During the slasher boom of the late ‘70s and especially the early ‘80s, the omnipresent, all-powerful killer was a near-universal concept. Whereas earlier proto-slashers, such as Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Bob Clark’s Black Christmas featuring achingly human, fallible people as their central killers, things began to shift after the release of John Carpenter’s iconic Halloween in 1978. That film posited that Michael Myers was not simply a man but rather (as Donald Pleasance’s character of Dr. Loomis waxes about to no end) the embodiment of evil itself. As such, nothing could stop Michael, not knives, guns, or learning how to operate a motor vehicle on-the-fly.
This worked incredibly well in Halloween and began to be carried over into not only Halloween sequels but also subsequent slasher franchises, such as Friday the 13th. The result was that characters like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees became these unstoppable, super strong, and unkillable characters, more akin to classic movie monsters like Dracula than they were actual people. But it was in looking at the evolution of these characters and the ways in which they function within their respective stories that filmmaker Adam Wingard found inspiration for his own new slasher film, Onslaught.
Onslaught is about a slew of super-soldiers being unleashed on a quiet, unsuspecting town. In this way, the film is something of a playful blend of caricatured conceits that Wingard has dabbled in before, between a subversive take on slasher antagonists (as seen in You’re Next) and a pulpy look at super-soldier programs (as seen in The Guest.) But for the ways in which this film specifically blends the two together, Wingard was seeking to recontextualize the iconic tropes of the ‘80s slasher in a bold new way.
As Wingard explains, “I saw these killers as being sort of like a Michael Myers type thing, but like, I wanted to see those kind of slashers' kinds of concepts run through the filer of military. Even though it’s a simple idea, I was kind of surprised; I’ve not really seen that before.”
In this way, Onslaught allows Wingard to play in a number of his favorite sandboxes simultaneously. He is indulging in pure genre filmmaking instincts, after spending years away from outright horror to make a couple of Godzilla vs. Kong films, and is getting to metatextually sew this story into the legacy of horror as a whole. Even from his earliest days as an independent filmmaker, Wingard has demonstrated a real aptitude for taking the tropes of the past and blending them into modern works in interesting ways. Hell, you could even see him doing this Godzilla vs. Kong, which took the franchise to gonzo new heights in terms of embracing the classic versions of those characters and the elements that surround them.
So it sounds like Onslaught is going to be a full-on, brute-force Adam Wingard film, in that it sees the director tackling fresh material with all of his favorite tools readily available to him, and that sounds awesome to me.
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