Naman Shrestha
With Adam Wingard at the helm, ‘Onslaught’ is an action mystery thriller movie that revolves around an Army sniper named Celeste who lives in the Windy Oasis trailer park in a peaceful desert area with her young daughter. Raising her daughter as a single mother, Celeste also frequently struggles with PTSD from her time in the Army. Far away, three genetically engineered super soldiers break loose from a secret military facility and kill everyone in their way.
When the trio of terrifying soldiers, led by a silent yet destructive figure called “The Butcher,” reaches the desert trailer park, Celeste must tap into her lethal combat skills and join forces with her neighbors — a local drunk cop named Kovacks and a fellow Army veteran named Josiah — to protect her young daughter and others. Featuring Adria Arjona, Dan Stevens, Eric Wareheim, Reginald VelJohnson, Michael Biehn, and Rebecca Hall, the horror drama movie is mainly set in the fictional Windy Oasis trailer park, where its arid landscape heightens the overall tension and reflects the trauma associated with Celeste’s time in the military.
Onslaught Filming Locations
Production on ‘Onslaught’ was conducted in New Mexico, specifically in Albuquerque. According to reports, principal photography for the Adria Arjona starrer got underway in November 2024 and continued for a couple of months before wrapping in January 2025. Oren Soffer, the Director of Photography, described it as “one of the most incredibly rewarding experiences” of his professional career. He added, “I owe that entirely thanks to the most incredible local crew in New Mexico; truly some of the finest folks I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet and work with. This post is to highlight and thank as many of them as I can for their incredible hard work and dedication to this film.”
Albuquerque, New Mexico
The city of Albuquerque and its surrounding areas served as the primary production locations for ‘Onslaught.’ The production designer, Tom Hammock, and his team built the fictional Windy Oasis trailer park from the ground up in the middle of a real desert, a few miles outside Albuquerque. They also strategically planned and positioned the exact number of trailers on the set so the makers could maintain full control during shooting. The cinematographer, Oren Soffer, surrounded the trailers with four condors, each carrying an Elation Proteus Maximus moving light. The constructed trailer park was also fitted with Astera NYX bulbs and practical bulbs to match the color temperatures the filmmaker wanted for each frame.
During a conversation with Cinematography World, the DOP Soffer revealed that they had to place “every single practical light that’s on the outside of every trailer, as well as every lamp throughout the entire trailer park. That was probably the heaviest lift throughout prep and the process lasted the entire eight weeks, right up until the day before we started shooting, because the first day of the of the shoot was at the trailer park. In fact, our first couple of days were day exteriors and we were still placing practical lamps because we hadn’t gotten into the night work yet, and we still needed a little bit more time.” However, he claimed that dealing with the natural elements was the biggest challenge they faced during the shoot.
He exaplained, “We were filming in winter in the high desert, it was very windy and dusty, and the nights were particularly cold. But we got lucky because it never rained or snowed. It did snow in the final week of prep, and our entire set got covered in snow, but thankfully it melted by the time we started filming.” The final climactic scene between Celeste and the antagonist was shot on two of the coldest nights of the entire shoot. “We averaged 50 setups on both of those nights, and we were just getting so many shots and probably one or two takes of each stunt, and once it was completed, we would quickly move on to the next shot. It was kind of a marathon to gather all the pieces in such a short amount of time, but in the end, it all edited together beautifully,” the DOP added.
For Adria Arjona, one of the hardest scenes she was involved in was the shot of her character spinning the cylinder of a handgun in front of her arsenal. She had to perfect it in about three takes. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she shared, “On the first take, the entire armory fell on top of me. It was a trailer packed with so many people. If somebody moves, everything moves. Adam probably still has the footage. We were like, ‘F**k! S**t! Put it back.’ We then had time for one last shot, and (prop master/armorer) Brett (Andrews) was like, ‘Breathe, focus, you got it.’ And that’s the take that’s in the trailer.” As per reports, the filming unit also set up camp at several practical locations in the Albuquerque area to tape multiple key portions.
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