Forget a 'Halloween' Rewatch, Dan Stevens' Best Horror Movie Is a Slasher Surprise
Skip your annual Halloween rewatch and check out Adam Wingard's stylish 2014 thriller instead
Earlier this year, Adam Wingard emerged from the Godzilla brand-building exercise known as the MonsterVerse to deliver a raw and raucous blood-soaked slasher. Onslaught wasn't a critical or commercial hit, but it arrived like a heat-seeking missile locked onto a certain type of movie fan who revisits Terminator 2: Judgment Day on a regular basis and watches terrible Halloween sequels for fun. (In other words, it rules.)
Wingard's latest also came with an intriguing caveat that may have been a turnoff for casual theatergoers: Onslaught exists in a shared universe with his previous indie horror flick, The Guest.
Familiarity with The Guest won't have any real impact on your ability to enjoy Onslaught, which is on VOD as of last week. (Dan Stevens plays two very different characters across the two films, and any connections are tenuous at best.) But if you've never seen Wingard's 2014 action thriller, it's still worth checking out as we sprint through our annual Halloween Countdown.
The Guest stars Dan Stevens as David Collins, a U.S. soldier who returns from Afghanistan on a benevolent mission. After his friend Caleb Peterson dies in battle, David arrives at the doorstep of Caleb's grieving family and offers to help out in any way he can. At least, that's what he claims.
David quickly moves into the Peterson home and starts "helping" the various members of Caleb's family. That includes:
- Teaching Caleb's little brother Luke (Brendan Meyer) to fight back against his bullies and gifting the young boy a butterfly knife
- Partying with Caleb's sister Anna (Maika Monroe), having sex with her best friend, and making plans to buy a gun from a local stoner
- Murdering Caleb's father's boss to help him get a promotion at work
Stevens is so charming in the role that, for most of the movie, David gets away with everything. Even the audience will likely be rooting for him… up to a certain point. Eventually it's revealed that (spoiler alert) David isn't who he claims to be.
He's actually an unstable, unstoppable super soldier created by a top-secret government experiment. Even worse, exposing the truth triggers a defensive response where David goes into autopilot and cleans up any loose ends (aka, kills the entire Peterson family and all their friends).
Of course, that's exactly what happens when the military shows up (led by Lance Reddick, no less). David quickly kills the entire squadron of soldiers and the Peterson parents in a stylish shoutout that would make John Wick proud. He then chases Luke and Anna to the high school, where they manage to fight back and defeat him.
In the end, David escapes, setting up a sequel we never really got. (Onslaught is also about government-created super soldiers, but in that movie Stevens plays a Nazi scientist and David is nowhere to be seen, so calling it a direct sequel is a massive stretch.)
Disarming the nuclear family
In an interview with The Moveable Fest, The Guest screenwriter and longtime Wingard collaborator Simon Barrett explained the motivation behind the movie: He wanted to take the concept of the American nuclear family and blow it up. Literally.
"One of the things that excites me the most is to have established a pre-existing dynamic like a nuclear family, then introduce an element that’s disruptive because that all is really interesting to watch," Barrett said. "I love just movies where a stranger comes to town High Plains Drifter-style."
Wingard clearly understood the assignment. Much of The Guest is shot in bright colors against an even brighter New Mexico backdrop that gives the film a stereotypical suburbia vibe. The Peterson home and surrounding neighborhoods are so idyllic at times it's almost painful to look at. Eventually, David punctures that fake reality with brutal violence, but even before the big finale, Wingard finds ways to let the darkness in.
Multiple scenes, including the party David tags along to early in the story, reveal a seedy underbelly to this suburban world. The soundtrack, which Wingard has said was inspired by '90s movies like Mortal Kombat and The Matrix, is a mix of goth rock and electronic music that sends a sordid current pulsing through The Guest. The darkness is already there; it just takes a monster like David to drag it into the daylight.
Onslaught takes the already unsubtle subtext of The Guest and turns it into a picture book. (Side note: I would buy that book. Make it happen, A24!) In Wingard's latest movie, darkness is the norm, an inevitable hurricane of murder and mayhem that captures everyone in its path. Onslaught imagines a world full of Davids where the death of innocent American civilians is just collateral damage in the march towards scientific progress.
In that sense, The Guest plays like a perfect origin story for Onslaught, not for the world or its characters, but for the mad genius filmmakers who brought it to life.