‘Weapons’ Director Says ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo Inspired Creepy Kids’ Running Pose
The director of the hit horror movie Weapons has revealed how the photo “The Terror of War,” more commonly known as “Napalm Girl,” inspired the children’s unsettling running pose.
Written and directed by Zach Cregger, Weapons has become one of the most unexpected box office successes of the summer. The film centers on the disappearance of seventeen children from the same classroom, who all mysteriously run out of their homes at exactly 2:17 a.m. under unexplained circumstances.
Eerily, the children wake from their beds suddenly and run into the night in the same unnerving, uniform way. Their bodies remain stiff and upright, while their arms are held straight out in a downward “V” formation.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Cregger reveals that the chilling running pose in Weapons is directly influenced by Nick Ut’s iconic photograph of a young girl running in distress from a napalm attack during the Vietnam War.
‘There’s Something Really Upsetting About That Posture’
Cregger said the unusual running style was “just there” and part of his script from the beginning, but the “Napalm Girl” photograph absolutely inspired it.
“From the first moment, I was like, ‘And they run like that,’” Cregger tells Entertainment Weekly. “There’s that terrible photo of that girl in Vietnam with the napalm burn. I think that image is so awful, and the way she’s holding her arms out just killed me.
“I think there’s something really upsetting about that posture. If I had to guess, that might be where the seed is from. I don’t know. But there was no second-guessing that pose. I knew that they would run that way.”
The “Napalm Girl” photograph is currently the focus of The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo, an upcoming, controversial documentary that Netflix has reportedly acquired the rights to. The documentary asserts that photographer Nick Ut did not take the photo instead arguing that it was taken by a local stringer named Nguyễn Thành Nghệ.
