Zach Cregger Wants to Make a ‘Resident Evil’ Movie for Everyone

Resident Evil, the latest big-screen adaptation of Capcom’s iconic survival-horror franchise, follows a medical courier (Austin Abrams, Weapons) tasked with transporting a package between two hospitals, only to find himself walking straight into Raccoon City, the epicenter of the protagonist’s nightmare throughout the entire night. Writer-director Zach Cregger created the film to require zero familiarity with the games, crafting instead a fast-paced, breakneck descent into hell that unfolds almost entirely over the course of the 90-minute runtime.

Cregger has become one of horror’s most exciting new voices, following the surprise-hit success of 2022’s Barbarian and 2025’s Weapons. Cregger says he’s a lifelong fan of the Resident Evil lore. He wrote the script years before he ever intended to direct it. By the time he finished the draft, though, he knew he wanted to be the one behind the camera due to his love for the franchise.

Despite his affection for the source material, Cregger has been deliberate about keeping Resident Evil from becoming a straightforward rehashing of the games. The film borrows the franchise’s DNA in spirit, with its scavenged ammo, the iconic typewriter, and locked doors all making appearances, while making an original story with a decidedly unheroic protagonist who has more in common with the player behind the controller than any of the series’ seasoned survivors. The adaptation is a balancing act between honoring what longtime fans love and building something that stands entirely on its own, backed by Cregger’s now-signature blend of practical effects, hyper-subjective camerawork, and a comedy slapstick quality to his style.

In this interview with Steve Goldman for Rolling Stone, Cregger deep dives into the hellish worldbuilding, Easter eggs, and the characters he’s created out of one of survival horror’s most popular video game franchises.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with Resident Evil, like myself, what’s the elevator pitch for the movie?

First and foremost, if you know nothing about the games or if Resident Evil means nothing to you, you’re still going to be able to enjoy this movie. There’s no prerequisite to understanding this story. A medical courier (Austin Abrams; Weapons) is transporting a package from Hospital A to Hospital B. Along the way, things go sour as he realizes he’s walking deeper and deeper into the heart of a zombie outbreak, and deeper and deeper into the depths of hell. That’s the story in a nutshell.

I understand you wrote this before making Weapons, without the intention of directing it.

I did. I didn’t necessarily think I’d be directing it. At the time, I’d only made Barbarian. Because of that, I was able to write it in a very carefree way. But by the end of it, when I finished it, I was like: Okay, I really would love to be the one to make this movie.’ So I really pushed [laughs].

The first 20 minutes of the film were recently shown during a special footage presentation. Should audiences expect that same relentless intensity throughout the rest of the film?

I didn’t want to do any sort of weird narrative trickery as I did in Barbarian and Weapons. So for me, the big challenge of Resident Evil would be: can I tell a very simple linear story from beginning to end? At about minute six or minute seven in the film, our big event happens, and from there on the question was: “Can I put the pedal to the metal and floor it all the way until the movie ends?” That’s what makes this thing such a challenge for me as a storyteller. But for an audience member, I hope it really is a rollercoaster ride. So yes, once things kick off, they just stay full-on until the movie is over.

Tell us about casting Austin Abrams as the lead in Resident Evil.

Austin and I had such a wonderful experience making Weapons together… It was just really fun. And so I knew that going into Resident Evil, he would be a fun partner to have in the trenches with me. But he also has such a great, unassuming presence. I knew that what would make Resident Evil special was that we’re not following an action hero. It has a lot of action elements. But you’re following a character that would be more suited to sitting on the couch playing Resident Evil than surviving an actual Resident Evil experience. Austin has that sort of everyman quality. He’s athletic. But he’s not an athlete. He’s not a big hulk. And he has no combat experience whatsoever, and I think you can smell that when you look at him [laughs]…That this dude is not a fighter. All of that is an asset. I kind of wanted this movie to be like, “What if Marty McFly was thrust into a horror pit fight?” And he was perfect for that.

I honestly didn’t recognize him from your last film, which is a compliment to both of you.

Austin is a very committed, borderline method actor. For Weapons, he lost a lot of weight for the role and really transformed himself physically because he was playing a drug addict. For Resident Evil, he kind of went the opposite way. He packed on some pounds. He wanted to get a little bit roly-poly and just be more of a cuddly teddy bear. He’s unrecognizable.

Tell us about the supporting cast.

It’s a very limited cast. I mean, really, the driving engine of this is just watching Austin face off against all of these different bespoke threats. But periodically we do have some interludes with other characters, Paul Walter Hauser (Black Bird) being one of them. He plays an Umbrella [Corporation] employee (the corporation behind the viral outbreak in the games) who sheds light on the nature of Austin’s mission. We have Kali Reis (True Detective: Night Country), who is one of my favorites, even though she has a relatively brief stint in this movie. And then we have some familiar faces near the end, when he arrives at his destination.

You mentioned before that Resident Evil is one of gaming’s most iconic franchises. How did you bring the visual language and feeling of the game into the film while still making it cinematic?

What’s so great about the Resident Evil games, and honestly a lot of videogames, is that they utilize a specific visual vocabulary that is utilitarian but [also] inherently cinematic. People of my generation who grew up playing videogames as much as watching movies have, by osmosis, inherited this visual language. That language is when the camera is really fluid and yet locked to the protagonist. We generally think of it as third-person. But what I think games do that movies generally don’t is that there’s dexterity to the camera. For example, if Austin is walking down a hallway and he looks right, our camera needs to keep him stationary in the frame, but we need to swing around right as he’s looking to catch what he’s looking at. When he looks up, we have to drop down and look up at the same time.

So we’re creating this visual connection to Austin’s character. It’s a lot of choreography between the camera operator and the actor, where they have to get this dance down… What that does is give us a very clear sense of space and tone, and it keeps us locked into Austin’s perspective.

All video games utilize this nowadays. And yet very few movies do. And so it was really fun for me to toggle between that first-person view, which is like first-person shooter games, and that third-person view where we’re locked right over his shoulder… I think it’s not just a gimmick. I think it’s actually really effective filmmaking, if I may say so, because we’re just locked into him. And so when it all pops off, we’re that much more invested.

Have you ever done anything like that before?

I have. I did a little bit of it in Barbarian. Weapons, I was a bit more subjective with the camerawork. There are some scenes where we’re following people from behind and swinging around with their attention. But I really went way harder in Resident Evil with it. There’s a film called Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015) that I’m a big fan of. It takes place in a concentration camp in World War II. That movie really kind of woke me up to the potential of this hyper-subjective cinematography.

Was Resident Evil designed or shot with IMAX in mind?

It was. You have to take the IMAX aspect ratio in when you’re filming. And I’m so glad we’re able to show this in IMAX, because it’s so immersive. Obviously we’re all kind of on an IMAX high after The Odyssey, and that movie just used it so well. So it’s a real treat to be able to have people really primed and fully aware of the potential of an IMAX experience.

You’ve talked about your preference for practical effects over CGI. Is there a sequence you’re particularly excited to share with audiences?

I feel like every director worth their salt wants to do as much practical as possible. There’s something about it that’s more authentic. Generally, you have to augment it with VFX. But there’s one sequence that I’m really proud of that we did mostly practically.

There’s a scene where Austin is running down a street, and there are these zombies on the rooftops on either side of him, six stories up. They all start leaping off the rooftops and raining down all around him. And so the way we wanted to do it was: rather than just do it all in VFX, we rigged all these cranes with these 150-pound blood bags. We rehearsed like crazy, dialing in the timing of when we’d need to drop these blood bags so that they would hit the ground and the cars all around him and basically detonate.

Now we did go in and do some VFX sweetening to get some of the blood splatter to go the right way. But the physics is really there. These cars are really getting hit; there are real explosions, and they’re dropping all over the street as he’s running through. It was a really complicated sequence to plan and execute. It’s in the movie. I love the shot. It was a really cool use of combining practical and VFX together.

What was the biggest creative or technical challenge on the film?

This whole movie takes place over the course of one snowy night. I don’t think I realized when I was writing the script how demanding that sort of schedule would be on the cast and crew. You’re basically setting your alarm for 3 p.m. every day, shooting all night, going to bed at 7 a.m., and not seeing the sun for months. That was hard.

Fans love discovering hidden references. Are there any Easter eggs in the mix?

There are Easter eggs all over the place. Some of them I wouldn’t even think of as Easter eggs, but people will probably call them that. For example, the Resident Evil games [use] padlocks and the search for keys and keycards to bypass different sealed doors or chains and fences. That’s really baked into playing the games, and I wrote that into the movie. There are also objects galore in here. Healing items and the ammunition he finds, the progression [of weaponry]… All of that is like the DNA of the games that is in the movie.

You’ve become one of the most exciting new voices in horror but you started out in comedy. What inspired the shift and how do your comedic instincts come into play in this genre? Does that still influence your approach?

I think subconsciously it comes through. The anatomy of a joke and the anatomy of a scare are very similar — you’re using timing and tone to elicit an involuntary reaction from the viewer. It’s all about leading people to expect one thing and then subverting that expectation. That’s a scare. And that’s a joke. When you spend time making comedy, you’re kind of working the exact same muscle you use when you’re writing a horror movie.

You’ve got a lot of new projects coming up. Can you walk us through some of them?

Right now I’m working on a Weapons prequel (Gladys). I’m working on that with a friend (Zach Shields; Godzilla x Kong), and I’m pretty excited about that. I’m producing and writing Siren Head, which Brian Duffield (No One Will Save You) is attached to direct, and so he and I are writing that together. And then next I’m going to be shooting Flood, which is a sci-fi movie… I’ll shoot that next summer, hopefully. I can’t wait to make that movie.

What do you hope audiences take away from Resident Evil after the credits roll?

This movie is designed to be a rollercoaster ride. I mean, it’s a love letter to the video games, but first and foremost it should just be a blast. It’s a movie that is going to be very scary, very funny, and ultimately just a breakneck sprint for 90 minutes. It’s the kind of movie that I wish was made more often. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I think there were some more movies like this. But nowadays they’re a bit few and far between. I’m really proud of it.

Resident Evil opens nationwide September 16.

Elijah Pareño

Music Writer

Elijah Pareño is the Music Writer of Rolling Stone Philippines. He writes daily music news, features, reviews, and radar stories of the website.

In addition to music writing, Pareño has written about the behind-the-scenes writers and producers from the P-pop scene, interviewed hip-hop artists like Shanti Dope and Zae, and featured up-and-coming artists for the Music Forecast 2026. Aside from music, Pareño has written about the state of affairs that affects pop culture. He wrote a movie review for 'Mortal Kombat II' and reported and interviewed photojournalists at the September 21, 2025 protests in Luneta and Mendiola.

Prior to working in Rolling Stone Philippines, Pareño was a freelance writer for 3 years and independent live music promoter

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• In This Article:
• Austin Abrams
• Resident Evil
• Zach Cregger