Zach Cregger says star Austin Abrams almost died during the making of Resident Evil... and that the moment was captured on camera.
"So there’s a scene in this movie…it’s in the trailer," Cregger told Dread Central. "He’s [Austin] running down the street, and there’s zombies on the roof of the buildings on either side, and they’re all leaping at him. And so we had to design this thing where he’s just running with bodies falling and detonating all around him. I knew I didn’t want to do it with VFX. So I was like, how do we do this?"
"All these explosions are real, and the way to do it is, you get a bunch of cranes, and you have all these body-sized blood bags, and you rehearse the shit out of how they’re going to fall, and how fast he’s going to run, and then you just shoot it," Cregger explained. "So, he’s running, and they’re releasing these bags that are falling and hitting all around and exploding. One triggered too early, and it missed him by inches. And these things are all like one hundred and fifty pounds, and would have killed him if he had been one step to the right. He would have died. And it’s in the movie. So it’s fucking worth it. I was pretty stoked."
Cregger also reportedly specified that he was happy that Abrams was safe and uninjured, though he did receive minor injuries throughout the course of filming. This is unfortunately par for the course for a physical zombie movie with action of this caliber. Cregger directs from a screenplay he penned with Shay Hatten. Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, and Paul Walter Hauser also star.
Abrams, who starred in HBO's Euphoria and Cregger's Weapons, plays Bryan, a medical courier who is in the process of making a delivery to Raccoon City General Hospital when an outbreak forces him to fight for his life. A new scene was shown behind closed doors at San Diego Comic-Con that saw Bryan pull over to the site of a wrecked cop car, only to engage in combat with a terrifying, fast-moving zombie woman.
Resident Evil hits theaters on September 18. For more, check out our guide to upcoming horror movies.
