Patient Zero: Zach Cregger Takes “Resident Evil” in a New Direction

Zach Cregger is on a serious heater. His last two films have been critical and commercial hits, and they’ve both scared the socks off viewers. His 2022 horror hit Barbarian course-corrected his career in a bold way. A contained, increasingly fraught uppercut of tension, Barbarian centered on Tess (Georgina Campbell), who arrives late at night at her Airbnb in Detroit for a job interview. Distressingly, the house has been double-booked—there’s also a man named Keith (Bill Skarsgård) at the place. Due to inclement weather and the late hour, Tess decides to stick it out. The unfolding horror, written and directed by Cregger, reveals a filmmaker fully in command of the genre.

If you’re a film fan, you know what Cregger’s next move was. He wrote and directed another original film, Weapons, which became a bona fide blockbuster and earned Amy Madigan an Oscar for her deliciously bonkers turn as Aunt Gladys, a parasitic witch who torments the town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, where 17 children in Justine Gandy’s (Julia Garner) class go missing.

With two stone-cold horror homeruns back-to-back, Cregger took a big swing with his next film, Resident Evil, stepping into a beloved franchise that began its lifespan as a hit video game and ultimately spawned a sprawling cinematic world. The franchise includes seven live-action films: six in the original series starring Milla Jovovich as Alice, beginning with 2002’s Resident Evil; one reboot (2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City); and four feature-length animated films. That’s 11 films in total. Cregger was stepping into a well-trod world with fiercely loyal fans.

Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Cregger said he entered Resident Evil to make something true to his vision and ambitions, capturing the experience he had playing “Resident Evil 4” in his downtime. And owing to the fact that Cregger is not only a director but a seasoned writer, he decided he wanted to tell a new story in the Resident Evil world, focusing on a medical courier named Bryan who tries to deliver a time-sensitive package to Raccoon City General Hospital at the precise moment of the T-virus outbreak that has fueled the franchise. Bryan is played by Austin Abrams, a Weapons alum who later this year stars in Whalefall, where he gets swallowed by an 80-foot-long, 60-ton sperm whale. He’s having a year.

This choice to go his own way narratively has irked some Resident Evil purists. Not only has Cregger crafted an entirely new story, but he’s also left out any legacy characters from the game.

“Cregger has received no shortage of guff from the Resident Evil faithful for utilizing artistic license in his adaptation,” THR’s Brian Davids writes. “He knew that this type of criticism is part and parcel with major IP, but he’s said elsewhere that he ‘underestimated’ just how much appetite there is for legacy character stories, particularly one involving Leon S. Kennedy. The backlash has even prompted Cregger to previously say that Resident Evil will be the first and last franchise he tackles.”

“I cannot be worried about whether I am pleasing enough of every spectrum of fandom,” Cregger told THR. “If I tried to please everybody, I’d end up pleasing nobody. That much is obvious,” Cregger says. “I just have to be okay with people voicing their opinion. I’m a grown-up. When I took this on, I understood what I was walking into. So it would be weird for me to act surprised or bent out of shape that the thing that was obviously going to happen is now happening.”

There is good news, however. Test screenings have not only produced positive reactions to the film Cregger crafted, but also led to a major tweak that improved it, according to Cregger.

“I learned that people really liked the movie, but they thought it was too funny,” he tells THR. “So over the course of my testing, I stripped out as much of the jokes as possible,” Cregger shares. “I then found that not only did the audience enjoy the movie more, but I also liked the movie a lot more. A little bit of humor goes a long way in a horror movie, and there’s not a single joke I took out of this movie that I miss.”

Fewer jokes likely means even more tension. And Cregger’s choice to film largely in the style of third-person gameplay will only make the viewing experience all the more nerve-wracking.

“I went moment by moment, and I tried to pick the angle that is going to honor the moment,” Cregger told THR. “That is the beginning and the end of my concern. I tend to think that the third-person perspective that the games utilize is wildly effective, and so that ended up being the movie’s predominant visual language. The movie is stronger for it. But it’s only inspired by the games; there wasn’t any sort of rule. So I jumped from third person to first person to objective all the time, and it’s a blend. It’s a moment-by-moment thing.”

Resident Evil hits theaters on September 18.

Featured image: Director Zach Cregger (right) and Austin Abrams on the set of Constantin Film and Columbia Pictures RESIDENT EVIL. Photo by: Dušan Martinček