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Director Zach Cregger discusses the survival horror of Resident Evil
Featurette: Columbia Pictures

Resident Evil (2026)
Directed by Zach Cregger
Rated R
Infected 18 September 2026
#ResidentEvil

Zach Cregger’s cracked the horror code with this surprisingly effective retooling of the Resident Evil video games.

GoreDash

When it comes to the cinematic experience, it’s been a horrific ride for the Resident Evil series. And that’s not a compliment. Disregard the CGI animated features. Forget the six movies starring Milla Jovovich. And, yeah, there was even a completely unrelated reboot in 2021 (Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City) which went absolutely nowhere.

Finally, though, Cregger, riding high on the huge success of Weapons, has dialed it all back to the basics and made a Resident Evil movie that works really well.

Along with co-writer Shay Hatten (John Wick: Chapter 4), Cregger doesn’t bog things down with an overwrought narrative. The scenario here is simple: Bryan (Austin Abrams, Weapons) is a gig worker who delivers emergency medical supplies (of the human organ variety). At the movie’s start, he finishes one delivery when he’s offered a high-priority assignment that pays double the usual rate. He takes the bait and he’s off to the icy, snowy, treacherous terrain of Raccoon City, nestled high up in the remote mountains.

That’s all it takes.

A guy doing a delivery.

To a city that’s experiencing a catastrophic outbreak of a virus that’s turning humans into disgusting monsters. Not just run-of-the-mill zombies. Monsters. Some remarkably grotesque monsters. And nobody outside the area has a clue as to what’s going on out there.

Life Cereal

While Weapons was good, it was less horror and more comedy-horror, but still more interesting than the recent parade of horror hokum that’s centered on absurd storylines, bizarre ideas and grotesque visuals that hold no bearing to reality and offer little in terms of legitimate thrills and scares.

Cregger and Hatten have solved for that. Sure, there’s plenty of humor. As the movie starts, it’s relatively heavy on the comedy. As the story progresses, the humor persists, but the horror intensifies. The stakes grow higher and higher. The dangers become overwhelming.

And they’ve mapped out a movie that very much plays like a Resident Evil game by keeping the story very simple, featuring a very small cast of a half-dozen or so characters in a story that is reasonably representative of the gaming experience.

What is that experience?

It’s typically a single person walking through and exploring various creepy environments, finding life-threatening dangers that must be overcome. Puzzles need to be solved. A mission needs to be accomplished.

So, in this movie, it’s all about Bryan. As he drives on the treacherous, snowy mountain road to Raccoon City to complete his delivery of a mysterious vial of antidote to some Umbrella Corporation scientists, he’s on his phone trying to salvage his relationship with his girlfriend. She’s pregnant. He’s not ready.

Distracted and unprepared for the terrain, Bryan’s night goes south fast after he hits a woman who runs out from the trees and right onto the road. From there, Bryan’s delivery job turns into a survival mission as he encounters one precarious environment after another. The task in one of the movie’s chapters might be to call his girlfriend from a landline since his cell phone has no network connection. It might be to help a frightened little girl. Or it’s a matter of navigating through a decimated hospital, up 24 floors, across a skybridge, then head up four more floors for an epic boss battle.

How hard can it be?

Well, nothing comes easy in Raccoon City.

Take the stairs, Bryan’s advised. And for the love of all that’s holy, avoid the elevators.

So, of course, he takes the elevators.

The guy’s tired, after all.

It’s Raining Zombies

Possibly the most astonishing thing about this Resident Evil is it features so many scenes and images that are destined for modern horror classic status. The jump scares shift deftly between the visual and the aural. The imagery is a classic balancing of shadows and light.

One particularly effective scene – immediately after Bryan crashes into that mystery woman – includes the sight of his car’s taillights illuminating the dark, snowy terrain behind him in an eerie blood-red glow. Other elements include a bizarre, disgusting recombination of a deceased husband and wife that sweeps up the appendages of other victims as the ever-evolving creature becomes a greater, uglier, nastier and more threatening monstrosity.

The action starts simply, showing the horrific injuries on display during a typical day in an overworked hospital. But it doesn’t take long – the movie is a spritely 90 minutes – before monsters are vomiting acid and zombies are jumping off rooftops.

The story isn’t based on a specific game in the ongoing series, but there are oodles of Easter eggs that call back various key moments from the gaming action. It’s an approach that completes the bridge between the different media and the different experiences.

Shredded Umbrellas

Is it wrong to call a gory, bloody horror movie delightful?

That’s what this Resident Evil is. It’s a delight in its treatment of its source material (“Video games!” Bryan shouts out on the (rare) occasion his gaming skills gain him some sort of advantage in fighting the good fight) and it’s a delight in the giddy fun it has with the horrific ideas bouncing around in Cregger’s noggin.

This is a movie that knows what it is and knows what it needs to do. It also knows so extremely well what it doesn’t need to do.

At the top of that list is any sort of monologuing or “backstorying” that explains what the heck is going on and how anything got started. All the audience needs to know is there’s a deadly virus spreading with alarming speed.

At one point, a cop played by Paul Walter Hauser (The Naked Gun reboot) attempts to explain Umbrella Corporation and its mysterious government contracts and ties into the deep state. His dialogue – with audiences bracing for something lengthy and ominous – gets shut down by his partner (Kali Reis, True Detective). Bryan doesn’t want to know all that, she claims. And it makes for some great movie fun.

With the world having survived COVID and now wrangling with all the ramifications of artificial intelligence and its own potential to wipe out the human race, it’s time for this Resident Evil to take the world for what it is and make some blood-splattered lemonade out of those infected, rotting lemons. And it’s all wrapped up with a wholly appropriate – yet totally unexpected – ending that leaves the door wide open for more morbid mayhem.

• Originally published at MovieHabit.com.