Say what you will about Ethan Winters — that he’s dull (he is), he’s corny (he is), or he’s got a really nice jacket that outdoes Leon Kennedy’s famous suede bomber (he does). But for all the shortcomings in this cardboard cutout of a man’s personality, he does one thing no other protagonist does in Resident Evil. And it’s a dramatic departure for Capcom.
[Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil Village.]
I’m talking about the death of Ethan Winters.
Death isn’t a big deal in Resident Evil. A zombie treats Chris Redfield’s throat like a sub sandwich, and the big guy just pops up again a few seconds later in a safe room, hale and hearty with his massive neck fully intact. Some nightmare with a bag on his head and a chainsaw turns Leon Kennedy’s head into a volleyball, but it’s fine. He’s okay! Had a spare head and some Elmer’s glue in his backpack, or… something.
Death is tense and gruesome in these games. It’s the thing you need to avoid so you can stop seeing horrendous things happen to nice people — and so you don’t have to replay an annoying section or two before reaching the next save spot. But when it happens, it’s the shock that sticks with you, not the actual concept of that person dying. How could death hold any meaning, when green herbs heal severed arteries and Hero Magic keeps the protagonists from catching the highly infectious zombie disease (despite being bitten multiple times)?
Which makes Resident Evil Village and, by extension, Resident Evil 7, unique, even a little radical, in Capcom’s horror series. Ethan Winters dies. For real. Bro’s dead. You learn this at the end of Village, as Ethan faces Mother Miranda and learns it wasn’t video game logic that let him use Nickelodeon slime to stick his hand back on. It was her mold, the stuff that was all over the Baker house, the stuff that freaky little shit Eveline was made from.
Way back when, in Dulvey, LA, Jack Baker stomped Ethan Winters’ head into the ground and killed him. Permanently. No fixing it with plants or undoing it with typewriters. The only reason he’s still shambling around is the massive amount of mold in the house, which slithered into his corpse and brought it back to life, enough life to keep going, father a child, and run around eastern Europe. (Though it evidently didn’t sharpen his faculties enough for him to notice his wife wasn’t his wife at the start of Village, but a weird old fungus witch.)
A crazy old man murdering you in his isolated swamp mansion and no one even knowing what happened is genuine horror and on a much different level than the disturbing-but-shlocky death scenarios we usually get. Going through life without knowing you’re dead is… well, it’s basically the plot of Alejandro Amenábar’s 2001 classic psychological horror film The Others, but that in itself is noteworthy. Psychological horror is a much different kind of horror than what Capcom typically goes for.
Capcom killed one of its heroes. For all his boringness, Ethan Winters wasn’t an action figure, a brand icon to drag out for guaranteed cheers from the audience (sorry, Leon). He was Capcom’s foray into a new kind of storytelling and a person whose death mattered enough to be permanent. And that’s a big set of firsts for Resident Evil.