Minor spoilers ahead for Onslaught.
Adam Wingard’s Onslaught channels the rough-edged energy of 1970s grindhouse cinema while retaining the polish of a modern production. The director, known for You’re Next, The Guest and the most recent Godzilla films, has created a science-fiction horror story built around lurid violence, eccentric characters and a deliberately outrageous premise.
Adria Arjona plays a single mother defending her trailer park from three zombified super-soldiers. The creatures are unleashed by Dr Hans Kammler, an evil Nazi scientist played by Dan Stevens. The result sits closer in spirit to exploitation cinema than a conventional studio action film, even though it was produced for A24 and made with a reported budget of $25 million.
Wingard describes the project as a film designed to deliver the pleasures of a B movie with the visual finish associated with contemporary prestige filmmaking. His influences range from Quentin Tarantino and John Carpenter to the large-scale production lessons he gained while directing Godzilla vs. Kong.
1. Tarantino shaped the film’s visual and musical style
Wingard credits Pulp Fiction with inspiring him to become a filmmaker, although he considers Once Upon a Time in Hollywood his favourite Tarantino film. He carried that influence into Onslaught through its heightened colour, exaggerated gore and carefully selected music.
The blood was made an especially vivid red, echoing the cartoon-like violence of Kill Bill. Wingard says the larger influence, however, is Tarantino’s approach to soundtracks. Rather than simply pairing familiar songs with compatible scenes, Tarantino often uses films to introduce audiences to music they may not know.
That principle has guided Wingard’s own work since he watched Pulp Fiction in the 1990s. He says his strongest films begin with a musical idea, with songs helping establish a directing style before the rest of the production takes shape.
2. The soundtrack combines German covers, techno and guitars
Wingard was previously most proud of the soundtrack for The Guest, although one Gesaffelstein track could not be licensed. For Onslaught, he pursued a more unusual idea: Kammler listens to German-language covers of popular songs.
The score by Matthew Pusti adds another layer, blending a driving electronic pulse with techno and guitar. Pusti’s band, Makeup and Vanity, had been a long-time favourite of Wingard’s, and the pair had already worked together on Death Note.
Pusti also contributed music for the video and visual development work on Godzilla vs. Kong. Wingard brought him in to score the film’s previz, but that music did not make it into the finished blockbuster because large productions require more than creative approval; experience and practical considerations also influence the final choice.
One piece did survive in a new form. Music originally written as a possible Mechagodzilla theme appears when the super-soldiers are released inside a training facility. Wingard describes the cue as a dramatic, machine-gun-like rhythmic figure accompanying the opening doors and the soldiers standing behind them.
Most of Pusti’s score was completed before filming. That gave Wingard the opportunity to direct with the music already in mind, much as he had done on earlier horror projects, using the score almost like pre-selected needle drops.
3. Godzilla taught Wingard how to stretch a budget
Wingard says every film teaches him the same fundamental lesson: resources are never unlimited, so every part of a production must work harder. He estimates that Onslaught could have used another $5 million, while a Godzilla film can make an additional $25 million seem like the solution to every problem. That figure, he notes, is the entire budget of Onslaught.
The blockbuster experience did give him an advantage. Wingard recruited editors, colourists, sound designers and other technicians who had worked with him on the Godzilla productions. His aim was to bring that level of behind-the-scenes craft to a much smaller film.
For Wingard, the gap between low-budget and big-budget filmmaking is not simply a question of equipment. He argues that the quality and experience of the technicians have a major effect on the finish of a production, because audiences are often paying for precision rather than technology alone.
The same principle applies to an arcade machine: the visible cabinet is only part of the experience, while controls, display, audio and careful finishing determine how convincing it feels in use.
4. The film connects its horror to Operation Paperclip
Onslaught uses a deliberately extreme premise: American soldiers are transformed into killing machines by a Nazi scientist and released on the people of New Mexico. Beneath that exploitation framework, Wingard draws on the real history of Operation Paperclip, the secret US programme that brought more than 1,600 German scientists and engineers to America after the Second World War.
Those recruits played an important role in helping NASA compete with the Soviet Union during the space race. The film asks what moral cost accompanied that achievement. Kammler is described as “third-generation Operation Paperclip”, extending the programme’s legacy into the story’s fictional conspiracy.
Wingard says he was interested in the possibility that the US government accepted the services of scientists whose crimes or ideology were too troubling to acknowledge. He presents Operation Paperclip as a moment when political leaders chose practical results over moral accountability, linking that decision to later abuses such as MKUltra.
5. Dan Stevens and Rebecca Hall embraced the film’s strangest roles
Dan Stevens has a small but memorable role as Kammler. Stevens previously worked with Wingard on The Guest and appeared in the director’s Godzilla films as a kaiju dentist. Rebecca Hall, another MonsterVerse veteran, has even less screen time as Kammler’s wife, but her early scene establishes an unsettling power dynamic between the couple.
Wingard says the wife’s part was originally little more than a brief farewell before Kammler left for work. Stevens suggested that his character should have a submissive side, which inspired the bizarre scene in which Kammler obeys his wife’s demands to lick and worship her feet. That idea expanded Hall’s role and suggested that she may hold more power than her supposedly influential husband.
The characters’ German heritage and connection to Operation Paperclip also carry disturbing implications. Wingard imagines them as part of a lineage obsessed with ancestry and racial purity, possibly involving generations of inbreeding. Kammler’s unusual appearance, which Wingard compares to Mr Burns, is not meant to indicate old age; he is intended to be a strange, unsettling man.
With its pulp violence, provocative themes and unusual performances, Onslaught aims to feel like a rediscovered exploitation film made with contemporary production values. It releases in Australian cinemas on September 4, 2026, based on the supplied release information.
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