Adam Wingard Unleashes Onslaught

From the little side corridor of screen five at the Alamo South Lamar, director Adam Wingard grins. He’s just spent the last 90 minutes pummeling, ripping, and grinding the audience with his latest slice of no-holds-barred, Eighties-influenced mayhem. “It just feels so good to make this kind of movie again.”

Wingard’s connection to Austin goes back to 2010, when his first feature with writer and now longtime collaborator Simon Barrett, A Horrible Way to Die, took home a shelf’s worth of awards. A year later, the duo found even more success with their revisionist home invasion cult classic, You’re Next, which played on the exact same screen as Onslaught. A festival smash and their box office breakout, You’re Next  saw them both move into bigger studio and franchise projects like their The Blair Witch Project sequel, Blair Witch, and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.

So, it made sense that, for their return to their style of off-the-rails hyperviolence, Wingard would choose Austin for the first public screening of Onslaught, which smashed onto VOD this week.

By comparison to his work in the Monsterverse, this is a much smaller project, but Wingard explained that it wasn’t hard to get used to a tighter budget again. After all, you never really have enough money. Even on the Godzilla films, he explained, “it’s just the amped-up version. ‘Oh, if we only had $10 million more, $20 million more, we’d get every single shot we wanted and everything would be perfect,’ but somehow you’re always struggling right on the edge.” However, that explains why he produced Onslaught with A24, “not because they were offering the biggest budget – they offered enough to make the movie – but they offered a lot more to me than that, and that was final cut. To me, that was worth every amount of having to get creative and figure out how we were going to make our days.”

Forming a loose trilogy with both You’re Next and The Guest, the action-packed and blood-spilling Onslaught draws a bead on Adria Arjona as Celeste, a retired army sniper with a hair trigger and a trailer full of guns who finds herself and her daughter in the path of a trio of recently resurrected super soldiers. Plus, with its mix of levity, depravity, and ghoulishness, it’s arguably the most Wingardian film since his psychotronic sophomore film, robotrippin’ underground masterclass Pop Skull. “This is a pretty weird movie,” he said. “Even though it’s a sequel to You’re Next and The Guest, it’s not going for the same thrills those movies are. It has a lot of that kind of crowd-pleasing moments, but they’re juxtaposed with a lot of darker, more adult themes. It’s also really silly at times, as well.”

Much of that silliness is personified by Dan Stevens (yes, Downton Abbey Dan Stevens) as an albino Nazi scientist war criminal and foot fetishist. This is actually his third collaboration with Wingard. “Even in The Guest, even though he’s playing the villain, he’s beautiful, gorgeous Dan Stevens, and it was becoming too easy for us,” Wingard said. “That’s just him in a nutshell, and so the challenge in this film was, let’s see if Dan can play the most disgusting, deplorable character ever and still somehow find a little bit of charm in there. And maybe it’s just me, but the charm is still there.”

Onslaught’s over-the-top action, combined with a score that channels classic synth rock, shows the Eighties influence, but so does on repeated signature image: the murderous trio of the Cockroach (Dave Campbell), the Cry Baby (Tyler Hall), and the Butcher (former UFC champion Alex Pereira) standing stock still, backlit and silhouetted. They invoke the raw fear of knowing what might happen next, and in those moments Wingard was deliberately paying homage to the work of one of the all-time greats of action and horror, John Carpenter. He said, “When I was pitching to A24, the only image I took in was the poster of The Fog, this backlit image of the ghost pirates and their glowing eyes, and I was like, ‘This is what our killers are.’” 

As he developed the feature, he built an image board that featured another unforgettable visual from a different movie from Carpenter’s filmography: Halloween III: Season of the Witch. “It’s the Men in Black robot guys, and they’re lined up in a row, just standing there in the distance. There was something that imprinted on me of there being something so Carpenter and Eighties of just cutting to someone staring at you from the distance.”

Working to a tighter budget actually allowed Wingard to tighten up on his themes. As the script rubber hit the production road, he was forced to change one major scene. In the filmed version, when the killers arrive at the trailer park they launch a stealthy attack, but in earlier script drafts they smash through at the wheel of a semi. “I was really looking forward to doing that, but it was one of those things where it’s like, well, we’re only going to get one shot at it, and if we don’t get it, it’s going to be a mess. I actually like the direction we went. It makes more sense that the killers show up and it turns into a slasher movie. But I would have loved to drive a huge truck through a trailer. That would have been awesome.”

Of course, a slasher flick is only as good as its killer, and Wingard found that in MMA legend and legit kickboxing hall-of-famer Pereira. As filming was coming to an end, they were taking photos together “and I just jokingly put my head against his fist, to pose with it. And just my head barely touching, somehow his fist and knuckles were the hardest object I had ever felt in my entire life. It was almost like power was emanating from it. You see those guys fighting and they’re just punching the shit out of each other in all kinds of vulnerable places, and I’m like, this guy punched me once, I would literally die.”

At the same time as evoking the classic slasher – albeit with a modern military twist – Barrett and Wingard wanted to make Onslaught feel contemporary. For Wingard, that’s summed up in the unstoppable warriors’ assault on a gas station, which plays on the arbitrary terror of mass shootings. He called that scene “relatable, even if it is unpleasant. … As an adult, it’s one of the final big things that freaks me out. So, I thought that that was important to include in this: OK, we’re going to have this fun slasher movie, but you’ve got to make the stakes real, and you’ve got to plant them in a modern context.”

Onslaught is available on VOD now.

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