Zach Cregger’s ‘Resident Evil’ Is Going First-Person, Just Like the Games

Yesterday, we shared a new featurette from Sony Pictures’ Resident Evil in which director Zach Cregger made his case to skeptical fans that, yes, he really does love these fucking games.

But hiding among the flashes of footage and all that evidence was something particularly exciting: a roughly four-second shot from the actual movie filmed from a first-person perspective, complete with a pistol raised directly in front of the camera!

And apparently, it’s not a one-off.

Several of the film’s action and horror sequences reportedly shift into first-person perspective, taking direct inspiration from the modern games Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Resident Evil Village and Resident Evil Requiem.

It’s a really fucking cool idea.

We’ve seen Hollywood play with this before. The 2005 Doom adaptation famously dropped Dwayne Johnson and company into an extended first-person sequence designed to mimic the video game experience. Then Hardcore Henry went completely insane with the concept and essentially built an entire action movie around the first-person perspective.

Cregger appears to be doing something different by using POV selectively, another tool for making the movie actually feel like you’re playing Resident Evil rather than simply adapting its characters and mythology.

That lines up perfectly with what Cregger explained in yesterday’s featurette. He’s structuring the movie around the rhythm of the games: moving into new environments, encountering barriers, scavenging items and gradually upgrading from a pistol to more powerful weapons. The footage also revealed familiar staples including green herbs, healing spray and typewriters.