Weapons' Kid Actors Fought To Deal The Most Gruesome Blow In The Film's Climax

The ending of "Weapons" is, in the very best way, absolutely insane. (This should go without saying, but, uh, spoilers ahead!) In writer-director Zach Cregger's "Weapons," we watch as Gladys, a potentially ancient witch played by Amy Madigan (who deserves an Oscar nod for the role), invades the fictional town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, and hypnotizes people, turning them into apparent sources of energy for her ailing body. After performing rituals to ensnare multiple adults and 17 children, Gladys' "nephew" Alex Lily (Cary Christopher) manages to figure out how her magic works and turn it back on her ... at which point those 17 children "weaponize" and tear Gladys to literal shreds. According to Cregger, the child actors involved were very excited about this whole thing.

As Cregger told Indiewire, he told the kids it was a scary movie and they'd get to punish the witch who trapped them in a basement. How did they react? "They were like, 'YEAAAAH!' They were genuinely thrilled to do it," Cregger shared. "Kids have not quite developed empathy at that age yet, so there was no questioning it. I was like, 'Who wants to pull her jaw?' And they were all fighting for who would do it."

Cregger says that he had to be much more up front with his young star ... but Christopher didn't read the script and Cregger isn't sure he's seen the entire film. Still, they figured it out. "We just had to have a lot of honest conversations about where he's at emotionally. There's no way to trick him into portraying the right levels of fear and anxiety and sadness," Cregger shared. "He's just such a true actor. He asks really intelligent questions. He fully understood everything we were doing, and you can see it in the performance."

Let me rewind for a second, though, and explain the build-up to the moment where, in a satisfying and disturbing twist, the children previously possessed by Gladys become her downfall. Gladys' magic involves branches from a mysterious tree, and once she steals a possession that belongs to her intended target, she wraps that possession around a branch from said tree, smothers the branch in her own blood, and breaks it. From that point on, the person to whom the possession once belonged becomes a heat-seeking missile ... and when Alex mimics the magic, he manages to send all 17 of his elementary school classmates after Gladys.

The entire sequence is frantic, wild, funny, and stunning, and as Zach Cregger told IndieWire, barely any CGI was used in the process ... except for one moment where the children hurl themselves through glass windows as a part of their chase. "It's pretty much all practical. The only CGI is some of the windows the kids go through, but even that is like we had the muntins and mullions in, but we just couldn't put the glass in because you can't have kids jumping through sugar glass, even. It's too dangerous."

Cregger then clarified that one particular shot, where the borderline rabid children tear down a fence to get to Gladys, relied on special effects. "The one shot that is the most VFX-heavy is when they are breaking the fence down. That actually was a composite of five different passes, one with stunt adults, one with kids, one with the door, one with no door," he shared. "That was kind of a nightmare. That shot is really fast but deceptively complicated."

As Zach Cregger put it, he tried to stick to practical effects as much as possible, including the climactic and satisfying moment when all of the kids rip Gladys apart. "Everything else is practical. Even Gladys getting shredded. I think her eye blinks while her face is getting pulled apart, and that's VFX, but everything else is like ... we had a dummy with hoses inside, and the kids pulled the dummy apart and got sprayed with fake blood," Cregger recalled of the scene. He utilized lightning-quick edits and cuts to ensure that we see Gladys being pulled apart and which, smartly, ensures that we only see horrifying tidbits before her destroyed body is shown.

Cregger did say that the kids in charge of "pulling Gladys apart" had a great time. "They were having the time of their little lives," he said, before continuing, "The only time I felt not in control of the movie was when the kids were pulling Gladys apart." I can only imagine how stressful it was for the writer and director of "Weapons" to feel like he was losing control during its grand finale, and Cregger said he definitely felt that stress.

"The whole movie I felt very much like I had it under my thumb because I'd photo-boarded it and I knew exactly what I wanted," Cregger said. "But with those kids screaming and piling on this dummy, it was too much for me, man. We had two cameras going. We had to shoot at three different times and kind of stitch it together from three different cracks at that thing. It was really hard." Thankfully, it paid off handsomely ... and the ending of "Weapons" is amazing. The film is streaming on HBO Max now.