Twelve years after The Guest turned a deliberately hokey premise into a cult classic, Adam Wingard is returning to the same town and the same covert mythology with Onslaught. At the film's San Diego Comic-Con panel last week, Wingard laid out the design. "I saw this film as a completion of a trilogy," he said. "I thought it was You're Next, The Guest, and then Onslaught."
The setup for the new film tracks: Adria Arjona plays Celeste, a former Army sniper living in a desert trailer park who must protect her daughter when three genetically engineered super soldiers called Cockroach, Crybaby, and The Butcher escape from a secret military facility. That facility, Wingard confirmed, runs on the same program that produced David Collins in the 2014 film. "Onslaught takes place in the same town as The Guest," he said at the panel, "and there are thematic through lines to it."
Dan Stevens returns, though not as David. He appears in the second trailer, released today by A24, in old-age makeup playing a scientist with a German accent. Stevens has described the role as allowing him to "play an even more insane character" than his original turn. Written by Wingard's longtime collaborator Simon Barrett, Onslaught also features Rebecca Hall, Drew Starkey, Michael Biehn, Reginald VelJohnson, and UFC champion Alex Pereira as The Butcher.
The film marks Wingard's return to A24 after directing both Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024) for Legendary. A deliberate pivot, by his own account: making the film was a personal creative choice after "making all these big [movies] for so many years." Whether the cult base for The Guest has widened enough to support a September wide release is the open question. Onslaught opens in IMAX on September 4.
