Ahead of the release of Resident Evil later this month, director Zach Cregger sat down for an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit he answered questions about the movie. While trailers for Resident Evil have teased a few Easter eggs that players of the game will recognize, Cregger also spoke about another game-inspired influence on his horror movie: Resident Evil’s third-person viewpoint.
“I feel like the biggest inspiration for this was the games, and I mean cinematically,” Cregger said during the AMA (via YouTuber Troy Hill Talks Movies).
“I’m not talking about the content of the movie. I’m talking about the visual language of the movie. I feel like people my age and younger, we grew up with our visual tastes informed just as much by video games as we did by movies. I know as a kid, I played video games probably just as much as I watched movies. There’s something that is ingrained now about this third-person camera and this first-person thing where you really are learning the space as the character learns the space, and you feel much more immersed in their perspective because you are. And so, for me to make a movie about Resident Evil where I’m following a character on his foot journey, it’s like, obviously, I’m going to employ the visual vocabulary that these games have employed so well.”
Cregger added that he choreographed scenes to emulate this gameplay approach, so as to “train the viewer” early on as to how they’re going to experience the movie and the journey of Bryan, the medical courier played by Austin Abrams. Resident Evil 7 was also influential on the film for how it portrayed a normal person being put through the ringer, Cregger said, but Resident Evil 4 also played a large role in the “rhythm” of the film.
“[Resident Evil] 4 has the rhythm that I really like, where you’re moving from set piece to set piece, location to location,” Cregger explained. “Resident Evil 4 is just such a big game. You go through all these different worlds, from the village to the castle, and to the island. It just kind of keeps giving and giving. I like the idea of kind of borrowing the rhythm and the scale from RE4 and using some of the character elements from RE7.”
Resident Evil hits theaters on September 18, and Cregger has teased a fast-paced movie full of “f**ked up and weird” imagery for fans to enjoy.
