Godzilla Director Reveals the Secret MonsterVerse Easter Egg In His New Action Thriller

I’m pretty sure Adam Wingard built a time machine, traveled to the 1970s, and stole Onslaught from some grimy grindhouse movie studio on the outskirts of Los Angeles. That’s the only way to explain how the director behind indie horror hits You’re Next and The Guest, along with Hollywood’s last two Godzilla movies, emerged from the MonsterVerse to deliver the nastiest sci-fi horror movie of 2026. Onslaught, which tells the the story of a single mom played by Adria Arjona who has to fight off a trio of zombified super-soldiers unleashed on her trailer park by an evil Nazi scientist, feels more at home on your shelf next to Switchblade Sisters and Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS then as part of A24’s summer slate. And I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. The other, more likely explanation is that Wingard has been studying the grindhouse masters and the auteur directors who swam in their murky, mucky wake for a very long time. Onslaught is his tribute to those movies, and his attempt to update the genre for a modern audience. “That's the origin of all this,” Wingard confirms in an interview with Polygon. “We're trying to create something that satisfies in a B movie way, but we're doing it with this modern A24 sheen.” Ahead of Onslaught’s release, I sat down with Wingard to talk about how directors like Quentin Tarantino and John Carpenter influenced his film, what he learned from making blockbuster Godzilla movies that he brought to this $25 million production, and why he thinks America has been doomed since 1945 (more on that in a minute). Check out five highlights from our conversation below. Minor spoilers ahead for Onslaught. 1 How Quentin Tarantino inspired Onslaught Uma Thurman wears a yellow jumpsuit and bears a sword in Kill Bill: Volume 1. It probably doesn't come as a surprise that Wingard is a big fan of Quentin Tarantino's movies. He credits Pulp Fiction with inspiring him to become a director, but says his favorite is Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: "It's the ultimate Tarantino movie." Wingard brought those influences into Onslaught in many ways. He even brightened up the fake blood to resemble the cartoonishly vibrant red fluid in Kill Bill. However, the biggest inspiration is likely Tarantino's iconic soundtracks. "Ever since I saw Pulp Fiction in the '90s, that opened a complete doorway to what I consider exciting about creating a directing style," Wingard says. "All my movies, especially the best ones that I think I've directed, all start with a musical approach. That all starts with Tarantino. I love the way he uses needle drops. For the most part, he's introducing you to songs. He's not just using cool songs that fit that we all know. He's not trying to be populist. In every movie, he's introducing me to things I've never heard. So that's how I try to approach things." Until Onslaught, the movie soundtrack Wingard was most proud of was The Guest. "It's kind of hard to beat how many songs I really love are in that movie," he says. "The only one we couldn't get was a Gesaffelstein track." However, with Onslaught he found a way to top himself by having the movie's Nazi scientist, Dr. Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens), listen to German covers of popular songs. "There ain't going to be another movie this year that's going to be taking that approach," Wingard says. "There's not going to be an accidental overlap of, 'Oh my God, I can't believe we both used the same KISS song!'" 2 How the rest of the soundtrack came together Image: A24 German pop covers aside, Onslaught features a pulsing score by Matthew Pusti that combines John Carpenter-inspired melodies with heavy techno and guitars. For Wingard, this was a partnership that had been in the making for years. "I've always wanted to work with Matt Pusti," the director says. "His band, Makeup and Vanity, has been a big favorite of mine over the years. I used some of his music in another film of mine, Death Note, and that's how we really connected." Wingard even brought Pusti onboard for Godzilla vs. Kong to score the previz version of the movie, but wasn't able use any of that music in the final film. "Everybody loved his music — Warner, Legendary — but when you're doing those movies, it's bigger than just the creativity," the director says. "You've got to have the experience." While most of Onslaught's score is original, Pusti was actually able to salvage one track from Godzilla vs. Kong to use in the new movie. A track originally written as the theme for Mechagodzilla becomes the music we hear when the super-soldiers are first unleashed into a training facility at the start of the film. "There's that really dramatic piece with the doors opening, and they're just standing there," Wingard says. "It's this machine gun kind of 'tutta-tutta-tutta-tutta-tutta-tutta-ta.' That was actually the original concept for how we were going to do the music for MechaGodzilla." Wingard adds that most of the score was composed ahead of time, which allowed him to direct the film with that music already in mind. It's a strategy the director also employed on his earlier horror movies. "I could actually find inspiration even within the scenes, almost like using needle drops." 3 What he learned from Godzilla Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures/Legendary Pictures "Every movie's such a big learning experience," Wingard says, adding that the big lesson he keeps relearning on each new project, regardless of its size, is how to stretch the budget as far as possible. "Every movie somehow is always under-budgeted. Onslaught probably should have had another five million bucks. On a Godzilla film, you go, 'Ah, if we'd only had $25 million more, no problems at all.' And that's the whole budget of this movie!" After working in the blockbuster system, however, the one thing Wingard wanted to do was bring that same level of high-quality behind-the-scenes craftsmanship to Onslaught. He was able to convince some of the professionals he worked with on those Godzilla movies — editors, colorists, sound designers, etc — to come "slum it with me for a little bit." "At the end of the day, that's the difference between low-budget and big-budget," Wingard says. "It's the quality of people working on it. Not to say there's not quality people in the low-budget world, but you're paying for the level of perfection that you get, and that's really more about the technician than it is the tech." 4 What is Onslaught saying about America? Image: A24 Onslaught is not a subtle movie. It's the story of U.S. soldiers turned into unstoppable killing machines by a Nazi scientist and unleashed on the citizens of New Mexico to see what they are capable of. For Wingard, it was important to anchor that premise in the real-world history of Operation Paperclip, the top-secret U.S. intelligence program that quietly transported more than 1,600 German scientists and engineers to America after World War II. Those scientists played a critical role in helping NASA win the space race against Soviet Russia, but at what cost? In the movie, Dr. Kammler is revealed to be "third-generation Operation Paperclip," and that connection to real-life history was always an important part of Onslaught's story. "I looked at the history of our government and the way we interfaced with the Nazi scientists at the end of World War II and how they kind of infected the bloodstream of America," Wingard says. "The thing that fascinated me is: We know about the best of the Nazi scientists, but there's got to be some that are so bad that we can't even admit we're using them." But beyond that one very evil Nazi, Wingard theorizes that Operation Paperclip was the beginning of the end for the great American experiment. "I always felt like that was the turning point for America, where we kind of made a pact with the devil," he says. "America's always been a little fucked up, but that was where we decided a means to an end was more necessary. That's where we turned on ourselves. If it wasn't for Operation Paperclip, I don't think mind control programs like MKUltra would have happened. We basically took all that from the Nazis." 5 How he got Dan Stevens and Rebecca Hall to play two very ridiculous roles Image: Daniel McFadden/Warner Bros./Everett Collection Stevens, who stars in The Guest and plays a supporting part in Wingard's Godzilla films as a kaiju dentist, has a small but impactful role in Onslaught as the scientist behind the super-soldiers. His wife (fellow MonsterVerse veteran Rebecca Hall) has even less screen time, but leaves a serious impression after she orders her husband to lick and worship her feet in one of the movie's opening scenes. Wingard credits both of them with elevating what could have been far less memorable performances. He also reveals that it was Stevens who came up with the whole submissive husband idea, which is what cracked the entire scene wide open: "Before we cast Rebecca, the part was actually much smaller, almost nothing. That's why we didn't initially write it for her. It was just one scene. She was Dan Stevens' character's wife, and she said goodbye before he went to work. When Dan read the script, he was like, 'Okay, I'm on board with this. I like it, but I just gotta say, I don't know what it is, but I think there should be something kind of submissive about Kammler.' As soon as he said that, the foot-licking scene popped into my head, and I was like, 'I got you.' I knew exactly what it was. That instantly made the wife character more important. And then we started thinking, 'Well, who is this woman who has power over this extremely powerful guy?' And then we started thinking maybe she's actually the one secretly running things." The freaky dynamic between Stevens and Hall's characters may also be hiding some disturbing subtext that Onslaught never explicitly spells out, but only reinforces the movie's status as a modern, grindhouse cult classic. "She's German as well, and like I said, they're coming from an Operation Paperclip lineage," Wingard explains. "They're so obsessed with their ancestry that they're maybe even inbreeding. Dan's character, even though he looks like Mr. Burns or something, he's actually not supposed to be old. He's just supposed to be some kind of weird, fucked-up dude. In my mind, he's coming from a long line of people who think their blood is so pure that they're inbreeding." Like I said, Onslaught feels like a forgotten relic from a much nastier era of American cinema (albeit with the polish of a modern Hollywood blockbuster), but I'm extremely grateful it exists today. Onslaught releases in theaters on September 4.