With Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil now playing in theaters, audiences around the globe are getting to experience the writer-director’s distinct take on the T-Virus and Raccoon City and seeing just how much it differs from previous cinematic attempts. For all the nonsensical discourse in the lead-up to the film’s release about how faithful or not Cregger’s film was going to be to the games, an important and simple fact always seemed to be left out entirely: few modern filmmakers know how to stage a scare quite like Cregger.
Between Barbarian and Weapons, Cregger had already more than proved his bona fides as a classical horror filmmaker able to scare the wits out of audiences, and blessedly, he very much brings that same degree of craftsmanship to Resident Evil, if not more so. If Weapons was a gradually crescendoing magnum opus of a song, Resident Evil is a no-holds-barred punk thrasher that gets in, gets out, and gets the job done. It’s a blistering, entertaining watch, and that energy is very much reflected in its scares.
Building scares is a far more intricate and delicate art than audiences might assume. Sure, a filmmaker can have things simply leap at the screen and blare a loud musical stinger in tandem with it, in the hopes that it might elicit a jolt. But that’s the kind of trick that can grow very tiresome very quickly, which is why truly great horror filmmakers employ a litany of different tactics and approaches in their filmic craft to scare the audience in different ways. Things like suspense, tension, and dread are all powerful tools to utilize when building to a scare, and Cregger demonstrates a keen understanding of this in many of Resident Evil’s best scenes.
To take a better look at how the craft works here, let’s take a look at one of my personal favorites: where Austin Abrams’ Bryan is attacked within the farmhouse in the opening act. By this point in the film, shit is beginning to well-and-truly go sideways for Bryan, as he keeps encountering inexplicable terrors, such as the woman he accidentally hit with his car and then had to resort to shooting just outside the farm when she tried to attack him multiple times. When he arrives inside the farmhouse, he immediately attempts to call his girlfriend back on the home phone but gets no answer. He proceeds to search the house for weapons and ammunition and also to see if anyone is home.
Here, we have multiple different motivations at play, all of which are sowing the seeds for multiple sources of tension. When Bryan goes upstairs into a new bedroom, he finally finds a box of ammo for his recently acquired shotgun and begins to try to load it. However, because he’s ‘not a guns guy,' as he repeatedly says, he isn’t positive about how to load it and immediately has trouble figuring it out. From here, he looks up to see the woman he hit with his car and subsequently had to shoot has risen and is now charging toward the house. He continues to try and load the shotgun as the home phone begins to ring incessantly and his girlfriend begins to leave a frustrated voicemail, trying to figure out what is going on. As this is happening, Bryan is still attempting to load the gun, splitting his vision between the gun and the infected woman getting ever closer.
All of this is wrapped around the audiences’ throats in increasingly tightening coils from an editing perspective. Cregger and editor Joe Murphy interlace each of these strands of tension with one another, each escalating to newfound levels of anxiety. And just when the woman begins to enter the home and Bryan’s attention turns fully toward that, a previously unseen infected man comes chagrining out of one of the dark corners of the room.
It is a ridiculously effective scare specifically because it pays off one of those initial tensions (is someone in the house?) but only after Cregger and co. have so thoroughly pulled the audiences’ attention away from that thread. Viewers and Bryan alike are so wrapped up in the cacophony of stressors that are presenting as present-tense problems in this moment that the sudden payoff of this initial fear feels unexpected, brutally invasive, and yet still wholly earned.
The whole film is full of remarkably constructed scenes like this, with Cregger’s filmmaking feeling more explicitly rooted in John Carpenter and Sam Raimi influences than ever before in the best of ways. The new Resident Evil is wall-to-wall adrenaline, laughs, and scares, and they’re all crafted with ridiculous degrees of intentionality and articulation. Great stuff.
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