Zach Cregger’s Barbarian (on the left, featuring Georgina Campbell) does a great job of tormenting its characters in dark corridors. Resident Evil (on the right, showing an image from the remake of the 1996 game) also features dark corridors and lots of tormenting.
Spooky

Zach Cregger’s ‘Resident Evil’ Movie Needs To Keep It Simple

The formula seems so easy, but it hasn't been done yet.

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The Resident Evil video game franchise has proven to be fertile ground for film and TV adaptations for more than two decades. Unfortunately, we have yet to see a live-action movie or show that is truly faithful to the games. Zach Cregger’s upcoming RE movie can be the first. He just has to keep it simple.

The Hollywood Reporter broke the news on January 24th, 2025 that there is currently a bidding war among studios for a reboot of the Resident Evil film franchise to be written and directed by Zach Cregger.

Cregger, as you may remember, wrote and directed the excellent 2022 horror film Barbarian. That movie is fantastic. Barbarian manages to deliver tense horror, dark comedy, and fantastic surprises, all on a relatively small scale. It’s a movie with limited characters and essentially one main setting, and it’s one of the most fun and memorable horror films of the 2020s. It’s this kind of scaled-down attitude that Cregger needs to bring into Resident Evil.

Resident Evil remake
The original Resident Evil game (an image of the remake is seen here) essentially had five main characters, only three of which you would focus on depending on which playable character you chose.

The live-action Resident Evil movies from the past two decades have varied wildly in quality. Paul W.S. Anderson’s series started fairly strong in 2002, but after that it began sliding off the rails. Plus, by the third movie the franchise completely abandoned the idea of it being even a loose adaptation of the game series.

Johannes Roberts’ Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021) promised fans a more faithful adaptation, but way too much story was crammed into one movie. Jamming so many plot points and references from multiple games into the film forced the story to be altered drastically.

What’s so baffling about Raccoon City and the Anderson RE movies is that the Resident Evil games are already quite cinematic. They’re literally inspired by zombie movies, at least initially. It’s well-known among fans that George Romero’s zombie films were a direct inspiration on the first Resident Evil game from 1996 (and presumably beyond). So why has it been so difficult to make a good, faithful film adaptation?

Sweet Home game
The 1989 video game Sweet Home was also a direct inspiration on Resident Evil. Sweet Home was based on a movie of the same name that came out that same year.

Maybe it’s because the people making the movies so far are only thinking of Resident Evil as games where you shoot monsters. Yes, the games have the player shoot monsters. And sure, the games eventually shifted to a more action-forward style, but the first three mainline games were as much about avoiding action as a means of survival as they were about blasting creatures.

Those initial games were tense because supplies were limited, meaning that each bullet you fired was one you couldn’t use later on when you might need it. Movement was also restricted because of the tight spaces characters almost always found themselves in, and the characters themselves didn’t move incredibly fluidly. It was survival horror, not action horror like the movies tend to be. That made the atmosphere more oppressive, and the action exponentially more tense.

So how can Zach Cregger make a Resident Evil movie “that will take the title to its horror roots and be more faithful to the initial games,” as sources told The Hollywood Reporter? Adapt the first game, and do it like an old-school zombie movie.

Day of the Dead (1985)
It wouldn’t be a bad idea if the new Resident Evil took some inspiration from the claustrophobic horror of George Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985).

Resident Evil from 1996 took place entirely on (and beneath) the grounds of a mansion. Though subsequent games revealed lore that occurred before what is known as the Mansion Incident, the events in the mansion and the laboratory beneath it are the perfect way to re-introduce people to the Resident Evil universe.

Welcome to Raccoon City and the 2002 Resident Evil movie used the Mansion Incident as well, but they didn’t do it justice. The 2002 movie went underground and became a sci-fi action movie too quickly, and Raccoon City kept moving away from the mansion because of too many plot threads. The new movie should stay within the mansion and its grounds for nearly the entire time, slowly building tension with an increasing number of zombies before gradually building up to bigger monsters.

If you played the original game when it came out, chances are you remember the feeling of panic when a Hunter first appeared in front of you. That’s because the game knew how to build fear, which is something the movies, so far, haven’t done a great job of. This feeling needs to be the goal of the new movie.

So that’s the idea, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil movie needs to adapt the Mansion Incident of the first game, and it needs to feel claustrophobic and frightening. Keep the action to a minimum. Emphasize survival over fighting. Limit the number of characters we get to know. Isolate those characters and make us fear for their lives. Cregger does an amazing job of all of those things in Barbarian, so if he keeps Resident Evil simple like that, he’ll be the perfect filmmaker for the job.