Onslaught
2026
Director-
Adam Wingard
Cast-Adria Arjona, Reginald VelJohnson, Blake Kennedy, Drew
Starkey, Dan Stevens, Michael Biehn, Rebecca Hall, Alex Pereira, Tyler Hall,
Dave Campbell
The trailer
makes the film look like an updated version of the Jean Claude Van Damme film,
Universal Soldier, and plot wise that’s close enough. Onslaught however, takes
the idea of government created super soldiers and moves it out of the realm of the
action film and turns it into a dark slasher. The final girl in the film is Adria
Arjona, who Star Wars fans will know as Bix from Andor.
To sum it
up, a trio of engineered killing machines attack a small town. Why? Because
they’re there.
All horror,
regardless of when its made or where its made, plays on (or preys on) the
anxieties of its audience. Some of these anxieties are universal. Most people
have a fear of the dark so most horror films take place in the dark. Most
people have a fear of death so most horror films feature lots of death.
But some
anxieties are culturally specific to a time or place. Only the Japanese, the
only people to have been atomic bombed, could create Godzilla. The horror of
Universal Monsters disappeared in the 1950s and was replaced with giant atomic mutated
monsters (people were afraid of the new power that had been unleashed) and the
alien invasion film (fear of communism). Zombie movies prey on our fear of
infection and contamination. When someone in a zombie movie is infected and
turned into the walking dead, its playing on our anxieties about HIV, ebola,
Covid, hepatitis or whatever the germ of the day is. You see where I’m going
with this.
In the
post 9/11 post Columbine world of the 21st Century, a new genre of
horror has developed. It has no name but its instantly recognizable. It can
best be described as “bad things happening to people for no reason.” Home
invasion films are a great example of this. Why were these people murdered? Because
they were at home.
In John
Carpenter’s original 1978 Halloween, Michael doesn’t have a reason why he’s
killing everyone. He just is, and that's what makes him scary. There is no meaning to it. And when his mask is
knocked off, he is revealed to be some guy that we’ve never seen before. The
idea that Michael is after Lori Strode because she’s his sister is an idea that
was added after the fact in Halloween 2. But in the original, Michael is just
killing people because he can.
In today’s
world of daily (yes daily) mass shootings anyone is just as likely as anyone
else to get murdered. It’s a roll of the dice. And that’s the anxiety that the
new genre of horror preys on. Horror usually has a kind of instructive morality
attached to it (if you do bad or act stupid you die). In gothic horror, curses
follow families because of some past sin. In 80s slashers, teens would have sex
or do drugs and then get killed. If you go down stairs to check out the strange
noise you will die.
Likewise,
these movies offered the viewer a default sense of safety. If you don’t go to
Crystal Lake, Jason won’t get you. If you don’t read from the magic tome, the
demons won’t get you. But this isn’t in line with the modern world where you or
your children can catch a bullet or shrapnel in a school, church, restaurant, theater
etc.
And this is
the fear that Onslaught preys on. People become murder victims for no reason
other than they were there.
Onslaught also mixes in
another feature of the modern world; military fetishism.
No, I’m not talking about
veneration of the military. Throughout its history (with the sad exception of
Vietnam) Americans have typically respected and honored uniformed service
members. What I’m talking about is the sub-culture fascination with military aesthetic.
People decking themselves out with Punisher skulls, camo, and military grade
fire arms without any concept of duty to their fellow citizens. And since
almost everything that a US infantryman uses (with the exception of truly
automatic weapons) is readily available to civilians, anyone can deck themselves
out with body armor, night vision and an AR with all the attachments.
Think back to the January 6th
riots. How many rioters were wearing gear that 20 years ago you would have only
seen on active duty personnel in a war zone. Think back to the ICE raids
earlier this year. 2 years ago they would have looked like cops. Now they’re
decked out in the same gear as private military contractors.
20 years ago, if you saw
someone walking down the street with an assault rifle, you’d know to run because
something bad was about to happen. Today that might simply be someone
exercising their rights in the most in your face way they can imagine. I
routinely see people in Walmart and the grocery store with hip holsters,
shoulder holsters, etc. You can’t tell who is there to shop and who is there to
murder until they pull their gun.
Onslaught captures this
perfectly by giving us a trio of villains that could easily be special forces
commandos, or members of your local white supremacists group, or maybe just the
DLC skins for a Call of Duty game.
In short, when you can no
longer tell who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, the world gets a
lot more frightening.
Onslaught gives us a strange world
with Nazi scientists, S&M clubs and government conspiracies. But all of
this is the periphery. The main story and horror is that of regular everyday folks
dying brutally at the hands of people they’ve never met for no reason other than
they were there.
The Good- The foley artists deserve an Oscar, for real. You’ve
got the sounds of firearms, bullets hitting flesh, blades hacking away flesh,
chainsaws, crashes, explosions and it all sounds bone crunchingly real.
The Bad- the movie needed another 30 minutes. It teased us
with a strange world lurking outside the main story and we needed more of that.
In summary, mix Michael Myers with Call of Duty and wash it down with some hallucinogens and you’ve got Onslaught.
