Inside Zach Cregger's Resident Evil: How the Movie Recreates the Feel of a Survival Horror Game

One of my most anticipated films of 2026 has finally arrived, and that is Zach Cregger's Resident Evil. Instead of running through the long list of Easter eggs, I want to look at how Cregger captures the actual experience of playing a survival horror game from a technical perspective, and at how the movie works overall as a survival horror game adapted into a film. This will spoil the entire movie, so if you have not seen it yet, go watch it first.

This Is a Survival Horror Movie, Not a Direct Game Adaptation

Cregger has been very open about wanting to make what he describes as a survival horror movie rather than a direct adaptation of any one game. In an interview with Deadline, he explained that the idea first came to him while he was on set of Barbarian. After Barbarian's success he had the concept for the movie and eventually pitched it to Constantin Film, the German company best known for the Resident Evil franchise, who liked what they heard and let him start writing.

He wrote the film with Shay Hatten, who also wrote John Wick 3 and 4 along with Ballerina, and the two freeballed their way into each beat rather than following a traditional script structure. One thing I really love about Cregger's stories is that he consistently takes ordinary lives and slowly starts chipping away at them in real time. Where Weapons and Barbarian relied on structural surprises to keep audiences on their toes, Resident Evil does the opposite. It is a simple movie taking us from point A to point B, and the surprises come from how far the journey takes us. It also wastes no time getting started, and it clocks in at under 95 minutes.

Austin Abrams Plays a Regular Guy, Not Leon Kennedy or Chris Redfield

Instead of following Leon Kennedy or Chris Redfield, the movie introduces Brian, played by Austin Abrams, a lowly medical courier making his final delivery of the night. Brian is very much a regular guy, not a trained soldier or a cop, nowhere near the average movie kind of hero. He just seems to stumble into one bad situation after another. Based on most of the license plates we see, the movie takes place in Colorado, whereas the games stayed vague, sometimes assumed to be somewhere near the mountains or in the Midwest.

The movie begins at St. George Hospital, where Brian cannot get anyone's attention while delivering an organ on behalf of Lightfoot Medical Transport. The camera follows him, ignored, until he gets his mission, which already gives a very gamey feel. Cregger has mentioned in interviews that the film largely lives in a third-person perspective, and shots like this help set that up. Eventually Brian is offered double pay to transport another organ outside the zone, a schedule A top priority package needed for Raccoon City General.

Right away you can see the kind of guy Brian is, not just from his very early 2000s Seattle vibe, but from how he is at odds with his pregnant girlfriend Michelle, voiced by Sara Paxton, as the two struggle to figure out what they want to do about the baby.

The First Zombie Attack and the Sheriff of Martin County

The film takes no time getting started. The first zombie spotting comes in under ten minutes, as Brian swerves across an icy road and slams into a woman in a red dress. After checking on her, he straps her into his car and continues toward the hospital, only to be pulled over by a sheriff whose badge gives his surname as Wilson, reporting from Martin County rather than the Raccoon City Police Department. I assume they used Martin County instead of RCPD because tying it directly to that department would immediately connect the film to Leon from the games and create a different movie than the one Cregger is trying to make. It is still structurally very much a Resident Evil story, just following a different, newer character.

The sheriff takes the injured woman and forces Brian to follow behind him toward Raccoon City. This is also when we learn the police and dispatch lines are not working, something echoed later when Brian tries to call for help from a farmhouse and gets nothing. On the way, the sheriff's car flips, and it becomes clear all hell has broken loose. According to Cregger, the inspiration for the flip is actually Fargo, and he liked shooting it from Brian's perspective.

A Red and Blue Color Language Borrowed From Barbarian

The visual work continued through Oscar-nominated cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, known for Pirates of the Caribbean, Prometheus, The Martian, and Alien Covenant. DFI Rentals has argued his filmography is unusually wide, covering gothic fantasy, submarine thrillers, blockbuster adventure, hard science fiction, a western, and a period epic, and some have called him one of the most rehired DPs alive. Bringing someone like that onto a story about a medical courier going point A to point B might seem unusual, but it fits an epic survival journey through a zombie outbreak. The camera operator also worked on The Odyssey.

Visually, the movie spends a lot of time in cold, dark environments where the dominant light comes from blue hues, whether from moonlight or snow reflecting light back onto the characters, which makes the color red stand out immediately. Red becomes a recurring visual theme, which makes sense for an outbreak movie, but it is used more intentionally than just splashing blood on screen. It reminded me a lot of Barbarian, where Cregger used colors from opposite sides of the color wheel to move the story along. When red or orange enters a scene here, it feels like a warning.

Brian's Gun Panic Leads Him to an Isolated Farmhouse

After the crash, Brian finds a gun at the overturned vehicle, one of the mechanics meant to show this is nearly a survival horror game made into a movie, since we upgrade weapons as we get slightly proficient with the last one. But in a grounded way, Brian does not know how to use a gun, which is around the first moment we get a game-like point of view, the kind of thing I enjoyed in The Last of Us, where it feels like our subject is steering the camera.

The zombie woman emerges from behind his headlights almost like an angel charging at him, and he sprays and misses every shot. I love the real life comedy of this scene, because Cregger reportedly asked himself what would actually happen if someone tried to unload a clip like that, and Brian ends up unknowingly shooting bullets into his own engine, a detail that returns as a joke later. With no vehicle, he continues on foot until he reaches a desolate farmhouse, chased by a dog that comes running after him like a little black blur.

The Barn Escape Reveals the Zombie Dog

Brian outruns the dog into the barn and up to a loft, then throws the ladder that saved him back down at the dog still barking below. It is a scene grounded in classic game logic, and it reminded me a bit of the Dungeons and Dragons movie, where you are choosing your own adventure inside a sandbox with limitations. He swings off a hook to land outside, taking a bit of fall damage, and right before the jump you can spot the first aid spray from Resident Evil 2.

The dog then crashes through the barn wall, revealed to be infected, its mouth opening like the Demogorgons from Stranger Things with tentacles darting out. This dog was shared on Resident Evil's social media in the first week of September, with x-rays and Brian's delivery details both tied to the Umbrella Corporation, the main antagonist of the games, a pharmaceutical company front developing the T-virus behind the outbreak. There are always zombie dogs in Resident Evil, and Resident Evil 4's Las Plagas dogs have similarly creepy tentacles. In a past conversation with a colleague, Cregger reportedly mentioned his favorite character from the games is the dog.

The creature also gave me a John Carpenter's The Thing vibe. Production designer Tom Hammock has said they used the creatures and zombies from Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 6 as inspirations, pulling elements like the teeth and tentacles. Asked about it by IGN, Cregger explained, "You have this opportunity for the T-virus to do all these really fascinating things to the human body and to the world around you. And so to just limit it to zombies feels like a squandered opportunity. So I tried to really bury it up." And that is exactly what the film does, letting the infection keep evolving into something grosser instead of repeating the same zombie over and over.

Inside the Farmhouse, the Movie Turns Into a Resource Hunt

Once inside the empty farmhouse, Brian finds a shotgun with no bullets and, like in a game, begins searching everywhere for ammo, even the refrigerator. This is where Cregger really leans into survival horror mechanics: the house has too many doors, and its layout lets the camera reveal things to us at the same moment they are revealed to Brian, turning the whole space into resource management. He tries calling 911, gets a dead line, then calls Michelle, who does not pick up, leaving her a message with the number to call back.

In an IGN breakdown, Cregger acknowledged taking the green herb from Resident Evil 4 and replicating the bucket it sits in for this scene. One room he searches has a typewriter, a direct nod to the save rooms in the games where players could organize their items and feel briefly safe. In a drawer he eventually finds heavy field ammo, another lift straight from the games.

The Farmer's Jump Scare Creates the Amalgamation Monster

Through the window, Brian sees the zombie woman has woken up and is charging the farmhouse. He frantically tries to load his gun and spills the ammo everywhere. Cregger told Letterboxd that they had to use visual effects to fix her running arms here, because her original arm angle looked too similar to the runners in Weapons, calling it a very expensive mistake to correct so that her arms now wiggle slightly as she runs.

Just as Michelle is leaving her voicemail, the phone rings loudly right as the farmer who lives in the house jumps out, giving a scare so big I saw someone nearly leap out of their seat in the theater. Brian takes out the farmer, then shoots the zombie woman's head off as she runs in. Tentacles crawl out of her neck like a long worm, another tentacle emerges from the farmer's cheek, and the two link together into the amalgamation creature glimpsed in the trailer. A family photo of the dog and the farmer reveals there was also a wife, presumably the woman who has been chasing Brian the whole time.

On his way out, Brian grabs keys from a rack by the door, keys I had theorized in an earlier trailer breakdown would matter. Doors, locks, and keys are a huge part of the games, and Cregger has said in interviews there are simply way more doors than there should be. When Brian finds the truck blocked by a locked gate, he tries shooting it, fails, and drives over it instead, getting the truck stuck, which again feels like the rule-bound sandbox logic of a Dungeons and Dragons movie: you can try anything, but the game will not just let you ignore its mechanics.

Weta and Legacy Effects Built the Film's Practical Puppets

Cregger has talked about the film's mix of CGI and practical work. The Fat Man later encountered in the sewer is actually a 2,000-pound puppet built by a sculptor whose first job was as key sculptor on The Terminator. "There's one puppet that he built in LA that's like 2,000 pounds. Takes like four people to operate. We shipped that in pieces over to Prague where we were shooting, and that was like a treat for the movie," Cregger said. Wherever possible they built practical versions even for effects they knew would ultimately need CGI, photographing them on set so visual effects artists had a physical reference for lighting, texture, and movement instead of guessing.

Weta, the New Zealand visual effects house founded by Peter Jackson and known for Lord of the Rings, Avatar, and Planet of the Apes, handled the digital work, while Legacy Effects, a continuation of Stan Winston Studio known for Jurassic Park, The Terminator, and Aliens, built the practical prototypes Weta used as its basis.

An Infected Girl in the Tunnel Foreshadows Brian's Own Fate

Brian has to cross a dark tunnel blocked by an RV, no way over or under it. Working his way through, he pulls back a bathroom curtain to find a girl shaking, her foot turned into tentacles after her mother bit her. That detail matters later, because when Brian is eventually bitten he begins changing in the same limb, and like the girl, he stays consciously human even as he loses control of his own body.

The girl screams for help as the tentacle creature attacks Brian, and her face rips open Demogorgon-style to reveal a single eyeball before he shoots her, though the film does not show that moment. He is also bitten by her here, something he plays off for the rest of the movie. He continues through the RV and out of the tunnel, spotting the amalgamation creature, now bigger, cartwheeling through the forest parallel to him as he runs toward a car in the distance.

Maxine and Paul Rescue Brian and Reveal the Umbrella Corporation Antidote

Brian is saved by Maxine and Paul, who are searching for the cooler he is carrying. This gives us one of the funniest interactions in the movie, a real contrast between the severity of the outbreak and how naturally funny Paul's character is. I would have watched these two play off each other for a lot longer trapped in that car.

Brian finally opens the cooler and finds a small vial that may cure the outbreak. It is an antidote created by Umbrella Corporation scientists who were contracted by the government to investigate genetic enhancements for classified reasons and had apparently made recent progress, until one of them dropped the vial they were working on and released the substance that caused the outbreak. The liquid is bright yellow and later turns green when they tinker with it, which I believe matches the antivirus color from the first film. Paul points out, in a pretty funny explanation, that it was not an emergency when they originally requested the sample, only after they broke their only vial. He tells Brian there is a secure room atop Raccoon City General Hospital, a building inspired by London's Guy's Tower, described as the tallest hospital in the world, where the vial needs to go.

Raccoon City, Shot in Prague, Turns Deadly Fast

The film's Raccoon City sequences were actually shot in Prague, chosen because it looked closest to Resident Evil 2, though the production swapped that game's rain for snowfall. When a woman is seen running from a gang of infected, Maxine steps out to save her, takes down the infected, looks left, and simply walks away, never returning, in what I thought was one of the funniest realtime moments in the film.

Left alone, Brian and Paul realize the woman took the keys with her. Brian finds a machine gun in the back seat, matching what Cregger told IGN about wanting to follow someone who might know how to use a gun in a video game but would have no idea what to do with one in real life. Brian nearly shoots Paul in the face reaching for the keys, and when he gets to the woman's body, there is barely anything left except her legs, the keys dragging away every time he gets close, until he finally grabs them. Back at the car, Paul is being pulled out by tentacles, and Brian's attempt to save him with the machine gun accidentally shoots him in the stomach and leg, forcing Brian to let go as Paul is pulled into the growing creature, which keeps absorbing bodies to get bigger.

The Sewer's Fat Man Was Inspired by Blood Meridian

Running through alleys lit by yellow streetlights, Brian hits a dead end, squeezes through a fence with his gun getting stuck, and drops into the sewer just ahead of the creature. Cregger has said in interviews that in Resident Evil, the deeper you get into the game, the more lost you become, which is exactly what plays out here. In the sewer, Brian meets the Fat Man, a towering, pale, hairless, belching figure that Cregger says was inspired by the judge in the novel Blood Meridian. Its stomach gurgles before infected sewer rats rip their way out and chase Brian, who sprays bullets at them. I do not remember rats being sprayed at directly in the games, though infected rats are a known enemy type, and these feel more demonic. In the original script a rat jumped onto his leg after he climbed out, but that beat was cut.

The Practical "Jump Street" Stunt Sequence

Atop a building, a zombie launches itself at Brian in a sequence the crew referred to as Jump Street, which Cregger has said was the hardest to shoot because he did not want to rely solely on CGI. Human-sized blood bags weighing 100 to 150 pounds were rigged onto cranes and timed to drop right next to Austin Abrams as he ran across his marks, exploding on landing. The sequence uses long, wide compositions with little camera movement, so it feels like the camera is chasing Brian rather than watching the bags fall.

Cregger has mentioned one of those bags came dangerously close to actually landing on Abrams, and you can spot the moment he skip-hops over one in the finished film. The production reportedly covered the small Prague street in an enormous amount of fake blood that day.

The Hospital: A Locked Garage, Acid Vomit, and the Maternity Ward

With the hospital lobby full of infected, Brian heads for the parking garage instead, missing his first shot at the lock before breaking it on a second, closer attempt. Inside, the elevator button will not work while his arm keeps worsening, and as he pleads through what he thinks might be his final moments, a voice comes through the intercom that is actually Cregger's own. He is directed up the stairwell to the 24th floor to reach a sky bridge to the lab on the 28th, making it up only four flights before he is completely exhausted and gives up for the elevator instead.

Waiting for the elevator while worrying a zombie might burst through a nearby door was a deliberate detail from production designer Tom Hammock, meant to evoke the same dread you feel not knowing what threat comes next in the games. Once inside, acid begins dissolving the elevator ceiling from an infected vomiting above him, a quality I think they borrowed from Resident Evil 6, where infected animals could spit acid, and I can see them applying that to this character here. Brian climbs onto the elevator cable, forces the creature to vomit its acid onto zombies below, and throws it over the edge before continuing on.

He then has to cross the maternity ward, which Total Film described after visiting the set as going full Resident Evil, covered in massive fiberglass egg-like membranes with tentacles crawling across the walls. Stunt performers were suspended upside down above the set, trained to hold their breath while gallons of slime were dumped on them before the membranes broke apart and dropped them into the scene, all done practically. Brian mops his way through cradles filled with infected tentacle babies, and when he knocks into a bed that bursts into a blood sack, spidery-handed infected babies are briefly revealed before he flees, using the mop to hold the door shut.

The Collapsed Sky Bridge and Brian's Final Transformation

The sky bridge has crumbled into a gap Brian has to edge along, with the amalgamation creature visible climbing the building below. Down to his last bullet, having tracked every shot the whole movie the way you would in the games, he fires it to cut the mop holding the maternity door shut, sending the infected spilling out onto the creature and knocking it down floor by floor.

Brian finally reaches the lab, guided in by a character played by Zach Cherry, and hands over the vial to a group of scientists, one played by Griffin Newman, co-host of the podcast Blank Check. By this point Brian's arm has fully turned to tentacles, and in a genuinely funny beat he tells them, "Hey, whenever you guys are ready with that, just let me know." It is too late. Brian starts tearing through the room while still trying to plead for the syringe, killing people and destroying the lab as his body reacts violently, including slamming Zach Cherry's character into a wall so hard his body explodes.

The last surviving scientist grabs the syringe and runs, chased by Brian, who has now absorbed the other scientists' bodies into his own amalgamation. Just before the scientist can inject him on the edge of the sky bridge, a tentacle breaks off his limb and sends the syringe falling 28 floors. Brian swallows the scientist whole as the National Guard arrives by helicopter, and the film ends with Brian fully transformed into the same amalgamation that chased him the entire movie.

My Verdict: Not the Greatest Adaptation, But a Great Time

Brian starts this movie not knowing how to use a gun, what the creatures are, where he is going, or what is happening to his own body, and neither do we. I think the movie works really well as a Resident Evil adaptation without directly adapting one of the games. I personally wish it was a bit more dramatic and serious, but I had a good time watching it and have already seen it twice. What I appreciate is that it is not trying to recreate a specific game, it is recreating what it feels like to play one, an ordinary person trapped in a horrible situation constantly asking what to do next, and Cregger somehow makes that experience funny, disgusting, terrifying, and cinematic all at once.

Is it the greatest video game adaptation ever made? No, because when you are adapting a massive IP I do think you still have to engage with that IP's lore a little bit. But Cregger understood something important about adapting Resident Evil: you do not necessarily need Leon Kennedy or Chris Redfield or a direct retelling of one of the games. Sometimes all you need is a regular guy and a whole lot of doors. I really liked this movie, and I plan on seeing it a third time.

How did you feel about Resident Evil, and did it work for you without a Leon or a Chris Redfield at the center?