If you’ve seen practically any of his movies, it will probably not come as a huge surprise to you that writer-director Adam Wingard is a dyed-in-the-wool John Carpenter fan. But what might come as a bit more of a surprise is precisely what classic Carpenter joint is severing as a strong influence on Wingard’s newest film. For the new movie Onslaught, one of Wingard has confirmed that one of his biggest sources of inspiration from the get-go was none other than John Carpenter’s The Fog.
After years spent away in the land of big-budget blockbusters, Onslaught is Wingard’s return to his bread-and-butter, gnarly horror thrillers. The director shepherded some modern classics of the genre, including You’re Next and The Guest prior to being tapped to direct a pair of Gozilla vs. Kong movies. Even those MonsterVerse movies (Godzilla vs. Kong and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, specifically) saw Wingard bringing his own distinctly pulpy and genre-indebted sensibilities to the blockbuster space, but now, Onslaught sees him fully letting his freak flag fly once more.
And according to a new interview while doing press for Onslaught, the long-haired, bearded, and very Alan Moore-esque Wingard confirmed that Carpenter’s The Fog was a critical influence on this new film from the start. “The Fog was another big inspiration… just the iconography within it. You know, like when I went to A24 to pitch the film, I wanted to set the stage, you know, because sometimes you read a script, especially one like this, and you know, you don’t really know what the tone is. The one image I brought was the famous cover art of The Fog, where it’s just like the silhouettes of the guys, the ghost pirates, and their eyes are glowing… And I was like, ‘That’s what we’re going to do with these killers.’”
If you’re unfamiliar with John Carpenter’s The Fog, you should do everything in your power to rectify that as soon as possible. It is an absolutely incredible gem of a horror film that has earned ardent praise from the likes of Robert Rodriguez and Guillermo del Toro in recent years, despite the fact that many do not include it among discussions of Carpenter’s best work. The film is about the town of Antonio Bay, which it turns out was only established a century earlier thanks to some blood money gotten by allowing a whole crew of lepers to die gruesome deaths on the shore. Those lepers return on the anniversary as the aforementioned ‘ghost pirates’ and wreak all kinds of Carpenter-helmed havoc, and it absolutely rules.
So to hear that Wingard is pulling inspiration from this often underappreciated Carpenter gem is delightful, and only makes me that much more excited to see Onslaught as big and loud as humanly possible.
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