Long before making his own Resident Evil movie, Zach Cregger was a fan of Capcom’s video game franchise, pouring countless hours into fighting monsters, solving puzzles and anxiously awaiting the next threat.
“I think the games are really amazing at dread,” he exclusively told SYFY Wire. “It’s not that they’re big action extravaganzas. They spend almost more energy in the negative space between the adrenaline, where you’re just creeping through a terrifying environment, and you have two bullets. You know something is going to happen and you don’t want it to, but you can’t go back.”
“That, to me, is the essence of survival horror,” he explained. “That’s what Resident Evil has always done so well in the games. That’s what I wanted to make sure that this movie really leaned into: that dread, that resource management—and really, the horror that I didn’t see advertised in the other movies.”
In his take on the franchise, Cregger eschews a scene-for-scene retelling of the games for a brand new story. It’s set parallel to the events of Resident Evil 2 and features a cast of original characters lead by Austin Abrams’ Bryan, a medical courier whose delivery to Raccoon City General Hospital snowballs into a harrowing fight for survival.
While Cregger’s focus was capturing the feeling of playing Resident Evil for moviegoers rather than adapting it directly, he made sure to throw in a few unmissable references from the game.
“There’s all these healing items. There’s save items—I think we all know what I’m talking about,” he added, hinting at the typewriter shot in the film’s trailer. “But really, I think it’s the soul and the pacing of the story [that carries over]. The progression from location to location, set piece to piece, and each set piece has its own unique threat. I think that is what makes this really, more than anything—more than any little healing herb I could put in there—Resident Evil.”
Cregger’s Resident Evil comes on the heels of the success of his hit horror film Weapons. Abrams, who played the bumbling burglar and addict James in the 2025 movie, was excited to reteam with the director on a new frightfest.
“It felt like we just picked back up,” he told SYFY Wire of their creative collaboration. “Honestly, it was awesome.”
Bryan, Abrams says, is a “very different person” than James—and perhaps one more well equipped to rise to the occasion amid a deadly outbreak.
“I wonder how [James] would’ve fared in the world of Resident Evil,” Cregger posited to Abrams during their interview with SYFY Wire. “That would be interesting. Do you think [he] would survive this movie?”
“I think he would get distracted,” Abrams replied. “It would not have gone well. I still think he would survive—he just would’ve been trying to get drugs the whole time.”
Bryan’s journey, meanwhile, brings him face to face with a series of mutated monsters, all culminating in a sequence Cregger is thrilled for fans to see.
“I’m excited for the very end,” he said. “The last 30 seconds of this movie, I think, are pretty remarkable—if I can say that about my own thing. I can’t wait to be in a room while people see that for the first time.”
Resident Evil hits theaters on Sept. 18.
