There is something mythic about a climactic moment only teased in the Onslaught trailers and marketing. A mother, wounded, bloodied, and defiantly badass stands with a chainsaw-in-hand and an eyepatch-on-face against an otherworldly, demonic force with glowing eyes and heavy weaponry. The tableau might be worthy of a John Trumbull painting—or at least a John Carpenter poster.That is of course by design for director Adam Wingard who counts the filmmaker behind The Thing, They Live, and so many other cult classics among his foundational influences—when he was a boy he even told his mother his favorite movie was Big Trouble in Little China. Yet there’s something deafeningly modern about this spooky moment in Onslaught. After all, his boogeyman-shaped villain is not a serial killer with a knife, but a veteran with an assault rifle. And his Final Girl opponent is likewise a woman who served and now endures a complicated memory of her time in America’s ever-multiplying Forever Wars. That distinctly American tension between admiring service and the horrifying war wounds they leave behind in the 21st century has been a fixation for Wingard, whose Onslaught marks the second genre movie that marries American patriotism with the trappings of horror. The other is 2014’s cult classic The Guest.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});“It’s funny, I’m scared and distrustful of the government and the military industrial complex, but I have a lot of respect for veterans and people who serve, so it’s a complex situation,” Wingard observes when we catch up on the eve of his A24 release. “That’s the reason why I’m attracted to that world, because I’m torn in many directions.”Indeed, the Tennessee-boring filmmaker grew up in a world he’s essayed through multiple genre films, be it the neglected military families of Onslaught and The Guest, or the survivalist twist on slasher fun in 2011’s breakout horror-comedy, You’re Next.“I have a lot of friends who served, and one of them, my friend Caleb, is in the movie,” Wingard reveals. “He was actually in the Air Force and served in Iraq. He went over there during the invasion, and he’s in a couple of sequences in the movie.” Most intriguing still is his cameo in the film’s opening credits sequence, which is designed to tell the saga of another fixation for Wingard: American conspiracy theories. The title cards set up the movie’s pulpy premise of Nazi scientists and their super soldiers, but it notably includes an image that is not paranoid fiction; it’s Wingard’s childhood buddy sitting on Saddam Hussein’s throne holding an M16 in his mouth.“I reached out to Caleb, and I was like, ‘Hey, when you were in Iraq, did you have any photos that might be interesting for me to take a look at for this?’” the co-writer recalls. When Caleb described the image, Wingard begged, “Please send that over!”The filmmaker is playing with the more sensational and pulpy aspects of military mythology, but the aforementioned empathy for those who serve remains centered and even hallowed in the film. Wingard muses the lurid genre approach to a sensitive topic is a bit like a spoonful of sugar with your medicine, and a still welcome departure when compared to all the Iraq and Afghanistan movies around the late 2000s, which Wingard suspects “nobody really gave a shit about because they were just so depressing.” Nonetheless, he wants his movie to be a good time: “This movie deals with a lot of serious things but ultimately doesn’t take itself too seriously. If you see something in it that you know resonates with you, I think it is in there, and if you just want to have a good time, then fuck it, it works there too.”Someone for whom it works on all levels with is Adria Arjona, the American actress who dominates the screen as a former soldier living with PTSD in a nigh abandoned trailer park alongside other vets. They will all have to make a stand together, too, when the aforementioned Nazi-engineered super soldiers come calling.Likely best known right now for being the rebel with a touch of tragedy in the Star Wars series Andor, as well as one half of the sizzling rom-com team opposite Glen Powell in Hit Man, Arjona moves smoothly into the Final Girl role, coloring the characterization with Ellen Ripley or Sarah Connor shadings of grit. For the half-Puerto Rican performer it was a personal thing as well.“I was trained by two vets. I did a lot of research on my own, but my uncle’s also a marine, so I spoke a lot to him,” Arjona reveals. “I focused a lot on training and doing as much research to pay tribute as I possibly could.” The prep work even brought her closer to her family, although she laughs heartily when asked about the best piece of advice her uncle gave her.“I don’t know if I could share it, he’d kill me,” she muses. Finally she allows, “He really emphasizes how real and how abandoned he felt, and that loneliness that he felt coming back kind of stayed with him. I didn’t know that side of my uncle. My uncle to me is such a happy dude and so fun, and he loves ballroom dancing now, and I just think he’s the coolest. So I got to meet my uncle in a different way because of the stories that he shared and the reality that happens behind closed doors.”Michael Myers Timestamped in the 21st CenturyThe reality that informs the fantasy is there but in its bones Onslaught is always intended to echo the Carpenter-infused mix of fun and dread that makes simple stories like Michael Myers hunting babysitters with a knife in Halloween so iconic. Admittedly though, the idea of what a boogeyman might be today has shifted.“I saw these killers as being like a Michael Myers-type thing, but I wanted to see those slasher concepts run through the filter of military,” Wingard explains. “I’d not really seen that before, and what’s interesting about that is when you have violence in a slasher film, somebody can be getting killed in the most elaborate way possible with some sort of sharp weapon, a butcher’s knife or a chainsaw, and audiences are weirdly going to have fun watching that. But when you put guns into the mix, it becomes more disturbing.”In fact, the one genuinely terrifying moment in Onslaught doesn’t resemble an ‘80s B-movie at all. Instead modern real-world horror comes into focus when the three traumatized killing machines set their sights on a busy Friday night at a truck stop.“Even though this is a really fun movie, I wanted to have that one serious moment where it makes you think about the reality we live in,” Wingard says, “and I wanted this movie to be the kind of thing where 30 years from now, you look back and it feels like it has a timestamp in the moment it was created, because I think that’s what all good horror films do in their own way. To me, the massacre sequence is kind of my biggest fear, this fear of a thing happening.”It certainly captures America circa 2026, but that makes the ending so much more satisfying where Arjona’s Celeste and her tormenters alike are deliberately separated from their arsenals—she is a vet—and must meet on a literal field of combat in the old-fashioned way: chainsaws at daawn!“I love the choice that Adam made early on in the movie where I don’t get to my arsenal,” says Arjona. “You see it, and you’re like, ‘Oh, man, this woman is equipped for everything, and the fact that I don’t make it back there was such a brilliant choice.”It gets back to those influences that are at the heart of a kid who once cited Big Trouble in Little China his favorite film, and even today freely admits that Onslaught begins with Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 and then tries to out-gonzo the faux-documentarian “true story” vibe of tough guys and gals under siege.“From the beginning, I always called this an A + B movie,” explains Wingard, “and what I mean by that is I wanted it to deliver on all the levels that you want a B-movie to deliver on, but in a slick A+ package with all the references and experiences I’ve had as a filmmaker over the years making big movies.”While selling the film to indie distributors, he even brought a high-resolution photo of the ghouls in another Carpenter cult darling, The Fog.Says Wingard, “When I went to A24 to pitch the film—I basically had a meeting with them before I gave them the script because I wanted to set the stage—the one image I brought was this famous cover art of The Fog where it’s just the silhouettes of the ghost pirates, and their eyes are glowing and they’re just standing against a fog bank. I was like that’s what we’re gonna do with these killers.”It’s something almost classically spooky in a reconfigured, modern context—and it looks downright cool when finally juxtaposed in a chainsaw duel.Onslaught is in theaters Friday, Sept. 4.The post Onslaught’s Adam Wingard Wants Michael Myers ‘Run Through a Military Filter’ appeared first on Den of Geek.