In several recent interviews promoting his new Resident Evil movie, writer and director Zach Cregger has been speaking about his love for snow-set horror films. Among the many creative decisions that have been ludicrously earning Cregger backlash from terminally online fans of the franchise is his choice to have the film set amidst the backdrop of a winter’s snow, something that eschews the non-wintery backdrop of the game that Cregger’s film is most heavily pulling from, Resident Evil 2. However, Cregger has had one very simple answer as to why the film features the snow: because he thinks it’s “fucking cool” to have a horror movie set in the snow.
Cregger has more than enough walk to back up this talk, with the most recent Resident Evil trailer sporting references to two of the most iconic horror films of all time, which also both just happen to be snow-set: The Thing and The Shining.
This starts with the very opening of the trailer, as Austin Abrams’ protagonist enters the hospital he works for. By and large, the design of the interior of the hospital is standard fare, but it has the notable exception of having a blood-red floor. This is a great touch that immediately foregrounds the red color that is clearly a dominant motif throughout the film, while also referencing Stanley Kubrick’s immortal The Shining. That film utilized similar design techniques, with strong primary color choices cutting through established norms in striking ways. Of course, one of the most infamous uses of this in the 1980 film is the blood-red colors of the elevator doors and the eventual blood that comes pouring out of it across the floor, mimicking the red tile flooring in some striking ways.
Elsewhere, an early shot of Abrams’ character driving through the snow sees his car flanked on either side by only partially illuminated snow-covered trees in an ultra-wide shot. Everything about this image, from the white light of the front headlights to the snow-covered fauna to the sheer scope of it, is evocative of any number of images from the final act of The Shining, wherein Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance chases his family around through the Overlook Hotel’s snow-covered hedge maze. This is shortly followed by Abrams’ character retracing another character’s footsteps in the snow, another clear reference point to The Shining’s final act, where Jack does the same thing to try and hunt down his son.
However, one of the most concrete references in the whole thing comes mere moments later, in an out-and-out visual quotation of John Carpenter’s seminal science-fiction horror film, The Thing, from 1982. After Abrams’ character has accidentally hit a seemingly innocent bystander with his car, he finds the individual’s body mangled among the frozen terrain, and the staging and design of the creature is a near-exact replication of a similarly frozen corpse in The Thing. In that film, this frozen Norwegian corpse is what ultimately harbors the pathogen that will come to wreak havoc upon Outpost 31, and it looks as if Cregger is quoting this moment very intentionally for Abrams’ character’s first interaction with an infected person in Resident Evil.
In short, Cregger has already made two remarkable horror films set in non-wintery suburbia, in the form of Barbarian and Weapons, so switching things up from an aesthetic perspective makes perfect sense and brings a fresh layer of visual intrigue both to his own work and to the Resident Evil franchise as a whole. The latest trailer deliberately harkens back to iconic snow-set horror films, illustrating the kind of influence that films like The Shining and The Thing had on the Resident Evil source material to begin with and engaging in a much larger conversation about the genre, these stories, and where they come from. So yeah, I think it’s perfectly okay that Cregger wanted to put some snow in the movie.
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