With the first trailer of Sony’s upcoming Resident Evil reboot now out in the wild like the T-Virus, infecting fans everywhere, we sat down with director Zach Cregger (Barbarian, Weapons) to break down this first look at the video game adaptation. Along the way, we got the dirt on Austin Abrams’ character Brian, tried to get to the bottom of what the deal is with the dude who looks like Dune’s Baron Harkonnen, learned that there aren’t going to be a ton of zombies in this particular Resident Evil movie, and also discussed Cregger’s overall approach to bringing the classic horror game series to the big screen.
Read on for the highlights from our chat, or watch the full video breakdown above!
It Exists Alongside Resident Evil 2
“This is for sure, bar none, my most visually gonzo movie,” says Cregger. “Basically, my rule for this movie was to just try and make a movie that felt like my experience of playing the games that could live in the world of Resident Evil. So I feel like this movie takes place alongside the events of Resident Evil 2. I like to think that everything that’s going on in the police station could be happening in this world. This is just another dude on another mission on the other side of town and what’s going on with him. It’s not canon, in that I’m not using the characters, but it’s canon in that it lives in the actual day of reckoning in Raccoon City.”
Abrams’ Brian is the main focus of the trailer, as he attempts to travel from the outskirts of the iconic city to the center of it. Along the way, Cregger says Brian will go through a “gauntlet of set pieces” as he gets deeper and deeper into town.
‘This is for sure, bar none, my most visually gonzo movie.’
“What I love about the games is that every set piece brings with it unique new horrors,” he says. “And so I wanted the rhythm to feel like it was always changing. It was always shifting. You were always facing increasingly bigger dangers and you had to be aware of resource management and health and things like that. So I really did use a lot of cues from the games on how to build this thing out.”
The director acknowledges that he “fully, obsessively” loves the games, and as such, the film is a love letter to them. Specifically, one aspect of the games that he adores is how the player graduates from weapon to weapon, and we see in the trailer that Brian has a pistol early on. But as he progresses, he’ll graduate to the shotgun, and then eventually he’ll get an MP5 machine gun.
Visiting the Set of the Resident Evil Movie: Here’s Everything We Learned
“That’s one of the fun things about playing these games is whenever you get the new weapon, you’re like, ‘Oh, fucking thank God,” he says. “And so his character kind of has that reaction as he does it.”
And even if you have a weapon, you still need ammo for said weapon…
“One of the things that is so integral to playing Resident Evil is you’re constantly searching for healing items and ammunition, right?” Cregger says, referring to the scenes when Brian is rummaging through drawers. “He’s found a shotgun, he’s got no shells, he’s got to find the shells. So he’s got to comb this house for these vital bits of ammunition. And you can’t really do a proper love letter to the games without that.”
Focusing on ‘Weird Creature Stuff’ Over Zombies
“I just really love the idea of moving through a sewer, you have no idea what’s in front of you, and you come around a corner and you see a gigantic, obese, naked, hairless man just sitting facing you,” says Cregger. “What is about to go down? I like the question there. And what does go down, I am also pretty happy with.”
The filmmaker explains that the mysterious figure in the trailer who fans are already calling “that Baron Harkonnen type guy” was partly inspired by a character named The Judge in the book Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.
“I don’t have a Nemesis in this movie that the games use, which is like this gigantic hulking Terminator that’s following you, but this is also like a little bit of a nod to the Nemesis,” says the director.
Regarding the weird moment in the trailer when a bunch of arms and legs reach out from the darkened doorway of a house, and not just reach out, but reach out from some seemingly impossible angles, Cregger says that while he doesn’t want to give too much away on this point, it is a “mechanic” that he’s put into the movie as far as how the infected interact with each other.
‘Believe it or not, this movie doesn’t utilize zombies that much.’
“It might be in some of the games and I just can’t remember it,” he says, “It’s something that kind of pursues him throughout the movie. … I’m really excited for how this specific creature, for lack of a better term… how it changes and how it evolves over the course of the film is really fun. Believe it or not, this movie doesn’t utilize zombies that much. It’s much more focused on, like, the weird creature stuff than the zombies. There’s really only two scenes, maybe three actually, now that I think about it, where there’s like proper zombie stuff going on, and two of those three are in this trailer.”
So from what we’ve seen so far, you’ve got the Baron type guy, there’s the limbs stretching out of the door, and then there’s the matter of, as Cregger puts it, the zombies “detonating around” Brian from the end of the trailer. Certainly there will be much more “weird creature stuff” in the final film, but those who are hoping for another zombie opus should contain their enthusiasm.
“I wouldn’t call this like a zombie movie necessarily,” he says. “I just feel like you have this opportunity for the T-Virus to do all these really fascinating things to the human body and to the world around you. And so to just limit it to zombies feels like a squandered opportunity. I tried to really vary it up.”
Creeping Through Dreadful Spaces
“A lot of this movie is like third person,” says Cregger. “So there’s a Steadicam following Austin, and it was really a dance between him and our camera operator [shooting with] a really wide lens, and we’re kind of over his shoulder. So when he looks left, we pivot around to look left. And when he looks right, we swing around and look right. I really try to incorporate just the visual language of the games into the movie.”
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t also first-person shooter action in the new Resident Evil as well, just as there is in the games sometimes. But the general concept of being “right behind the character” is the vibe the filmmaker was frequently going for, while also attempting to “drink in” the world that Brian has found himself in. It was also important to Cregger to portray Brian as a regular guy rather than a “badass with military training.”
“He’s moving slowly through this world,” explains Cregger. “So if you’ve seen any of my other movies, I like to creep through these dreadful spaces. And Resident Evil’s like the perfect playground for a guy like me who likes to just really take his time turning down a hallway, opening a door, and waiting for that jack-in-the-box moment.”
Resident Evil will be released on September 18, 2026.
