Minor spoilers ahead for Onslaught.
The summer months are behind us, and for many moviegoers that means Spooky Season is here, and it's time to watch lots of scary movies. Luckily a new horror movie arrived this weekend to kick things off: Adam Wingard's Onslaught. The movie is a violent blast, and I had to ask the director about that running gag with a barbecued corpse. He told me how he made that happen, and one regret he still has about the recurring shot.
Onslaught stars future Man of Tomorrow actress Adria Arjona who plays a former army sniper named Celeste. When zombie-like super soldiers escape from a nearby military base, she must defend the trailer park she lives in and keep her and her young daughter alive. There's a high body count of fatalities in the new A24 movie, including one resident who dies while at his barbecue, with his corpse shown burning away multiple times throughout its 92-minute runtime. As you can see in the video above I asked Wingard about how that came together, and he said:
You know, it's funny. The special effects team had a very clever rig, for that. Where they basically had almost like kind of like a metal exoskeleton and we just dressed it. And literally you could just turn it on and just burn it all night long if you wanted, you know?
Honestly, my mind is blown. It really looked like there was someone burning alive throughout Onslaught, and I assumed a stunt person was responsible. But in reality it was more like a super gross outdoor heater, one that was in shape of a dead body. Many of the best horror movies have technical achievements, and this clever bit of moviemaking is no exception.
As audiences watch Adria Arjona's final girl personally take out the three super soldiers who are stalking her home, we are regularly treated to new shots of the barbecued corpse deteriorating. It was a great running gag in Onslaught, but Adam Wingard told me about a regret he had, namely:
I have one regret, which is I never got a closeup of the guy's, like, skin sizzling, you know? Uh, you always see it a little bit from a distance.
Talk about a missed opportunity. Sine they could turn the rig on and off so easily, I would have at least tried to make a s'more or two during those long hours on set. But even if Wingard didn't get his shot of the victim's flesh melting, all of those sequences featuring the burned up dead body were helpful in establishing the movie's timeline, as well as adding some moments of levity to the bloody new movie.
Onslaught is in theaters now as part of the 2026 movie release list. The film's ending left things open for a potential sequel, so we'll have to see if Arjona's Celeste gets to kick more ass in a future project. Fingers crossed.
