[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Onslaught.]
The super-soldiers of Onslaught have a position they clearly favor. Repeatedly over the course of the movie, they’re seen standing in a line, observing their prey from a distance before giving each other military hand signals indicating their plan of attack. It almost becomes a running gag; at least once, the soldiers will be shown in the midst of a pursuit or a systematic slaughter, and then they’re next seen when another character spies them neatly lined up, partially enveloped by the nighttime fog. They’re arranged this way in part to underline their resemblance to a later-period ’80s slasher villain, further emphasized when one picks up a chainsaw and makes it his weapon of choice.
In Onslaught, these cues add up to a fun twist on both movie-slasher origins and the framing of the super-soldier archetype—the fearful human product of the military-industrial complex. But while it’s not a slasher sequel, Onslaught does have a predecessor of sorts: 2014’s The Guest, which shares a director (Adam Wingard), screenwriter (Simon Barrett), actor (Dan Stevens), premise (military experiment wreaks havoc), setting (Moriarty, New Mexico), and imagery (a grinning jack-o’-lantern) with the new A24 release. Wingard has confirmed that the movies are indeed set in the same universe. Stevens isn’t playing the same character—he’s been upgraded to mad scientist engineering and overseeing the super-soldiers, rather than the super-soldier antagonist-slash-victim he plays in The Guest—and the new film’s approach is correspondingly different. But viewing these companion pieces in close proximity does reveal the filmmakers’ evolving views on the idea of super-soldiers and military excess.
The two movies are formally connected by the fictional private military contractor KPG (which is also mentioned in passing by a character in Wingard and Barrett’s earlier, more traditional slasher You’re Next). In The Guest, the company is part of a vague description/explanation for the behavior of David (Stevens), a veteran who turns up on a family’s doorstep, claiming to be a friend of the son they lost to the War In Afghanistan. Still reeling with grief, the family invites this seemingly modest, polite young man to stay with them. At first, he seems content to serve as a comforting son/brother figure, all while protesting that he doesn’t want to be too much trouble.
It eventually comes to light that David is the subject of a military medical experiment courtesy of KPG, and that he’s been “programmed to clean up all loose ends” when his identity is compromised during a mission. David isn’t completely inhuman; his self-selected mission in this case really is to help the family of his departed friend. But his KPG-induced “neurological condition” (which presumably also has enhanced his strength and reflexes) complicates his ability to complete it. The movie cleverly crosses aspects of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow Of A Doubt with the cult slasher film The Stepfather and the scenes in Face/Off where a madman turns out to be a surprisingly effective husband and father—it’s no surprise that Wingard was once attached to direct a sequel to the latter film. This pulp material is in turn overlaid with the largely unpopular and more sober-minded soldiers-coming-home-from-Afghanistan subgenre of the ’00s: The Lucky Ones, Stop-Loss, In The Valley Of Elah, and so on.
The Guest is not an airtight psychological portrait of a soldier coming home from war. One major unexplained plot snarl: David has been programmed to protect his identity and initiates a major killing spree when it’s in danger, but the main reason it’s compromised in the first place is a double murder he commits without any real reason when buying a truckload of guns, also without any real reason. But it’s easy enough to chalk that up to whatever we don’t know about his KPG programming, which remains entirely offscreen.
In Onslaught, presumably set at least a decade after The Guest, we get a more extended look inside a KPG facility, with Stevens now playing the neo-Nazi-coded scientist working to perfect a newer form of the experiments from the earlier film. There are no pesky questions about how to square the super-soldiers’ motivations: They’ve been bulked up into remorseless, mostly-masked, hard-to-stop killers. A dark version of Captain America has been optimized into an army of Jason Voorhees.
The thematic through-line between Onslaught and The Guest is that war isn’t necessarily to blame for a soldier’s fragile mental state—the military is. Not that Wingard and Barrett let war off the hook. Rather, the ongoing existence of KPG (which seems to have only grown in budget and ambition) can seemingly be blamed on the military-industrial complex’s never-ending arms race. The escalation can be seen in the movie’s respective climaxes: The Guest concludes in a chintzy school-dance Halloween maze; Onslaught dispenses with the decorations and has its super-soldiers pick up Jason and Leatherface’s favorite tools, making a real-world haunted house out of a small trailer park. David—who gives a thumbs up to his killer as he slumps over and dies (or seems to)—seems positively benevolent compared to the monsters KPG has perfected since he slipped off into the night.
That the military-industrial complex has become a monstrous behemoth designed to perpetuate death and destruction is not exactly a blindingly original observation. (The very term “military-industrial complex” was coined in a warning from Dwight Eisenhower as he departed the presidency.) Yet it’s still a point worth making. Following the super-soldier’s stint as one of many X-Files governmental conspiracies in the ’90s, the concept was reclaimed by big-screen superhero narratives, most prominently good ol’ Cap. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, super-soldiers are only as bad as their bosses brainwash them to be; left to his own moral compass, Steve Rogers is an uncorruptible hero.
Wingard doesn’t offer this version of the super-soldier. Onslaught‘s closest equivalent is the heavily armed Celeste (Adria Arjona), an ex-soldier who is positioned early on as the designated combination of Final Girl and John Rambo. She does prevail, but while she’s more of an action hero than Anna (Maika Monroe) in The Guest, neither Anna nor Celeste are purely defined by their physical prowess. In Onslaught, Celeste’s less Frankensteinian military training can only lend her so much preparedness; her real advantage would have been to get as far away from any military facility as possible. This feels like a particular subversion of expectations, perhaps to the point of anticlimax. The movie’s lack of a knock-down, drag-out fight between the good kind of self-trained super-soldier and the artificially enhanced ones is a little unsatisfying in the moment, but Wingard and Barrett may also be onto something: Maybe a functioning human being shouldn’t be able to out-fight a scientifically engineered super-soldier—and maybe the line between high-octane action and slasher horror is a lot thinner than most movies acknowledge.
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