Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian, Weapons, emerged as one of 2025’s most talked-about horror films: produced for roughly $38 million, it has amassed north of $250 million globally and maintained a prolonged theatrical presence largely on the strength of word of mouth. Warner Bros. has already been reportedly pressing Cregger to develop a prequel. At the heart of the movie is an unnerving mystery: 17 children from the same third-grade class rise from bed at precisely 2:17 a.m., move in the same rigid, uncanny way, and vanish into the night.
The characters — and the audience — crave answers: what compelled the children to leave, where did they go, and why did this happen? When the film finally explains, it does so with a cascade of practical gore. Special makeup effects designer Jason Collins, the founder of Autonomous FX, spearheaded many of those moments. Collins, whose career stretches back to the 1990s and includes recent work on shows like Yellowjackets, Veep, Euphoria, and Westworld, says Weapons felt like a return to “early horror days” — particularly when the production involved blasting children with pressurized fake blood from modified extinguishers.
With Weapons now available to stream on HBO Max, it’s possible to go fully into spoilers — both for what the film reveals and how the blood-and-gore effects were achieved. Polygon spoke with Collins about building the film’s most shocking sequences, from the gruesome climax to the pivotal scene where, in his words, “the entire movie pivots.”
Warning: Major spoilers follow for Weapons. Graphic images and descriptions below.
The disintegrating head
The moment the film “goes left” arrives about 80 minutes into the 128-minute runtime. Told in nonchronological chapters, the story fragments across viewpoints — third-grade teacher Justine (Julia Garner), bereaved father Archer (Josh Brolin), and others — as they grapple with the aftermath of almost an entire class vanishing overnight, leaving only Alex (Cary Christopher) behind.
It’s eventually revealed that a woman who calls herself Alex’s Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan) has infiltrated his home with a form of sympathetic magic, subjugated his parents, and kept his classmates captive to siphon their life force. When Justine begins probing Alex’s household, Gladys retaliates by possessing school principal Marcus (Benedict Wong), compelling him to murder his husband Terry (Clayton Farris) by head-butting him until the skull collapses.
“That’s the first time we actually see someone turned into a weapon, which ties directly to the film’s title,” Collins explains. “We built three prosthetic heads for the sequence and cut them together: a pristine replica, a partially crushed version, and a fully caved-in head.”
Collins says the effect takes inspiration from Gaspar Noé’s notorious 2002 sequence in Irréversible, where a fire extinguisher is weaponized against a skull — a brutal visual touchstone Cregger admired.
The zombie run
After killing Terry, Marcus bolts through town as if guided by a motor, honing in on Justine under Gladys’ control. His gait is relentless — no pauses to gather himself — and the horror is compounded by his physically damaged face, bugged eyes, and the viscous black bile he expels after Gladys’ influence takes hold.
“He reads animalistic and monstrous, but Benny is an intense performer who really committed,” Collins says. “He ran extreme distances in Georgia swelter, day after day, which added a real, exhausted rawness to his close-ups. Visual effects then enhanced the eye bulge to achieve the Graves’-like look Zach wanted, since a practical eye appliance wouldn’t have been safe for all that running.”
Wong wore facial prosthetics for the damaged look and covered himself in practical blood, bile, and remnants modeled from Clayton Farris’ make-up to sell the brutality. The fixed, widened-eyes effect, however, was completed in post-production so Wong could maintain his sight and move safely across wide outdoor setups.
The pull-apart corpse
Collins cites the finale as the sequence he’s most proud of: Alex turns Gladys’ power back on her, and the children — once captives — become instruments of her undoing, hunting her down, shattering doors and glass, and ultimately dismantling her with bare hands and teeth.
“We combined footage of Amy and her stunt double breaking through obstacles, then used scans of Madigan in a scream pose to build a full-body mechanized mannequin for the kill,” Collins explains. “The rigging featured multiple internal release tabs tied to a controller so specific bits could be removed on cue: eyes crushed, ears torn, spurts of blood timed to action. The final pull-apart was engineered to come apart convincingly on command.”
To amplify the carnage, Collins and his crew stood off-camera and sprayed the child performers with cascades of fake blood from repurposed fire extinguishers. “We were listening for Zach’s direction and then, on cue, blasting the kids with tons of blood,” he recalls.
Collins describes the extinguisher technique: fill the canister halfway with watered-down fake blood, then pressurize the remainder with compressed air to achieve a high PSI so the spray can reach from well out of frame. Despite the mess, the team designed the prosthetic body to be quickly reset between takes — costume and hair adjustments allowed it to be reassembled and reused efficiently.
Working with children and the blood shower
Given the intensity of those scenes, the production had to consider the young actors’ wellbeing. Collins says producer Miri Yoon prioritized the children’s comfort by arranging rehearsal days where the kids could handle the prosthetics and practice with the extinguishers before any real blood was introduced.
“We started by pressurizing extinguishers with plain water so everyone could experience the sensation without being surprised,” Collins notes. “Once they were comfortable, we offered kids the choice to be sprayed with fake blood; about half raised their hands — they thought it was exciting.”
Collins says the children enjoyed the process and often jockeyed to be the ones who could take part in the most visceral moments, which reassured the effects team that the experience was safe and positively received.
Weapons is available to stream on HBO Max and can also be rented or purchased on platforms such as Apple TV, Amazon, Plex, and similar digital services.
Source: Polygon
