Resident Evil Finally Nails The Video Game Horror Adaptation
An Average Joe in Raccoon City.
Despite living in the best era of video game adaptations (not a particularly high bar, considering what’s come before), it feels like we’re yet to get a truly fantastic adaptation of a beloved horror game. The best of the bunch, Christophe Gans’ Silent Hill movie, is still weighed down by flaws, and in the last few years, we’ve had missteps like back-to-back PG-13 Five Nights at Freddy’s movies and an adaptation of Until Dawn that drastically changed the story and plot mechanics.
The problem dates all the way back to Paul W.S. Anderson’s six-film adaptation of the Resident Evil franchise, movies that were financially successful but abandoned the tense, nerve-wracking terror of the original games in favor of Matrix-adjacent sci-fi action. Twenty-four years and two cinematic reboots later, and it finally seems like we’re getting a film interested in replicating the texture and atmosphere that made those first few games so scary (and from Zach Cregger of Barbarian and Weapons fame, no less). After months of waiting, the official teaser dropped earlier today, giving fans their first glimpse at the nightmare Cregger is cooking up in Raccoon City.
The trailer opens with main character Bryan (Cregger’s Weapons collaborator Austin Abrams) entering an abandoned house to call 9-11, then choosing instead to call his girlfriend upon discovering that the emergency line is dead. As he explains the increasingly dire situation he’s stumbled into, we’re greeted with multiple teases of the horrors that await him in Raccoon City: a multi-limbed monstrosity emerging from the house he just left, a hospital room filled to the brim with zombies, a pale, bloated mutation watching him from inside the sewers. As the trailer continues to intensify, the dial-tone sound cue in the background becomes even more chilling, all culminating in an urgent final shot of Bryan running through the Raccoon City streets.
There’s not a whole lot of plot revealed, but the trailer certainly shows off the film’s nonstop approach to escalating terror, which early reports have described as a horror-movie version of Fury Road. More importantly, the trailer has the perfect tone for a Resident Evil movie: bleak, uncanny, isolated, and full of dread. It’s also good to know that the film won’t just derive all its terror from generic walking corpses, but is instead leaning into the biological mutagen aspect of the T-virus. Sure, legions of zombies are scary, but so are the grotesque, Cronenbergian creatures present throughout the series.
And from the looks of it, there will definitely be lots and lots of zombies.
While some fans are sure to be disappointed by the lack of Leon Kennedy or Albert Wesker, a new character has the potential to give audiences a look at the outbreak and resulting destruction of Raccoon City in a way that they’ve never had in the games. Bryan is the protagonist, but he could easily wind up as one of the many bodies strewn about the city, with a tragic note found nearby explaining how he got bitten after making one last call to his girlfriend. Even though he’s not delivering a straightforward adaptation, it seems like Cregger will certainly deliver a pulse-pounding, white-knuckled night of chaos and primal fear that earns the Resident Evil title.
