Dan Stevens Reveals the Disturbingly Real History Behind His ‘Onslaught’ Villain

Adam Wingard has built an entire career on smuggling real conspiracy theories and declassified government programs into his most over-the-top genre movies, and his latest collaboration with longtime creative partner Dan Stevens continues that pattern in full force. ‘Onslaught,’ which hit theaters September 4 through A24, follows a former Army sniper turned single mother named Celeste, played by Adria Arjona, as she’s forced to defend her daughter and trailer park community against a trio of genetically engineered super soldiers.

Stevens’ involvement in the project marks a notable shift from the role that first made his partnership with Wingard so memorable. Back in 2014, he played David Collins, an unhinged, government-engineered super soldier, in Wingard’s cult favorite ‘The Guest.’ Rather than reprising that character outright, Stevens instead plays the scientist responsible for creating an entirely new generation of similarly weaponized killers.

That character, Dr. Hans Kammler, draws directly from a very real and unsettling piece of American history. Stevens has confirmed that Kammler’s backstory ties into Operation Paperclip, the real-life secret intelligence program that brought Nazi scientists and engineers into the United States following World War II, with his character positioned as a third-generation descendant of that legacy.

Speaking about how deeply that history shapes the role, Stevens has explained that Kammler represents a central piece of the broader fictional world Wingard set out to build, tying directly into the layered conspiracy mythology and overarching theory the director has been developing across his recent films. It’s a connection Stevens seems genuinely invested in, treating the character less as a throwaway villain and more as a load-bearing piece of the story’s larger design.

That larger design now spans three films. Wingard has confirmed ‘Onslaught’ completes a loose trilogy that began with 2011’s ‘You’re Next’ and continued through ‘The Guest,’ with ‘Onslaught’ taking place in the same small town and sharing thematic connections about covert government programs producing weapons that eventually spiral out of their creators’ control.

Kammler’s name isn’t a coincidence, either. The character shares his surname with a real SS-Obergruppenführer who oversaw the construction of Auschwitz and directed the forced-labor program behind Nazi Germany’s V-2 rocket program, a grim historical detail that adds extra weight to the film’s fictional framing of Operation Paperclip as an ongoing, still-active conspiracy.

According to Wingard, the character was written specifically with Stevens in mind from the start, largely because Stevens had previously starred in a German-language film and could bring an authentic feel to the role’s accent and background. Alongside Rebecca Hall, who plays Kammler’s wife and handler Hanna, Stevens leans fully into the character’s theatrical menace throughout the film’s bunker-set experiments.

Critical reaction to ‘Onslaught’ has been largely positive, with the film currently sitting at 73% on Rotten Tomatoes, though some reviews have noted that the movie’s political and historical window dressing gets somewhat abandoned once its super-soldier action sequences take over. Even so, several critics have singled out Stevens’ committed, scenery-chewing performance as one of the film’s most memorable elements, regardless of how much screen time the conspiracy plotline ultimately receives.

For fans who’ve followed Wingard and Stevens since ‘The Guest,’ watching Stevens flip from the created weapon to the man doing the creating adds an extra layer of dark irony to the whole affair. It’s a reminder that even in a movie built around bloody chainsaw kills and desert shootouts, Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett clearly wanted their villain’s backstory to carry some real historical weight.

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