‘Resident Evil’ Officially Cracked the Code on How to Make a Video Game Movie
Hannah has been writing about horror, sci-fi, and all things nerdy since 2021. At Collider, she covers news and conducts interviews, along with contributing features that dive deep into genre storytelling and why it works. If there’s something lurking in the shadows, she’s probably already writing about it if she's not too busy watching a tape from her VHS collection.
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Hollywood has spent more than two decades trying to turn Resident Evil into a successful live-action franchise, and mostly failing. Paul W.S. Anderson’s movies built an increasingly explosive mythology of their own, while Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City crammed the first two games into one movie. Both approaches borrowed plenty from Capcom, but neither captured the specific panic of wasting your ammunition, opening the wrong door, and realizing the game has something much worse planned for you.
Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil solves that problem without adapting an existing storyline or recruiting Leon Kennedy, Jill Valentine, or Chris Redfield. It recreates the experience of playing the games through limited supplies, locked doors, escalating objectives, revolting creatures, and one increasingly furious man who cannot believe any of this is happening to him. The result is an adaptation built around what players do instead of which characters they recognize, which is exactly what the franchise needed.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Is Your Biggest Horror Nightmare? Elm Street · Chucky · Scream · The Conjuring
Four horror franchises. Four completely different ways of scaring you. One waits until you fall asleep. One makes sure nobody believes you. One is already in your group of friends. And one is in the house with your family. Answer eight quick questions about how you actually watch horror, and find out which nightmare was built for you.
😴Elm Street(Freddy Krueger)
🧸Chucky(Child's Play)
📞Scream(Ghostface)
🕯️The Conjuring(The Warren Files)
01
Which horror scene makes you cover your eyes? Four classic images. One of them is worse than the others for you.
02
You are home alone and you hear a noise. First thought? Everybody has one. It arrives before you have decided anything.
03
Which horror movie rule would you break first? Everybody thinks they would survive. Almost nobody actually does.
04
Something genuinely frightening happens. What do you do? Not in a film. In your actual living room, tonight.
05
How do you actually watch a horror film? Be honest about this one. Nobody is checking.
06
Somebody offers you serious money. Which do you still refuse? The amount does not matter. There is one on this list you are not doing.
07
Which feeling stays with you a week after the film? Good horror does not stop when the credits do.
08
Something wakes you at 3am. What is the worst possibility? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your nightmare.
The Lights Just Went Out Your Nightmare Is…
Four franchises, four completely different ways of getting underneath your skin. This is the one built out of your particular fear, why it works so well on you, and what it would leave behind.
Elm Street
Your nightmare does not wait outside the door. It waits for you to close your eyes, which you are going to have to do eventually, because nobody has ever won that particular argument.
- Freddy is horror's cruellest idea: a threat that lives in the one place you cannot guard, cannot lock, and cannot avoid forever.
- You are the one who is fine during the film and wide awake at two in the morning. Your own head is where this does its damage.
- These films understood exhaustion as a horror engine. The kids on Elm Street do not lose because they are weak. They lose because they are tired.
- You can lock every door in the house. You still have to sleep.
Chucky
Your nightmare is not really the doll. It is the face of the person you tell, and the way they decide, very kindly, that you have imagined all of it.
- Chucky works precisely because he is absurd. That is the trap: the more accurately you describe him, the less anybody is going to believe you.
- You are the one shouting at the screen because the characters are not listening. You know that feeling from real life too.
- The franchise is at its best when the adults in the room are the real obstacle, and you have met those adults.
- By the time somebody finally believes you, you will have handled most of it on your own.
Scream
Your nightmare has your number, knows your name, and has almost certainly been inside your house before. The worst part is that you already know them.
- Scream is the only one of these where the killer takes the mask off and turns out to be somebody who was at the party.
- You are the person who calls the twist out loud before it lands. You watch people the same way you watch films.
- The franchise made the rules of horror part of the plot, which means the survivors are the ones paying attention. You would be paying attention.
- Everybody is a suspect, including the person who just offered to walk you home.
The Conjuring
Your nightmare is not really about you. It is about the people asleep down the hall, and the feeling that whatever is here is not interested in leaving.
- The Conjuring films are domestic horror. The house, the family, the perfectly ordinary room that quietly stops feeling ordinary.
- Your instinct is to get everybody into one room. Your fear is protective rather than personal, which is rarer than it sounds.
- This is the one franchise where belief is the weapon. The people who come through it are the ones who are not alone and refuse to be.
- Whatever is here did not come for you. It came for the household, and you are the one standing in the hallway.
Bryan Is the Perfect ‘Resident Evil’ Player Character
Austin Abrams stars as Bryan, a medical courier whose final delivery of the night takes him toward Raccoon City at the worst possible time. He is not a cop, soldier, or government agent who has spent years surviving bioweapon outbreaks. He is just some guy who was already having a terrible night before the monsters arrived. That makes Bryan much closer to the person holding the controller than the franchise’s established heroes. Leon and Jill have survived enough mutated nightmares that audiences expect them to know what to do. Bryan wastes ammunition, misses important details, makes terrible decisions, and keeps entering places that no sensible person should enter because the story has given him another objective.
His near-constant cussing may be the movie’s most accurate connection to the games. Bryan mutters while searching unfamiliar spaces, begs enemies to stay dead, and becomes personally offended every time the night gets worse. Anyone who has ever sworn at a locked door or demanded to know why a game gave them a shotgun without shotgun shells will recognize him immediately. But Abrams never plays that frustration like Bryan knows he is inside a video game. He is simply reacting to an absurd situation with the same panic, anger, and disbelief that players usually provide from the other side of the screen.
‘Resident Evil’ Turns Each Set Piece Into a New Level
Cregger has described Bryan as an avatar and discussed designing the movie around the games’ power progression. That meant each new location needed to challenge Bryan in a completely different way while still pushing him toward his final destination. In an interview with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff at Fantastic Fest, Cregger admitted that translating that structure into a movie created a new production problem with practically every sequence:
“This whole movie was just like… I didn't even think about it when I'm writing it, but then when we get there, I'm just like, ‘Okay, it's just one set piece after set piece after set piece,’ and each one is a completely new, very complicated riddle that has to be solved. I would love to do a movie of just two people in a diner, just talking. That just sounds so refreshing.”
Those complicated riddles become the movie’s version of individual levels. Bryan receives an objective, enters a new environment, finds supplies, encounters something horrible, and escapes into an even worse part of the map. Each location introduces its own rules and obstacles, giving the movie the same forward momentum as a playthrough that refuses to offer a comfortable stopping point. Bryan’s growing arsenal reinforces that progression. He moves from a pistol to a shotgun and eventually a machine gun, but better weapons never turn him into an unstoppable action hero. He becomes marginally better at surviving while the monsters become much larger, faster, and more disgusting, until he himself becomes one.
That balance is essential to Resident Evil. Finding a shotgun should provide approximately five seconds of relief before the player starts wondering why the game decided they needed one. Cregger lets Bryan become stronger without allowing him, or the audience, to become comfortable. The familiar references also support the structure instead of becoming a parade of Easter eggs. Typewriters, herbs, padlocks, healing supplies, and recognizable creatures appear throughout the movie because they belong to the franchise’s visual and mechanical language. Even viewers who have never touched the games understand what it means when Bryan finds a weapon, enters a new area, or discovers another door he cannot open yet.
A Faithful Adaptation Does Not Need Leon Kennedy
I would happily watch Leon Kennedy stumble through Raccoon City again, but recognition is not the same thing as understanding. The Anderson movies pulled characters and monsters from the games into their own mythology, while Welcome to Raccoon City recreated famous locations and story beats. Cregger leaves those heroes alone and tells an original story on the edges of the outbreak, yet his movie understands what players actually do inside that world. A direct adaptation can rebuild the Spencer Mansion or Raccoon City Police Department, but a movie cannot give viewers the agency that makes exploring them terrifying. They cannot decide whether to use a healing item, conserve their last two bullets, or open the extremely suspicious door at the end of the hall. Cregger replaces that agency with Bryan’s frustration, desperation, and increasingly questionable choices.
Bryan is not replacing Leon, Jill, or Chris, nor does he need to. He represents the poor bastard controlling them, except he has been dropped into their world without their training or seemingly endless tolerance for getting bitten. Watching him struggle is more recognizable to players than watching another highly trained hero confidently mow down monsters. After years of movies adapting Resident Evil’s stories, Cregger adapts its verbs: search, conserve, unlock, run, shoot, swear, and somehow survive long enough to reach the next objective until you can't anymore. Bryan’s miserable journey captures what lore and Easter eggs cannot. Faithfulness is not only about what players see in Resident Evil: it is also about everything the games put them through.
- Release Date
- September 18, 2026
- Runtime
- 90 Minutes
- Director
- Zach Cregger
- Writers
- Shay Hatten, Zach Cregger
- Producers
- Asad Qizilbash, Carter Swan, Miri Yoon, Robert Kulzer, Roy Lee, Zach Cregger, David Minkowski
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