Adam Wingard has been sitting on a secret. His upcoming film Onslaught is a spiritual sequel to The Guest, the 2014 cult favorite that made Wingard a name worth watching for a lot of us who'd been following him since the V/H/S days.

The big news, according to MSN, is that Dan Stevens is back. Stevens played David, the charming and deeply unsettling ex-soldier who shows up at a grieving family's door claiming to have served with their late son. What followed was one of the tightest, weirdest genre films of the 2010s, equal parts slasher and military thriller with a synth soundtrack that still holds up. If you haven't seen it, fix that.

What we don't know yet is exactly how Stevens returns. The ending of The Guest left little room for a comeback, but genre films find creative workarounds. And Wingard going back to his indie roots feels like a reset, the kind of thing a filmmaker does when they want to have fun again.

What we do know about Onslaught is that it takes place in the same town and the same universe as The Guest, with the story digging into secret government programs connected to the covert experimentation that created David. So this isn't a cameo or a wink at the audience. Wingard is building out the mythology around what made David the way he was, which is the most exciting direction a spiritual sequel could take.

The V/H/S connection matters here too. Wingard's work on that original anthology helped put him on the map, and The Guest always felt to me like the sharpest version of the energy he brought to those earlier projects. Getting him back in that sandbox with Stevens is the kind of reunion I didn't know I was waiting for.

No release window yet, but the fact that Wingard earned the trust to sneak a spiritual sequel through the back door of a new project tells you the studios know what they have. I'll be first in line.