Zach Cregger

A corridor, held a beat too long. A figure at the back of the frame who has not moved and should have. Then the thing itself, so wrong that the first sound out of you is a laugh and the second is not. That is Zach Cregger's scene, and he has built three films out of it. His camera waits where other horror directors cut away, and when the fright comes it has a joke attached, so you cannot tell afterwards which one made you grab the armrest.

The joke is not an accident. Cregger spent his first two decades in comedy, as a founding member of the sketch troupe The Whitest Kids U' Know from 2000, in sitcoms, and co-directing Miss March (2009) with Trevor Moore. Sketch comedy teaches you exactly how long to hold a shot before the payoff, and that is the whole of his craft as a horror director. Barbarian (2022) was the turn, a film that becomes a different film partway through, and it made his name. Weapons (2025) told the story of a class of children who run into the dark at 2:17 one morning chapter by chapter, each from a different pair of eyes. Resident Evil (2026) went the other way: one frightened courier, one parcel, one night, 90 minutes.

Small is where he is best. In Resident Evil, Dariusz Wolski drops the camera to Bryan's eye line so that a corridor becomes the corridor in the game, Joe Murphy cuts the first hour one problem at a time, and Tom Hammock keeps Raccoon City ordinary, all service doors and back stairs. Hays Holladay and Ryan Holladay, on their second film with him, keep the score to a hum and let the sounds in the walls do the frightening. Austin Abrams, also on his second, plays Bryan as a man counting what is left in his bag. About forty minutes in there is a sequence involving something that should not be able to move the way it moves, and we laughed out loud and were frightened within the same breath, and the row behind us groaned as one. We had a good time.

Then, both times, the film gets bigger and gets worse. Weapons is frightening for an hour and clever for longer, and its last act is louder and sillier. Resident Evil leaves its small rooms for somewhere larger, the camera pulls back from Bryan's shoulder, and he becomes one more person in a crowd being chased. Cregger and co-writer Shay Hatten leave threads hanging; Paul Walter Hauser, Kali Reis and Zach Cherry each get a scene and a personality and then the film moves on. We checked the time in the final stretch of both, and were cross about it, because the hours before had earned better.

He is three films into horror, and the two we have reviewed spend their first hour as well as the genre allows. If he finds an ending to match, we will be telling strangers. Until then, see them for the hour and forgive them the rest.