What Being ‘Faithful’ Really Means

Zach Cregger knows Resident Evil. The plots, yes, but also the panic. The dread of loading your last two bullets as you creep around a corner. The flailing terror of being ambushed and forgetting how to aim. Smashing buttons and running like hell to get a grip on what to do next.

So when the Barbarian and Weapons director started seriously thinking about how to make a Resident Evil movie, he never for a second considered building a story around Claire Redfield or Ada Wong or Albert Wesker intrigue. Instead, he wanted to drop you, the player, in the game. (No offense.)

“I’d rather watch a movie starring a schlub who’s, like, out of shape and has never fired a gun before!” Cregger tells Polygon. “I wanna see that guy get chased through this gauntlet.”

September’s Resident Evil stars Austin Abrams (Weapons) as Bryan, a medical courier sent to Raccoon City to deliver an organ transplant. Terrible timing tbh — happening off to the side of Bryan’s hellish drive through whiteout conditions are the events of Resident Evil 2.

Unfortunately for Bryan, he is… nothing like Leon Kennedy. When things go catastrophically wrong, he squeals, stumbles, and struggles to click the safety off a pistol. I felt seen in a moment in which, to flee a snarling zombie lady, Bryan runs in circles around a turned-over cop car until he figures out how to attack back. Who among us would not yelp “shitshitshitshitshitshitshit” in that scenario, even behind the safety of a controller?

From the Weapons press tour last fall to this July’s San Diego Comic-Con, Cregger has spent a lot of time lately defending his relationship to the RE franchise. He has been asked repeatedly about his “gamer cred,” and whether his Resident Evil is really a “Resident Evil movie” or simply a Zach Cregger movie wearing the series’ skin. The answer, he says, has always been straightforward: He chose to make Resident Evil because he wanted to make Resident Evil.

While wrapping Barbarian, producer Roy Lee asked him whether there was a video game franchise he would ever want to tackle. Cregger had one answer. “The only one I’d wanna do would be Resident Evil.” Lee told him to get started.

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“It was the fastest writing I’ve ever done in my life, by far,” he says. Part of the no-holds-barred approach came from an assumption that he’d never actually direct it. Cregger says, at the time, didn’t have the leverage to assume a studio would let him make an expensive Resident Evil movie on his terms. So he wrote without restraint. “I didn’t have to worry,” he says, “I just wanted to have a blast and write my favorite Resident Evil movie.”

In early scenes, Cregger’s version of Resident Evil successfully builds around the rhythm of playing the games: entering into shadowy stillness, the realization that you’re under attack, the gradual escalation of weapons, and the scarcity of resources. Nothing spells doom like an encounter with a zombie dog.

“I wanted that slow pacing the games have perfected, where it’s like, you’ve gotta go into this environment that you know is gonna attack you, and you can’t go backward,” he says. “I know it’s snowing and it’s 2026 and all those things” — nodding to inevitable complaints about continuity — ”but it just felt like spiritually right. This is a peripheral activity that’s happening alongside everything else that’s going on with Raccoon City.”

By the 15-minute mark, when the title card finally pops up, it’s clear Cregger has made something authentic to his established style and a total swerve from the knotted, more stoic horror of Weapons — it’s visceral, propulsive, slapsticky, genuinely scary, and relentlessly pointed in one direction. Early claims pegged it as “Mad Max: Fury Road for horror” but it might belong more on the one-crazy-night shelf alongside After Hours and Uncut Gems (though many heads explode). I found myself cackling at gruesome turns like I would in Evil Dead 2, which was both intentional for Cregger, a former member of the comedy group Whitest Kids U’Know, and perhaps the toughest challenge of doing right by Resident Evil.

“I have a natural inclination to lean into comedy, but the more I make stuff as a filmmaker, the more I really resist that impulse,” he says. “I found myself cutting most of the jokes out of Resident Evil. I think what we find funny in this is just the absurdity of these situations.” It helps, his mind, that the RE series is full of camp that gives him permission to go wild.

Image: Sony

What Resident Evil shares with Weapons is Cregger’s dazzling eye for terror. Legendary cinematographer Dariusz Wolski — whose career stretches from The Crow to Ridley Scott’s biggest epics — may not have been a lifelong Resident Evil player. (The director says he’s “sure” Wolski has never played one.) But Cregger didn’t need him to recreate the games literally. He needed him to understand what makes their environments feel dangerous.

The movie is stylish without becoming glossy. Wolski lets practical sources do much of the work, and early on — through silhouette forests and delicate snowbeds splattered with blood — Resident Evil reaches surreal levels of painterliness. “I love Darius’s natural inclination to not really do anything and just let the dark be the dark,” Cregger says.

Short lenses and strict camera angles allowed the director to channel more of the video game language. The movie lives largely in a third-person perspective, following Bryan while remaining tethered to his attention. When Bryan looks somewhere, the camera follows his gaze. A punctuating gun shot can snap the frame into first-person, but Cregger always returns to Bryan’s gasping reaction.

“The mission of the movie is that the camera should always be tethered to his attention,” Cregger says. “It’s a very hyper-subjective movie.”

The blend of film craft and Resident Evil’s visual legacy gets at the larger reason Cregger wanted to dabble in an adaptation in the first place. There’s no replacing the games, but he’s interested in what happens when you take away the player’s responsibility for surviving.

“There’s something about curating the pacing and the performance that you can get from a well-made movie that you don’t generally get from a game,” he says. “Sometimes if I’m playing a video game for a long time and then I pause and I put on a movie… It’s like sliding into a bath. I’m like, ‘OK, somebody else is taking the wheel and taking over.’ There is something [thrilling] about having somebody really manage the second-to-second experience.”

Cregger indulged every fantasy he ever had about Resident Evil, and considered the movie a one-and-done in the universe. Though now that it’s wrapped, he admits his brain has started doing what it apparently always does: imagining what could come next.

“I can’t help myself,” he says with a laugh. “This is just the way my brain works. I’ve already got other ideas of what could happen. But my next movie is already kind of in place here, and it’s not a Resident Evil movie — I’m gonna go make something else. But on the other side of that, who knows? Who can say? Anything could happen.”