Weapons director Zach Cregger has confirmed that a prequel is in the works about the antagonist of his hit horror film.
The terrifyingly charismatic Aunt Gladys, played by Amy Madigan, captivated horror fans this year as Weapons became a box office smash, earning more than $260m (£192m) worldwide.
Cregger has now announced that he’ll be expanding the legend of Aunt Gladys. “It is real [the prequel film] and I’ve been talking to Warner Bros about it,” he said.
The 44-year-old told Fangoria that he already has a story for the film that he’s “pretty excited about”.
“It’s not bulls***,” he enthusiastically added.
Cregger also said that he’d planned for a prequel film focused on Aunt Gladys before Weapons was even released. “I was ready,” Cregger said. “I had it kind of in my pocket before the movie came out.”
Weapons stars Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Benedict Wong and Alden Ehrenreich, and follows the mystery of 17 children who disappear in the middle of the night in a small town in Pennsylvania.
Despite the fantastical narrative, Cregger revealed earlier this year that the story was actually inspired by the death of his friend and collaborator, Trevor Moore, from a tragic accident in 2021.
“I was working on post-production on Barbarian [Cregger’s previous film] when my best friend died very suddenly in a really awful accident,” he told Rolling Stone.
He admitted that processing his grief through creativity could be considered a cliché in some ways, but believed the output was powerful.
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“Look, like the rest of the world, I don’t want to watch another horror movie about grief,” he explained.
“That whole horror-as-a-metaphor-for-grief is so f***ing played out. I shouldn’t even be talking about this, but I can’t help myself. I don’t care if anybody gets any of that when they watch it. I want them to have fun. If the story rips, none of that matters.”
In a four-star review of Weapons, The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey wrote: “There are echoes of the Satanic Panic, the mass hysteria in which teachers were falsely accused of the ritualistic abuse of their students, and the community fallout after a mass shooting.
“Yet, its climactic image is a pointed, and unexpectedly funny, act of intergenerational warfare that reveals Weapons’s true message: no one’s ever really thinking about the children.”
