Adam Wingard is opening up about his new film, Onslaught, an action horror movie about an army sniper who’s forced to protect her young daughter from genetically engineered super soldiers who’ve escaped a secret military facility.
In a letter to A24 members titled “Inauspicious Surroundings,” Wingard explained why bringing production back to New Mexico mattered so much to him. It’s the same state where he shot The Guest back in 2013, and returning there for Onslaught carried real weight.
“Where you shoot a film is important,” Wingard wrote. “You may be able to make anywhere look like anywhere, but the atmosphere and the energy of a place come through as well and that can be just as important. For the last decade I’ve been shooting movies out of the country for tax credit reasons, so to be back in America making a VERY American film felt poignant.”
That “decade out of the country” stretch includes some of Wingard’s biggest studio work — Godzilla vs. Kong and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire among them. But Onslaught marks a return to something smaller and more personal.
For Wingard, the project is less about his identity as a filmmaker. “This film is what it’s about for me: a movie that can express why I love cinema and can do it in a very personal way,” he wrote. “Even if my version of personal includes a bunch of super soldiers shooting up a trailer park!”
It’s a return to the genre roots that first put Wingard on the map with films like You’re Next and The Guest, before work on Blair Witch, Death Note, and the Godzilla vs. Kong films took him in a different direction.
The film stars Adria Arjona, Dan Stevens, Eric Wareheim, Reginald VelJohnson, Michael Biehn, Alex Pereira, Drew Starkey, and Rebecca Hall.
Onslaught hits theaters September 4.
