Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil Just Showed Its First Footage — And It Is Nothing Like You Expected
The man who made Barbarian and Weapons has just shown the world what he is doing with Resident Evil — and it is smaller, weirder and scarier than anyone anticipated.
Zach Cregger took the stage at CinemaCon this week to debut the first footage from his highly anticipated reboot of the most cursed franchise in horror cinema history. The crowd reaction was immediate. This is not the Resident Evil anyone was expecting. This is something genuinely new.
And that is exactly the point.
Cregger opened by telling the room he has played a colossal amount of Resident Evil across his lifetime — every game, every iteration, every dark corridor and grotesque mutation the franchise has produced across thirty years. He loves the atmosphere. The pacing. The resource management. The particular flavour of dread that comes from being locked in a building with something that should not exist and having almost nothing to fight it with. That, he said, is what his film is built on. Not the mythology of the previous movies. Not the Umbrella Corporation boardroom politics. Not the superhero antics of Alice. Just a person, a nightmare, and no way out.
From that quiet, human moment of terror the film accelerates into chaos. Bodies falling bloody from a great height into the snow. Corridors full of something that moves wrong. A pale, bloated creature sitting at the bottom of a sewer, perfectly still, waiting. The footage is deliberately fragmented — glimpses rather than reveals — but what it communicates is unmistakable. Cregger has built something that feels genuinely true to the games in a way no previous film adaptation ever managed.
Bryan is a medical courier — a man whose entire job is moving organs between hospitals for transplant operations. One fateful, horrifying night in Raccoon City collapses around him and he is suddenly running for his life through a world that has come completely apart. There are no narrative tricks. No time jumps. No chapter structure. Cregger described it simply — a protagonist going from point A to point B while all hell breaks loose. Locked in with Bryan for the entire ride.
That someone is Cregger. His track record demands respect. Barbarian was made for $4 million and grossed $45 million. Weapons cost $38 million and grossed $270 million — and along the way earned Amy Madigan an Academy Award. He is one of the most purely talented horror filmmakers working today and he has brought that talent to a property that has been waiting decades for a director who actually cares about it.
The timing could not be better. Resident Evil: Requiem — the latest game in the franchise — sold five million copies in its first week of release in February, making it the fastest selling entry in the franchise’s history. The games have never been more popular. The audience is primed and hungry.
Joining Abrams in the cast are Paul Walter Hauser, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis and Johnno Wilson — a cast built for character rather than spectacle, which tells you everything about what kind of Resident Evil film this is going to be.
Raccoon City is waiting. The night is long. Bryan is already inside.
