prior, but they weren't great. But this one, I was like, ‘This is.’ So, I was like, ‘Okay, I can do it. I can write something that I'm really in love with. Let's see if I can do it again and let's see if I can write something that's not tied to an expensive IP,’ which that one was. And so then I wrote Barbarian, and I loved it even more. And I was like, ‘This is not expensive. Somebody might be able to trust me to make this.’ And it took me a couple of years, but eventually I got it to Roy Lee and he found the money and I made Barbarian, and then the rest unfolded the way it did.So to answer your question, it was always what I wanted to do, and yes, I’m also very surprised at the response since Barbarian, to that movie and to Weapons and the situation I'm in now. I hope Resident Evil gets a favorable response. I don't want to talk about it like it's a foregone conclusion or anything. But I did not assume that my life was going to be what it is now, and I'm very proud of it. I also understand that these things come and go, and nobody stays forever in the hot seat. So I have to appreciate it while it lasts.MH: You mentioned that the first script you wrote was attached to an expensive IP. Was it something you had a longstanding passion for, and did that make it easier for you to write?ZC: It's a script called Henchman. It's about a normal guy. It's about a pharmacist who lives in Gotham City, and he gets accidentally sucked into this incredible power play between Batman and The Joker. And he finds himself a very integral part of something. And, so, it's a weird movie. It's someone living on the periphery of all the stories in Gotham that we know of and it's about some random. I'm not the world's biggest Batman guy at all, but I just liked this story. I liked this character. I liked what happened to him, so it was just fun.”I went to the gym for horror the whole time I was doing comedy.”MH: Does it feel like Miss March led to Barbarian which led to Weapons which now led to Resident Evil? Or is this all just kind of how the cards fell?ZC: I don't think about these things that way. I'm more playing the cards as they're dealt to me. But when I look back from Barbarian to Weapons to Resident Evil, I’m cognizant of the growing budgetary trajectory. That's not the goal, though. The goal for me is not to just keep making more and more expensive movies. Dude, I'm deeply envious of Curry Barker making a $750,000 movie [with Obsession] and getting such a tremendous response. I would be more than happy to shrink that down, but we'll see. We'll see what happens in the future.MH: Could you see yourself trying something like that as a challenge?ZC: I have no idea. Maybe. It all depends on the idea. I don't really think in terms of anything other than what's the story. If there was a story I had that could be done small, I wouldn't have a problem with that.MH: I believe Austin Abrams was the only one from your original Weapons cast who stuck with the project through the actors strike…ZC: That’s right! He was.MH: And now he’s leading Resident Evil for you. What makes a great leading man, and why is Austin one?ZC: There's something about Austin where in Weapons, he played this thieving junkie who doesn't ever do anything noble in the whole movie, and yet, everybody who sees that movie loves him. That right there is evidence he has a quality you just can't put your finger on and can't manufacture. You either have it or you don't, and he has it. There's something about him that is, ‘We want to be his friend. We want him to be our friend.’ When you’re a movie star… You look at Tom Hanks, and you feel like you know him in some way. You feel like you have a personal connection with him.I think Austin engenders that in the audience. I think we find this immediate affinity for him that’s impossible for someone like me to write or direct. He's got to have it, and he does. Obviously, he's a tremendously gifted actor who's incapable of a false beat, but he's just got that thing that makes you feel like, "That's my friend, Austin."Sony PicturesMH: As you go from movie to movie, do you find yourself learning and picking up new things from each experience?ZC: Totally, 100%. Barbarian taught me how to make a movie. I felt like I learned more on Weapons than I did on Barbarian just in terms of how to think about production, how to think about the edit, how to think about prep. I learned so much from my cinematographer on that movie, and I had a really fun person give me advice on the edit that was transformative. And then in Resident Evil, I think I learned more about my own fortitude and how I can dig deep and stay the course when things get hard, because it was a really hard movie.I don't know the lessons I've learned from Resident Evil yet. I think I need more time to know those lessons, but I'm positive they're there. But yeah, I'm still growing. I still feel like I'm just beginning as a filmmaker. I do not feel like I know how to make these things with any degree of certitude. I just feel like I'm getting better at it. I hope I'm getting better at it.MH: Throughout the first 30 minutes of Resident Evil I kept thinking of two primary themes of your work—tension and humor. How do you balance those two and make it seamless? ZC: I don't have a secret rule. Whatever I'm writing, I tend to just let it out, let it in and I usually think in terms of jokes because I think I'm used to that, but I'm always aiming at the scare. And then in the edit, I try my very best to cut all of the humor out of the movie—truly. So, the first assembly is probably a lot goofier than the final product, and any humor that's left into the movie you're watching is just the absolute minimal I can get away with.That's my rule. Because it's like, if you have a horror movie and people laugh four or five times throughout the course of the horror movie, they walk out of the theater and they're like, "That's pretty funny." If you have a comedy and people only laugh four or five times, they walk out of the movie and they're like, "That movie sucked!" So I have to recognize no one's going to dock me points if they don't laugh at this. In fact, I'll get docked points if they laugh too much. Less is more, and I'm already starting on third base in terms of how the horror is. So, really, what I do is I go through, I cut all the jokes that I'm able to cut out out of the movie, and I find that I very rarely miss them. And the final product is still funny.Sony PicturesMH: Is it always fun to brainstorm ways for people to gruesomely meet their end?ZC: Oh, yeah. That's so fun, man. It's just like, "What disgusting crazy thing can we cram in next?" and then you get an idea and then you get really excited… Yeah, that's the fun.MH: When you come up with something like Aunt Gladys’s demise, is it an “aha” moment, or is there a level of uncertainty until you film it?ZC: No, for Gladys with the kids, I remember when I thought of that moment and that was an “aha” moment. I was excited. I was like, "That is perfect." There's a similar thing at the end of Resident Evil and I remember, when I had the idea of how this movie should end, I was like, "That is it." And it feels good when you know you can stop searching. I'm always looking for the next, "How can I improve every idea?" and sometimes when you get an idea where you're like, "Nope, that's what it is," that's a good feeling. It's like, "That is a solid table with four legs. Leave it alone." It's nice when that's the end of the movie too. If you know that you can stick the landing, then you're in good shape.MH: You've talked about the prequel for Aunt Gladys and diving into her backstory. Do you have a status on where that is right now?ZC: The script is in process and the first draft is written. It's awesome. We're still working on it though. It's a character study. It's like, "Who was Gladys before she became that and how did she become that?" So, it's not a horror movie where she's the monster, although that is in there, but it is more like we're following her. When I wrote Weapons, I had a “Gladys” chapter that I went into her whole backstory and I ended up taking it out of Weapons because I thought it was better to just not know about her. And that is the right approach for Weapons, but it doesn't mean there's not a cool story about Gladys that can be a separate thing and I'm excited. Look, I love seeing Amy play that character and I think we have a really fun engine for her with this script, so we'll see. We'll see how it goes.Warner Bros.MH: Do you have a dream young Gladys or would you want Amy to come back?ZC: It would be Amy. I'm not going to do a Young Gladys. It would be Amy.MH: There’s a mysterious woman who figures prominently into the first 30 minutes of Resident Evil, and at one point she’s running through this meadow in a way that made me think of Weapons. Was that intentional?ZC: No, it wasn't intentional. In fact, there's a scene where she hops over the fence and then she picks herself up and keeps running and the actress had her arms like this, locked. I didn't even think about it on the day, and then in the edit, I was like, "Dude, she's running like Weapons." So we ended up VFX'ing her arms so that she would have a little bit more movement, just so that I and hopefully no one else would think about that movie.MH: We talked earlier about a script you wrote and see as a long shot to get made. Is there any other idea lurking in the back of your head that people might find surprising or unexpected? Is there a Zach Cregger rom-com in there?ZC: I doubt I would make a rom-com, but you never know. But my next thing is going to be a sci-fi movie, and it's not really a horror movie, so I think that will feel different. After that, who knows what I'll do? I have no idea.”If you have a horror movie and people laugh four or five times throughout the course of the horror movie, they walk out of the theater and they’re like, ’That's pretty funny.’ If you have a comedy and people only laugh four or five times, they walk out of the movie and they're like, ’That movie sucked!'”MH: That’s The Flood. I know you probably don’t want to say too much about that one, but can you talk a bit about what inspired you and why you want to make that kind of movie? ZC: I just love the story, dude. That movie is about something in a real way that’s important to me. It's another bizarre narrative structure in the way that Weapons and Barbarian are, but it's not jumping perspectives. It unfolds in a very unique way that I'm really proud of. It's disturbing, but it's not a horror movie, although there are horror scenes in it. It feels intimidating to me. I'm still not really sure how to make it, but I think that's a good thing. It's hard to talk about it without talking about the story. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to make that movie. I’m in love with that story in a really unique way.MH: Do you have favorites in that space that you aspire to, that you think of as the north star? Is there a vibe you can put in people’s minds?ZC: That's a good question. I think that it is like… I'm not comparing it to 2001, because I think 2001 is a true masterpiece in every sense of the word, but there’s a bizarreness to that movie that’s really undeniable, and it’s also a horror movie. I think 2001 is a really thrilling horror movie about human nature, and obviously about artificial intelligence, but it asks big questions. And I think, in that way, there's some similarity with Flood.MH: If you could put any performer, living or dead, into one of your future films, who would it be?ZC: Philip Seymour Hoffman.MH: Do you have a favorite role of his?ZC: I could never pick one. He is always miraculous.MH: Is there a movie that you would want to ever remake?ZC: I'm sorry to say there's not. No. There was a moment where I was ... There's a movie called Panic in the Streets that I was considering trying to adapt. It's like a film noir that’s about a pandemic that's breaking out in the city, and they're trying to find the Typhoid Mary equivalent in this town, and they're trying to find her or him before they spread it to everybody. And I was like, "That's a cool idea. What if I did that in the future and I made it this weird noir, hyperviolent pandemic thing?" But then the pandemic hit and I was like, "Nobody needs this."I would like to take a film noir and completely repurpose it and put it in a different time and place, and see what I could get away with. But honestly, I'm just more interested in finding original stories.MH: Obviously it hasn’t come out yet. But are you able to reflect on any aspect of Resident Evil yet?ZC: I'm tired. I don't think I’m able to have any perspective right now because I finished the movie less than a week ago, so I just don't know.Buy Resident Evil Tickets HereThis interview has been edited for length and clarity.Evan is the culture editor for Men's Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn't.