\u201cWhat\u2019s important to me, that I\u2019m honouring from the games, is the narrative structure and following one character from point A to point B, and the concern with resource management, ammunition conservation,\u201d reveals Cregger. \u201cWe start with a pistol, we graduate to a shotgun, we graduate to an MP5, and things are just getting progressively more intense, and we\u2019re encountering weirder and weirder monsters.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brian doesn\u2019t possess the confident, fringe-flicking action hero qualities of a Leon Kennedy, nor the tough-guy stoicism of a Chris Redfield.\u201c<\/p>\n
But taking those monsters on is Brian, a protagonist quite unlike any from the games. He doesn\u2019t possess the confident, fringe-flicking action hero qualities of a Leon Kennedy, nor the tough-guy stoicism of a Chris Redfield. In fact, Cregger describes him as \u201ca total hapless everyman,\u201d \u2014 a normal guy, thrown into a world quickly catching fire around him. \u201cIt\u2019s like if I were thrust into a Resident Evil video game,\u201d the director quips. \u201cI\u2019d be totally unequipped. I\u2019m not good with guns. I\u2019m totally out of shape. It would just be me panicking from one situation to another.\u201d<\/p>\n
From what I\u2019ve seen, the horrors Brian must face will be unrelenting throughout this evening from hell. We\u2019ll see him navigate the city\u2019s sewers in a sequence reminiscent of Resident Evil 3, albeit with something lurking down there that is quite unlike anything seen across the games \u2014 think a bloated, fleshy, mound of a man, not too dissimilar from Stellan Skarsg\u00e5rd’s unnerving physique in Dune. This one-ton flesh puppet had to be operated by four people in order to make its movements seem believably unnatural, writhing and pulsating as if something was threatening to burst out. As for what could be causing such convulsions\u2026 I wouldn\u2019t dare spoil the surprise.<\/p>\n
Resident Evil Movie Trailer Slideshow<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no shortage of creatures on show, either, with some taken from the games, and others new, exciting inventions. Cregger\u2019s idea is to root each design in what theoretically could happen to a human if it were to fall victim to the T-Virus, without ever crossing too far into the campier moments the games often lean into. Which is to say no Mr. X or Nemesis, for example, whose tiny hats, oversized trench coats, and skin-grafted missile launchers wouldn\u2019t quite mesh with the ever-so-slightly more grounded nature of the world Cregger is constructing. <\/p>\n
That doesn\u2019t mean there won\u2019t be plenty of larger-than-life action, though. The first trailer gives us a glimpse of bodies showering from the top of buildings onto the street below, and one set piece, centred on a tower block elevator shaft that took production designer Tom Hammock and the team over two and a half months to construct, looks set to steal the show. <\/p>\n
\u201cMaking a pair of working elevators in a five-story-tall concrete set was enormously difficult to do in-camera,\u201d reveals Hammock. \u201cI mean, it would have been so much easier, obviously, to just do a little box surrounded by green screen, but Zach wanted to go full bore for this action sequence.\u201d Having been shown around the disused Czech factory building where it was filmed, I have to say it was incredibly impressive, even if I can\u2019t reveal what horrors take place here yet.<\/p>\n
It’s this commitment to practicality and capturing as many of the film\u2019s effects in camera as possible that makes this a more believable world for its actors, and therefore characters, to exist within. No detail has been spared, especially Resident Evil\u2019s \u201cobsession\u201d with doors (something Hammock admitted to being surprised by). Ever since the original game, doors have been eerily zoomed in on, unlocked with ornate keys, and had zombies lurking behind them. That\u2019s not set to change here. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d say there are about twice as many doorways in the Resident Evil games as there should be,\u201d Hammock jokes. \u201cYou never know where the scares are coming from. Me and Zach had a great deal of fun working on the doorways and these odd transitions between spaces, so a hospital hallway leads to somewhere you don\u2019t necessarily expect. Literally, we have entire sets built where it\u2019s designed around a single shot for a single scare.\u201d<\/p>\n
We have entire sets built where it\u2019s designed around a single shot for a single scare.\u201c<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a sensation I briefly got to experience myself. From just one step into the hospital ward, it quickly became clear to me that Resident Evil will definitely be a disgusting movie when it chooses to be. Blood covered every inch of the floor, limbs hung out of glowing red sacs, and tentacles lay strewn across tables in the aftermath of whatever nightmare took place here. Over a whole week of filming, these horrors were captured on camera, with over 400 gallons of fake blood dressing the set per day. If you watched Cregger\u2019s 2025 hit horror, Weapons, you\u2019ll know from its grisly ending just how squelchy his films can get when he decides it’s time for flesh to be parted from bone and organs ripped from torsos. Resident Evil is looking no different in this regard, potentially pushing the director\u2019s eye for violence even further.<\/p>\n
Cregger\u2019s project looks to be hitting a really nice balance between paying homage to the games while also creating an original story of its own. It’s something we\u2019ve seen video game adaptations do successfully of late, namely Prime Video\u2019s Fallout TV series, which similarly makes the choices to tell a new tale in a familiar world, rather than regurgitate one back to us from a game beat-for-beat. This seems to be a mindset that Cregger shares, wanting this movie to evoke the feeling that \u201cstepping into Raccoon City for the first time [in the games] once did.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m going to live in the world of the Raccoon City games,\u201d explains Cregger. \u201cBut it\u2019s an alternate storyline that takes place on the periphery of the hero\u2019s storyline, so it\u2019s a story that could be happening without necessarily breaking the universe of the story the games are telling.\u201d <\/p>\n
It\u2019s about eliciting a positive emotion connected to those formative memories, without hanging its hat on nostalgia. That being said, that doesn\u2019t mean Easter eggs won\u2019t be sprinkled into the mix either, with recognisable weapons, locations and leafy green herbs all set to show up. Even an iconic use of canines from the game that started it all, way back in 1996, is teased by the director.<\/p>\n
Survival horror is inherently cinematic as a genre, with the original Resident Evil inspired by the haunted house in space classic, Alien, and its 1997 sequel taking inspiration from George A. Romero\u2019s zombie hits, such as Dawn of the Dead. Romero is a touchstone Cregger recognises, but places less of an emphasis on what films have come before him, instead using Capcom\u2019s games as the sole text to be focused on. That goes as far as camera angles echoing those seen behind the likes of Leon, Chris, and Claire, as the lens hovers over Brian, peeking around corners as if it were connected to an analogue stick.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat was really fun for me was to try and shoot this visually the way these games are told,\u201d Cregger reveals. \u201cI shoot in on a wide lens in an over-the-shoulder for most of the movie, so it feels like the way you play a game where we\u2019re kind of perched on his shoulder, and as he turns a corner, we turn a corner with him. So I\u2019m using video game visual language. First of all, it\u2019s very inherently cinematic, but it also makes things scarier.\u201d It\u2019s the little details like this that further emphasise his passion behind this project, and his unwillingness to create something that fans wouldn\u2019t be happy seeing.<\/p>\n
The Resident Evil Movies in (Chronological) Order<\/p>\n
Crucially, Cregger is a horror director who\u2019s known to add a few laughs alongside the scares, something that can also be expected here. Just don\u2019t expect his love of basements to return in Resident Evil (both Weapons and Barbarian utilise the underside of houses as prominent locations). A sad revelation, I\u2019m sure, for those partial to lurking subterranean suburban horrors. We will, however, get the aforementioned sewers, and of course, Umbrella Corp laboratory facilities. To what extent the sterilised white walls that play host to nefarious science experiments stay pristine is up for debate, though. But if the freshly fallen snow seen decorating Raccoon City\u2019s streets is anything to go by, they may well be painted in splashes of violent crimson.<\/p>\n
I left the set of Resident Evil convinced that this latest attempt at a translation to film is in great hands. Not that Cregger\u2019s track record to date hadn\u2019t already achieved that, of course, but my confidence is assured because of that clear love he has for the games. Considering his two wholly original projects that preceded it, it came as a surprise that he\u2019d want to dip his toes into the choppy seas of established IP next \u2014 especially one with such a mixed movie history as Resident Evil. But that\u2019s not the way Cregger necessarily sees it, and from what I\u2019ve seen, it looks more than a cut above any previous adaptation of the series. Time will obviously tell, but all signs point to Resident Evil successfully finding a new home for its horrors on the big screen when it arrives on September 18, 2026.<\/p>\n
Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I took away a lot from my visit to Resident Evil’s Prague set \u2013 not least being a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":638829,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75],"class_list":["post-638828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=638828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638828\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/638829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=638828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=638828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=638828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}