World Photography Day: The story behind ‘Napalm Girl’ - and its link to 2025's horror film ‘Weapons’

Today is World Photography Day, the annual celebration raising awareness about the importance of photography.

The day dates back to 1837, when Frenchmen Louis Daguerre and Joseph Nicephore Niepce created the Daguerreotype, the first publicly available photographic process. It takes place on this day to commemorates the declaration of patent for the invention by the French government. 

Last year, the Euronews Culture team handpicked their favourite photos. This year, we focus on one specific shot, which not only feels as depressingly relevant today as it was the day it was taken, but also inspired a filmmaker whose film is one of this year’s unmissable cinematic offerings... 

The photo above is “The Terror of War” - also known as “Napalm Girl”.

It was taken on 8 June 1972 by Nick Ut, a Vietnamese AP staffer working in the Saigon bureau at the time.

The shot features severely burned children, with a naked 9-year-old girl, Phan Thị Kim Phúc, running toward the camera as she flees a “friendly fire” South Vietnamese napalm strike.

Once Ut had taken the shot, he put down his camera and took the young girl and other children to a hospital. There, he was told that she might not survive because she had suffered third-degree burns on thirty per cent of her body. He helped to transfer her to an American hospital, where they were able to save her life.

The photographer sent his picture to the AP’s office. It was about to be rejected because the rules for publishing nudity were very strict. Ultimately, the editors agreed that the value of the picture was more important than any reservations about nudity.

Their call turned out to be the right one, as Ut’s horrifying photograph appeared on the front pages of leading US newspapers and ended up winning both World Press Photo of the Year and the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography.

However, “The Terror of War” isn’t without controversy.  

Then-US President Richard Nixon doubted the photo’s authenticity, suggesting that it was a fake. How times change... However, by 1972, the American public opinion had already turned against Nixon and US involvement in the conflict.

Ut's photo has been credited – apocryphally – as the shot that accelerated the end of the Vietnam War. Regardless of its impact at the time on the conflict, “The Terror of War” did become a symbol of anti-war sentiment.

Phan Thị Kim Phúc survived her injuries and met with Ut after the Vietnam war. In 2022, she posed in front of a plane transporting refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine to Canada (see below), showing that humanity singularly fails in learning the lessons of the past.

She has continued to give interviews about the image, using her platform to support survivors of war, raise awareness about humanitarian crises, and speak about the hope that images like Ut’s have the power to change mentalities.

Ut moved to the US after Saigon fell and spent more than 50 years as a photojournalist. In 2012, he was inducted by the Leica Hall of Fame for his contributions to photojournalism.

His photograph, however, remains surrounded by controversy.

In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg sought to censor “The Terror of War” on Facebook. Following widespread criticism, he backed down.

This year, a documentary titled The Stringer explored the authorship of the photograph and the possibility that stringer Nguyễn Thành Nghệ may have taken the photo, and not Ut.

Both AP and World Press Photo started investigations. AP denied the claim and concluded that there was no convincing evidence surrounding the identity of the photographer. AP did not change the credit for the photo. They released a statement saying: “Following a nearly year-long investigation, the AP has concluded that there is not the definitive evidence required by AP’s standards to change the credit of the 53-year-old photograph.” 

As for World Press Photo, the organisation presented their findings in May and suspended the attribution of authorship to Ut as uncertainty remained. 

Regardless, “The Terror of War” remains to this day a powerful indictment of the effects of war on children and innocent victims. It - and conflict photography in general - still feels as vital today as it was in Vietnam, considering the atrocities still being committed in conflicts and genocides around the world.  

Photographs like “The Terror of War” have the power to tell the truth and counter those who seek to bury their crimes under falsehoods. They also have the power to inspire other creatives around the world, including filmmakers.  

This year’s breakout cinematic hit – both commercially and critically - has been Zach Cregger’s Weapons. It is a mystery horror gem that takes place in the aftermath of the disappearance of 17 children, who all leave their homes one night at precisely 2:17am. They run into the night and are never seen or heard from again.

Weapons thrives on certain ambiguities, which not only feed a potent sense of dread but also allow audience members to reach their own conclusions as to the metaphorical content of the story and its execution.

One lasting image from Cregger’s film is the mysterious and unnatural stance the children adopt when they disappear from their homes: they run into the darkness of night, arms outstretched in a downward ‘v’. 

It turns out that this eerie pose is tied to “The Terror of War”.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Cregger explained that "from the first moment, I was like, 'And they run like that'," citing a possible subconscious inspiration from the famous photograph.

“There's that terrible photo of that girl in Vietnam with the napalm burn,” said Cregger. “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.”

Cregger also pointed out a connection between the film's title and the children's running pose, sharing: "My wife told me her friend called and was like, 'Do you know the etymology of that word means 'small arms'?"

In our review of the “metaphorically haunting” Weapons, we said: “When the film goes for scary, it’ll make you jump out of your skin. When it decides to crawl under said skin, it’ll make you meditate on the “weapons” and “targets” in even the most seemingly safe all-American suburban spaces, and how paranoia can be... well, weaponised.” 

Read the full review here, as well as the reason why a planned prequel is a terrible idea. 

The film’s title and its layered themes are inextricably linked to the central image of the children’s running pose, and by linking this imagery with the iconic historical photograph, Cregger shows that the posture isn’t simply an artistic flourish.

He creates subtext tied to loss, a historical metaphor surrounding trauma, and a deeper reflection on the violence children are subjected to. As the film states, there are “weapons” and “targets” in day-to-day life. Whether audiences interpret this as Weapons being a commentary about school shootings in US schools, a meditation about inherited generational trauma, or even an unsettling allegory on how young minds are being targeted by today’s toxic online culture in order to transform them into weapons that peddle hate-fuelled rhetoric full of racism, misogyny and unempathetic bile, no one is wrong.

There is no such thing as ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ when it comes to appreciating a film. Arguing the contrary is a fool’s errand. Audiences take from a cinema experience what they bring to it, and reducing a piece of art to one answer is reductive in the extreme. And on the other side of the screen, if a filmmaker needs to tell you what you should get from their film, then they have singularly failed to appreciate the richness of their craft.

However, what cannot be denied is the fact that artistic disciplines communicate with each other through time and that the staying power of the historical image “The Terror of War” continues to resonate to this day. As opposed to Weapons, what it continues to tell us can be reduced to 'right' and 'wrong' binaries.

Photography - in all its forms – has the capacity to expose, inspire and in the best of cases, change. Whether it’s an casual observer contemplating a snap or a filmmaker drawing inspiration from a shot and, through his art, inspiring those unaware of his conscious or subconscious reference points to seek them out in order to better educate themselves on real-life horrors, photos matter. In increasingly troubled and horrific times, they matter now more than ever. Even if they were taken more than half a century ago.