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GamesRadar+'s visit to the set of the Resident Evil movie does not quite go to plan. Just after we arrive at the cavernous Jordan Studios on the outskirts of Prague on a cloudy December afternoon, everyone else starts to leave. Director Zach Cregger is unwell, and filming has been shut down for the day. Instead of housing its usual hive of activity, the sound stages are abandoned, and I'm tempted to call out, "Hello? Is anyone there?", final girl-style, as I embark on an eerily quiet walk through the deserted warehouse from the press tent to the bathrooms. Here be zombies, after all.
In Cregger's new take on the survival horror franchise, rather than video game mainstays Leon S. Kennedy or Chris Redfield, it's Bryan who takes on the undead. He's a hospital courier on a job from hell, as he encounters horrors even worse than the gig economy over the course of one fateful night. Played by Weapons breakout Austin Abrams, Bryan is an original character with no link to the Resident Evil games. "I never wanted to tell the story of any of the characters from the games," Cregger tells us over Zoom a few months later.
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Return to Raccoon City
Back in Prague, everyone, including leading man Abrams, is incredibly apologetic about the disruption on set, but there's still plenty to see, and people are still busy behind the scenes – including our guide for the day, production designer Tom Hammock. "I play video games, but I'm not… I mean, Zach is obsessed," Hammock, who worked with Cregger on Weapons, tells us with a laugh as he shows us around. "I remember being in college in '96 and my roommate got Resident Evil 2, and I'd come home and he'd be playing in the dark and completely petrified himself. That's what Zach wants to capture. The first time you played the game, you didn't know what was going to happen, so he's trying to recreate all the scares, the flashlight work, the amount of darkness, the tension as you move through these spaces."
Don't be fooled by the film's first trailer, which sees Bryan arrive at a creepy remote farmhouse in need of a phone: Raccoon City is still on the map. "It takes detours," says Cregger. "The whole point of the movie is he's got to get from hospital A, through the mountains and into Raccoon City to deliver something to hospital B. And as he's going over this mountain pass, things turn bad." There's no hint of rural America in Jordan Studios, though: we've touched down in Raccoon City.
"We really designed the city based on Resident Evil 2, trying to get that look"
Tom Hammock, production designer
Hammock gives us a tour of a handful of sets: a dark, damp sewer, a hospital ward (sticky with the residue of 500 gallons of fake blood), and a few floors of a skyscraper, complete with working elevator, all built from scratch. We also venture into the production design office, which is a veritable treasure trove of storyboards, models, and a "creature wall", which does what it says on the tin, showcasing mock-ups of zombified rats, dogs, and more. "You'll see a lot of Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil 6," Hammock says, gesturing to the creature wall. "So Zach and I went through and pulled specific creature elements that we like from the games, whether it's tentacles, the teeth integration, and then tried to take that language and move it over to these creatures.
"I spent a lot of time in medical research libraries, so everything comes from nature," he adds. "But we also went as far as diseases. I used to work as a virologist long ago, so just having access to medical libraries gave us a really grounded starting point for all the creatures. And then you try to mix that with, you know, the insanity."
Although this movie may be a standalone piece, Cregger explains that the story occurs "on the periphery" of the second game. "You know, where Raccoon City is having its big night, but tell just another story that could be happening in parallel to that."
That extends to the production design, too. "We really designed the city based on Resident Evil 2, trying to get that look," says Hammock. "Lots of brick, lots of texture, lots of rain, and then the only change we really made was going heavier with the snow. We even found somewhere that looks exactly like the police station, by chance here, by the Opera House, which is pretty exciting."
But the hardest part of recreating Raccoon City in Prague? "It sounds so foolish, but one of the hardest things on the movie is Zach had me make Raccoon City manhole covers for the top of the sewers," Hammock says. "So hard to do. Everybody made their manhole covers, like, 50 years ago. It's not such a thing anymore."
Image credit: Sony Pictures Releasing
Image credit: Sony Pictures Releasing
Cregger reiterates that the movie is a "very simple and self-contained" story that doesn't depend on the viewer being as big a fan of the games as he is – but, if you are, there'll be some fun extra nuggets. "A lot of the references to the games, if you don't know them, they're just gonna go right over your head, and they're not gonna waste your time. I don't spend a whole lot of time talking about stuff that's only in the games," he explains. "The pacing of the games is very much in the movie. But if you don't know the games, that's not going to penetrate; you won't realize it. And the graduation of guns. You start with a pistol, you graduate to a shotgun, and then by the end, he's holding a machine gun. All the gamers are going to understand exactly what's happening, but if you've never played it just won't register."
Along with the pacing, Cregger says he also pays homage to the visual "vocabulary" of the Resident Evil games. "Sometimes I jump into first person, sometimes I use standard coverage if he's having a conversation with someone. But I really, really wanted to embrace that immersive feel that I get when I play the games, and so I feel like, to use their visual language… why wouldn't I do that? It's so cinematic anyway," he says, after flicking through a hardbound book of the movie's storyboards for us. "People who love the games are going to feel seen in a lot of ways, I hope, when they watch this movie, but I hope that the visual vocabulary is something that's really going to punch."
Away from the PlayStation, Cregger notes that he took inspiration from movies as far-reaching as Son of Saul and Evil Dead 2, but he wasn't thinking about any of the previous Resident Evil adaptations (six movies were released between 2002 and 2017, with a reboot following in 2021) – because he hasn't seen them. "Frankly, the reason I didn't see them is because I was such a fan of the games, and they just didn't look like the games to me, you know? And it was so obvious that they were not the games that I was like, it's not for me," he says. "Maybe they're great. I have no idea. But I just wasn't interested in that, because I feel like what's great about the games is they're shrunk down into this single perspective, and it's about this pacing and this horror, and those movies just didn't look like horror things to me."
Labor of love
If the work of Legacy Effects is anything to go by, however, Resident Evil certainly will look like a "horror thing." The Legacy team, who have worked on everything from Avatar to The Mandalorian, has set up camp in what appears to be a dressing room, lined with lightbulb-studded mirrors and furnished with makeup storage, but instead of lipsticks and powders, they're covered with displays of "messed up" models. Legacy is showcasing their favorite creations from the shoot for us: a mottled stretch of life-like skin, freakishly long limbs, something with three eyes. "I suppose it's a compliment when people think it's all done with computers," creature FX designer Shane Mahan (an industry veteran whose career began four decades ago with The Terminator) tells us amidst this gleefully gory tableau.
"Within the first two minutes, the audience should not be aware what they're looking at and just believe what it is," he adds. "Otherwise, there's no fun in that. If you don't believe that it's really there, there's no fear. Part of the fun is being frightened."
"People who love the games are going to feel seen in a lot of ways, I hope, when they watch this movie"
Zach Cregger, director
Some of these creatures will appear in a scene in a hospital ward. But, this is Resident Evil, after all, so this hospital has huge, fiberglass egg-like membranes and an assortment of tentacles clinging to its walls, and Hammock points out some cleverly concealed holes when we walk through the plasticky smell of fake blood to take a closer look at the set.
"There's a whole steel structure above with grids and pulley rigs. And what's going to happen is stuntmen, upside down, have been training to hold their breath so they're there against that membrane," he explains. "They pour, like, 50 gallons of slime in with the stunt guys, and it oozes down. And then the membrane breaks, and they fall into the sets, in-camera, which is pretty cool… It took, like, 15 people two weeks to glue the tentacles. Every one is hand-cut and then glued, and then held up. So it's this labor of love."
Lastly, we're taken to see a real, working elevator built on a sound stage, a short drive from the rest of the set. Construction is still underway, and Hammock has to raise his voice to be heard above the drilling and hammering. After climbing a flight of metal stairs, we find ourselves in a fresh paint-scented corridor with six doors on it. Cregger noticed that there are "too many doors" in Resident Evil, Hammock notes, and is working with "misdirection" in this set piece. "Just like in the game, you go to the side [just] to have something burst out of the other door, out of your peripheral vision."
Weapons star has the night from hell in first trailer for Zach Cregger's Resident Evil movie
Now we're inside the skyscraper itself, which is based partly on Guy's Hospital in London (the tallest hospital in the world), partly on a brutalist Swiss ski resort, and partly on '20s Czech cubism as "an homage to where we're shooting." Climbing a flight of concrete stairs, we get a better look at the elevator itself. The team has modified a sports stadium-style cable camera to operate vertically. "It goes all the way up and down, so it could track next to Austin as the elevator moves with him." It really is a fully functioning elevator, built from scratch, which will be involved in an action-packed set piece that we're not allowed to allude to further.
While it seems there's going to be some pretty gruesome stuff in this movie, Cregger says he never had any pushback from the studio. "They gave me the keys of the car, and I got to drive it where I wanted to drive it," he says. "And honestly, the person I feel the most responsible to is the [person] who loves the games, so that really was who I'm trying to please with this."
Resident Evil arrives in theaters on September 18. In the meantime, check out our guide to the other upcoming video game movies to add to your watchlist.
