Maika Monroe has built a career as a modern scream queen. After a breakout 2014, when she starred in both It Follows and The Guest, she became a key figure in horror, continuing to revisit the genre in everything from Longlegs to Victorian Psycho. This year, both It Follows and The Guest have been a part of the horror conversation: It Follows just wrapped a sequel, wonderfully titled They Follow, while The Guest just received a quasi-sequel with Onslaught, which director Adam Wingard set in the same continuity as his previous 2014 film.
Monroe notably doesn’t appear in Onslaught (there are no repeat characters), but will she ever return to The Guest universe? In a recent interview for her upcoming film, Victorian Psycho, Monroe sounded hopeful.
“I love Adam so much,” she tells Polygon. “We grabbed coffee not too long ago, and he’s awesome, so I would love to work with him again, so we’ll see.”
The connection between The Guest and Onslaught
The Guest remains one of Wingard’s most beloved films (and this is the guy who directed Godzilla vs. Kong). Written by Simon Barrett and starring Monroe and Dan Stevens, the story follows a charming visitor named David (Stevens) who arrives at the Peterson family home. There, he reveals that he is an army veteran and was a close friend to their son, who died while on tour in Afghanistan. David soon integrates himself into the grieving family, coinciding with strange and violent events taking place in the town. Anna (Monroe), the family’s eldest daughter, begins to grow suspicious of his behavior and past. The Guest marked one of Stevens first freaky roles, an edge that has since become a defining aspect of his career.
Onslaught came out earlier this year and marked a reunion between Wingard and Barrett, who’ve built a long partnership throughout their careers, collaborating on films like A Horrible Way to Die, You’re Next, and the V/H/S franchise.
The film stars Adria Arjona as an army vet with PTSD, who’s forced to defend her community and her daughter against three Terminator-like army experiments who’ve escaped a nearby facility.
Onslaught also features Stevens as Dr. Hans Kammler, an aging German scientist with Nazi ties and the mastermind behind the super-soldiers stalking the protagonist. Wingard confirmed that the events of Onslaught take place near the town that’s featured in The Guest. Both films are a part of his and Barrett’s “KPG-verse,” named after the shadowy organization that runs the super-soldier experiments and appears in several of their projects.
What’s next for the KPG-verse?
Even though Stevens plays different characters in both films, Wingard suggested there might be a connection between them. “I think he’s related to the genesis of the David character in some form [or] fashion, and I think that’s something that maybe we’ll more literally explore hopefully in future installments,” he told The Wrap.
Stevens, for his part, is happy to continue to explore that universe. “We’re definitely open to more KPG-verse. I don’t know whether a Guest 2, per se, is on the cards anytime soon, but you never know,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “We’ve teed everything up for an Onslaught sequel as well, so watch this space.”
Whether we get a sequel to David and Anna’s stories or something new set in the same universe, the door is open. Monroe, Wingard, and Stevens all seem to agree: The world of The Guest is one they’d be happy to return to.