After two of the most celebrated horror films in recent years, most filmmakers would wait for the big franchises to come calling. Zach Cregger did the opposite. Fresh off Barbarian and Weapons, he went directly to the rights owners for Resident Evil, pitched his own vision, and earned the keys to the franchise. It is his third feature as director, built around all-new characters and original setpieces.
The Filmmaker's Choice, Not the Studio's
Cregger is clear that nobody recruited him for this. "They were kind enough to hear me out and let me run with it," he says of the rights holders. A self-described major fan of the video game series, Cregger wanted to bottle the specific feeling of playing the games rather than retread familiar territory. His own summary: "It's really a Zach Cregger movie that just happens to be a Resident Evil movie."
An Everyman Dropped Into the Heart of the Horror
Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier and the film's central audience surrogate. Cregger made a deliberate choice to keep Bryan as far from a typical action hero as possible. "The concept here is that we're following an idiot," Cregger says, immediately qualifying: "Not that he's stupid, but he's not your typical game character, with no combat skills whatsoever and completely inept at survival." Bryan is an ordinary person suddenly burdened with a sacred mission that pulls him into the most dangerous territory imaginable. To explain the dynamic, Cregger reaches for a famous literary parallel: "It's kind of like Frodo going into Mordor."
Relentless from the First Five Minutes
Where Barbarian and Weapons leaned on perspective-shifting narratives and twisty structures, this film takes a more kinetic, direct approach. The chaos starts early and never stops. "Things pop off about five minutes in and it basically stays like that until the end," Cregger says. The structure borrows its rhythm directly from the games, where each new location brings its own distinct threat. "It feels like one gigantic sequence. What I love about the games is that you move from set-piece to set-piece. Every location has a unique challenge. So again, I'm borrowing from the games directly in that rhythm, where you're just running through a gauntlet." Resident Evil arrives in cinemas on September 18.
