AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The gory, shoot-'em-up movie "Onslaught" starts quietly - in the middle of the New Mexico desert with a secret facility, a third-generation Nazi and a murderous plan.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ONSLAUGHT")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As characters) What you are witnessing here is the human equivalent of a heat-seeking missile.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As characters) We set out to create an ideal combatant...
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL JINGLING)
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) ...To be deployed against the domestic populace.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RASCOE: But Iraq war veteran Celeste is on to them.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ONSLAUGHT")
ADRIA ARJONA: (As Celeste) This is the second time that Black Hawk has gone over us today. They're up to something in the desert north of here.
(SOUNDBITE OF HELICOPTER WHIRRING)
ARJONA: (As Celeste) Kind of secret base.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RASCOE: So when a trio of super soldiers breaks out of their military installation and invades her trailer park, she's ready to fight back, her young daughter in tow. Adam Wingard is "Onslaught's" director.
ADAM WINGARD: This film is literally very much about my deep interest in the era after World War II, where we brought a lot of the Nazi scientists over to work for us with Operation Paperclip, is the name of it. I've just always been fascinated about the fact that it's like - this was, like, sort of the moment that America's bloodstream was sort of infected. You know, obviously, there's a lot of the scientists that we brought over, like Wernher von Braun and those guys that are well known. But then there's a lot of the Nazis that, you know, we just couldn't whitewash entirely because their crimes were too big, but we probably still wanted to work with them.
And one of the most notorious is a guy named Hans Kammler, which Dan Stevens plays a sort of third-generation descendant of Hans Kammler is what we're playing. So this movie was almost sort of an imagining of, like, OK, let's say we did bring Hans Kammler. We kept him from the public, and - but he's been working behind the scenes. And what are these guys, many years after World War II - what have they been up to, basically? And super soldiers is the (laughter) - the answer that we came up with (laughter).
RASCOE: Well, so you have that happening on one side. Then you have the civilian population, but some of them are veterans, and the main character is played by Adria Arjona. She's the star of the movie, and she's playing this mother that's protecting her child from the attack of these super soldiers. Did becoming a parent yourself help you think about Adria's character as a mother?
WINGARD: Yeah, I mean, definitely. I mean, the genesis of this film really started with me being a parent. The film I did prior, "Godzilla X Kong" - I was in Australia in pre-production, and I found out that my partner was pregnant in the early phase of production. And, you know, I felt completely unprepared for it, to be honest with you. It was something that kind of was unexpected. And so juggling a $150 million movie at the same time as preparing to be a father - I mean, my daughter ended up being born pretty much right when I got back from shooting.
You know, I've also been in the studio world for the last 10 years. You know, I come from a very low-budget, indie background, and I worked my way up over the years. And it's been great being able to tackle, like, the biggest blockbuster budgets and all those kind of things. But there's a price you pay creatively for that sometimes that you're a little limited in terms of how far you can go in certain directions.
And so juggling that with being a parent, I think I sat down, and I thought, after this "Godzilla" movie is over, I really want to do something that represents myself stylistically, and I knew right out the gate that I wanted that story to be somehow centralized around a parent figure, maybe a slightly dysfunctional parent, you know, which is maybe how I saw myself then.
But ultimately, when you have a kid, it completely unlocks all these new fears. So I hadn't really made a horror movie in a while. And I think part of the reason was - is because nothing really scared me. It was sort of, like, having a kid was sort of, like, oh, now I'm scared. It's not for me. It's for her.
RASCOE: You know, this movie is really kind of more in the B movie tradition. What did those types of movies mean to you as a budding filmmaker? And, like, were there any in particular that you were drawing from for this?
WINGARD: Yeah, I mean, all roads from me lead back to John Carpenter. I mean, like, the very first time I remember my mom asking me, like, what was my favorite movie when I was a little kid? - it was "Big Trouble In Little China." And something about his style just, like - I don't know, it just hits me at my core.
And so, you know, this film really is kind of a love letter to his movies, him and James Cameron, I should say, you know, because between the two of them with "Halloween," "Terminator" and all the movies in between, it's, like, sort of - I feel like it kind of made me who I am as a filmmaker. And so this movie's sort of, like, pulling on those kind of things. And it is a B- movie, you know, like, at least in the sense that it delivers on everything you want a B movie to deliver on, but it's doing it in this sort of A-plus way.
RASCOE: What was it like, you know, shooting, like, all that the gore? Like, was that fun, doing that - kind of the practical effects and stuff like that?
WINGARD: Well, it's funny 'cause, like, I'm, you know, known as a horror filmmaker. A lot of my early movies were horror films. And the funny thing about me is that I actually really hate fake blood. I think it smells horrible. The special effects team - they shot some B-roll stuff of blood spraying from a body at one point, and the armorer, Brett (ph), was standing in for one of the killers with the chainsaw. And they were doing all these takes, and he was wearing shorts, and when the blood would spray up at him, he'd come back and show me the footage, and I'd be like, oh, yeah, can we do it again? You know, and he'd kind of look at me like, are you kidding?
RASCOE: (Laughter) Yeah.
WINGARD: And it turns out that the blood was spraying directly up his shorts.
RASCOE: Oh.
WINGARD: And he wasn't wearing any underwear.
RASCOE: Oh, my goodness.
WINGARD: And so he was coated...
(LAUGHTER)
WINGARD: ...In a very uncomfortable, sticky way for the rest of the night. But he really took one for the team.
RASCOE: (LAUGHTER) Well, you know, the concept of the super soldier itself is common. It's something that it seems like we come back to over and over again in pop culture. Why do you think we're so drawn to that idea?
WINGARD: This is well-tread territory, and, you know, that's why, to me, taking the concept of a super soldier and mixing it with sort of a slasher kind of "Halloween," Jason Voorhees-type thing was sort of a fun approach. It's like, it's simple, but it's interesting that it's never been done before.
I had an interesting kind of epiphanies during this film. And, you know, like, whenever you're doing slasher scenes with characters who have big butcher knives or, you know, a chainsaw, you can go really hard violently, and you can, you know, have buckets of blood spraying everywhere. And people still know how to engage with that and have fun with it. There's something about it, that it's so over the top that it's distancing. And I think there's so many tropes that exist that we're familiar with over the years that we're kind of desensitized to that.
But it's interesting how the gun violence is so much more upsetting. You know, I wanted this movie to kind of address that in a way, and I wanted this film to feel sort of like a timestamp of the reality that we live in now. And, you know, I think gun violence is the thing at the end of the day that scares me the most in the world - mass shootings and the concept of that unpredictability. Even though this is a fun movie, it's like, you know, there is a lot of, like, serious underlining things going on within it. But at the end of the day, you can also just turn your brain off, and like I said, you know, it's there to satisfy in all those B movie ways.
RASCOE: That's Adam Wingard. He directed the new movie "Onslaught," in theaters now. Thank you so much for being with us.
WINGARD: Thank you. It's a pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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