The 2025 release calendar for the summer season was packed with massive blockbusters, but if one were to look back at the final month, they would discover that a particular title utterly dominated: Zach Cregger's Weapons. The movie has been one of the most exciting releases of the year, and that's that's clearly been understood since its buzzy launch into the theaters and in the weeks since. Now, the film is ready to make its move into the home video market, and with its arrival will come special features that provide new insight into its production.
Weapons will be making its North American digital release debut on September 9, with the 4K UHD/Blu-ray scheduled for October 14 (just in time for Halloween!), and one of the featurettes that will be included in the latter is titled "Texture of Terror." In it, Zach Cregger, the crew, and the cast discuss how the movie created the fictional suburb of Maybrook – and as you'll learn from the exclusive clip above, the effort was a mix of irony and brilliance.
Without giving away any spoilers, Weapons is one of the wildest cinematic experiences to be introduced to audiences in 2025, and one thing that makes it special is that it works as a slow burn. There's no question that it pokes and prods movie-goers with scares throughout, but it's comparable to a simmering pot that suddenly its a roaring boil. As explained in the clip, one of the most important things about making that chaos work was making everything about Maybrook initially seem familiar and wholly average. Production designer Tom Hammock explains,
The key with this film is that it’s very normal. Very average… Whether it’s the family that comes back from the grocery store and they kind of only half-put the groceries away. It’s about finding those details that make everything appear as normal as possible so that when you get the slow build-up of things going wrong, it just escalates, but the audience has bought into this town as being the most normal place in the world.
It goes beyond just how the film looks, too. In addition to looking like a total average town, Maybrook is also populated by very normal, recognizable people. Each of the characters that gets their own perspective-constructed segment in Weapons is an individual whom you could imagine meeting on a random Tuesday. Nothing seems extraordinary about any of it, and that just makes it scarier.
But just because everything appears normal doesn't mean that everything is, as the production designer hints that certain choices were made to distort reality and keep audiences with a sense of uneasiness. Hammock explains,
There’s the realm where we’re trying to make you slightly uncomfortable with how things are designed. Hallways are maybe a hair longer than they should be. There may be a few too many doors . You never know where a scare can come from or when someone’s going to jump out.
I have maintained from the very beginning that Weapons is super Stephen King coded, and I weirdly feel like this only strengthens my case. Why? Because one of the most famous other examples of a film pulling off this kind of audience manipulation is the construction of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.
In addition to "Texture Of Terror," the 4K UHD and Blu-ray editions of Weapons will include two other featurettes: "Director Zach Cregger: Making Horror Personal," which delves into how Cregger developed the film with inspiration from personal experience, and "Weaponized: The Cast Of Weapons," which includes interviews with the ensemble of actors who bring the assortment of protagonists to life.
For now, Weapons remains in wide theatrical release – having topped the box office for the third time this past weekend – and given how much love the CinemaBlend staff has for it, you can be sure that we'll be continuing to write about the brilliant film for months (hopefully including news/information about the prequel that is reportedly in development).
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