Director Adam Wingard Explains Why He Left The Godzilla Franchise To Make Onslaught [Exclusive Interview]

So that’s why, to me, that scene … we treat violence very different in the rest of the movie than that one, like you said, because slasher films, it’s like you can have the goriest kills, like “Terrifier” and all that s***. You can make it as splattery and as graphic as possible. As long as it’s in that kind of slashery kind of style, it’s only disturbing in the sense that it’s hard to watch or something, but it doesn’t stick with you.

When it comes to guns and gun violence, it’s instantly much more disturbing because it’s much more relatable. For whatever reason, it just is. So when it came to doing that scene, I didn’t want it to be gratuitous. You actually see a lot less than you think you do in that sequence, of course. But at the end of the day, I wanted the movie to just be stark and real in that moment because I did want it to disturb.

I don’t think that the movie would stand up over time if it was just a fun slasher film, because we’ve seen fun slasher films. They come and go, and sometimes they just mean nothing. Or very little. And so with that scene, at the risk of losing some audience members, we just went for it. That’s why there’s really no music. It’s just the sounds of the guns.

We really went out of our way to make sure that not just the sounds of the gun felt real, we wanted to strip away the sexiness of how movie guns sound. When you’re shooting a real gun in real life, there’s almost more of a power tool feeling to it as opposed to the way it feels like in a movie. But also the space that they’re in, it’s like you want it to sound like it’s really in that space. So the [reverb] of the gunshots need to sound exactly like it’s inside of that building in such a stark way that it’s reality.

But like I said, I mean, the weird thing is the whole time we were shooting it, I was like, “This is going to be one of those scenes where maybe we get into post and we do a test screening and people rebel against it, and we’re going to have to cut it down, or at least fight to keep it in there.”

And honestly, we didn’t really have to change that much. I think I tweaked one thing voluntarily, just maybe one less person getting shot or something like that. But ultimately there just wasn’t enough pushback to do it. So that in itself to me was kind of disturbing. The fact that this wasn’t so upsetting anymore that people will reject the movie. That it was just sort of like they’re disturbed, but not so much that they can’t handle it.