‘Barbarian’ Director Zach Cregger Has an Exciting Update for His ‘Resident Evil’ Movie

Barbarian was a movie I knew (almost) nothing about, and it completely knocked me off my feet. That was by design. Details about the film were closely guarded during the marketing, making for a unique and exciting experience. It is a film that takes you deeper and deeper into a strange and terrifying location filled with monsters both human and … mutated. The scares are mean and funny, bouncing back and forth between cringeworthy discomfort and abject terror. So, it would make sense that the writer/director, Zach Cregger, is setting his sights on Raccoon City for a new Resident Evil movie.

Resident Evil has a sizeable footprint as a franchise. There were a bunch of video games and novels when I was a kid and the number has only grown since. A series of films was created and while they gave their own spin on the source material, there were six. Six! Then, there was a reboot movie released in 2021. After that, a TV show dropped on Netflix. The latter two projects didn’t set the world on fire, but they showed studios were still willing to mine the zombie series for all its worth! That leads to bringing in the man behind Barbarian.

Based on his debut film, Cregger is a great choice for the new movie. The games often involve characters starting in one “normal” and/or “creepy as f***” location only to descend deeper and find greater terrors hiding below. More often than not, the grotesqueries the character discovers are the result of experiments perpetrated by evil and/or profit-obsessed men/companies (mostly one company in particular). Barbarian plays out similarly, with the lead going deeper beneath a house only to find an incredibly evil man and his monster/offspring/lover(?).

Cregger recently appeared at Cinemacon to build hype for his new take on Resident Evil. While it hasn’t started shooting yet, his update is more than enough to get excited about. “There’s a moment that comes in every moment of every Resident Evil game where you find yourself standing in the mouth of a dark passageway. One shot in the gun is left,” he explained to the crowd. “You know that something horrible is waiting for you in that darkness, that awful moment where you have to will yourself. That’s something that every Resident Evil game has perfected and has kept me and millions of other players returning to the series for decades.”

It sure sounds like Cregger gets the games! Whether or not he’s able to replicate the feel of them while making a good movie remains to be seen, but I’ve got faith in him. That faith is doubled with his final tease, as he said, “My movie will be built in the spirit of those games and follows one central protagonist from point A to point B, as they descend deeper into hell.” I mean, he’s pretty much already made that movie! All he has to do is move it from Detroit to Raccoon City and slap a couple of Lickers in there. Boom, problem solved.