Sean Connor ‘30
Staff Writer
Just as everyone taps into their Ancestry.com 0.007% Irish heritage on St. Patrick’s Day, even the most high-strung, phobia-ridden wet blankets enjoy a good horror film once October rolls in and the air turns eerily crisp. Plenty of people gravitate towards the slow, trudging dread of slasher films, featuring bloodcurdling invincible madmen like Michael Myers and laughable skinny wimps like Ghostface. Others prefer the supernatural thrills of films like The Exorcist or It.
I, for one, do not enjoy being frightened very much, and have avoided horror films for quite some time. But this has changed recently, as other interests of mine have pushed me to dabble in the genre. For years I’ve appreciated the 1922 silent film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror primarily for its cultural and historical significance, which led to me enjoying the 2024 Robert Eggers version very much. Earlier this year, the Oscars celebrated Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which was frankly more of an action film. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, another personal favorite, won Best Picture, but that’s not scary unless you’re afraid of social change, paternity DNA tests, or lead actors that dump you once you turn 25.
The latest horror film I took a dip into was Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil. As a former member of the comedy sketch group Whitest Kids U Know, Cregger evolved from humor to horror, much like Jordan Peele. Previously, Cregger released the films Barbarian (a scary movie for citizens of the Roman Republic) and Weapons (which is about children outside playing “airplane” far past their bedtime). Resident Evil is Cregger’s first preexisting IP franchise film, based on the video game franchise of the same name. However, while this wasn’t the first adaptation of Capcom’s action horror series, it’s one built with an apparent love for the games that the campy films of the 2000s never captured.
This one’s an original story set in the universe, meaning there’s no homework to do if you’re a normal person with an actual life. This disappointed some die-hard fans, who were hoping to venture out of their basements to see their favorite characters on the big screen, doing the exact things depicted in the game, only without the need for button inputs. Yet as much as I would’ve loved to see Leon SexiestManAlive Kennedy and all his computer-rendered friends in theaters, Zach Cregger luckily decided against fan service and created his own tasteful side story. In fact, he spent the entire press campaign assuring fans that despite the lack of familiar faces and overly complicated multi-game plotlines, he’s done something even better, which is actually consuming the source material. And it shows: as an avid gamer myself, I appreciated how the camera would float over the protagonist’s shoulder as it does in the games and how resource management was a serious and consistent concern. The plot of the movie even followed the natural progression of the games, as the protagonist learns more about the danger he faces and tackles more and more challenging environments and situations. The combination of familiar threats and creative new creatures also gives the general public a taste of the disgusting monsters common throughout the series, whilst offering new, unexpected terrors for the veterans.
The film stars Austin Abrams, who plays Bryan, a medical courier who gets wrapped up in a viral zombie outbreak. A hallmark of horror movies is characters who think using a blowtorch to get rid of an itch on their back is a good idea, yet while Bryan struggles and fails many, many times, his decisions are reasonable given his circumstances and limited understanding of what’s going on. He also plays well into the film’s brutal humor, and is a lovable enough guy that you want him to survive. Also, as the internet’s pointed out to me, he’s joined a line of film protagonists who’ve become “Too important at work,” alongside Ryan Gosling as Dr. Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary, Robert Pattinson as Mickey 17 in Mickey 17, and Markiplier as Markiplier in Iron Lung.
Speaking of Robert Pattinson, Resident Evil has had some competition in theaters alongside A24’s Primetime (scary if you’re a predator), Tom Cruise in Digger (scary if you love the environment and/or Big Oil), and Heart of the Beast (scary if you hate dogs and Omniman). However, while these other films, which I have not seen beyond YouTube shorts commercials and googling the cast lists, probably stand strong in their own right, Resident Evil has pleased critics and gamers alike and provides a thrilling adventure accessible to casual moviegoers as well. So if you’re a fan of zombie films, action movies, video games, horror, sewer systems, or residents of a morally reprehensible nature, then Resident Evil might just be for you.
Image courtesy of Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures Releasing
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