There’s an ongoing problem in franchise media that owes to the studio’s predilection to plan out their paths for years in advance. Due to the overarching narratives and marketable characters, no viewer will ever go in with any sense of tension or fear for the fate of their favorite characters. This issue is more substantial in horror, where fear of death is the draw. The Resident Evil franchise is likely the most popular survival horror game series of all time, with eight main games and countless spin-offs. The film adaptations are among the worst received video game movies in an already despised medium.
Seven mainline Resident Evil movies, followed by last year’s Welcome to Raccoon City. The original series was based primarily around the new main character Alice and a regularly shifting cast of new arrivals. Those films slowly introduced weak facsimiles of most of the fan-favorite characters of the source material, but most of them came across as unrecognizable bad guesses
The most recent film, however, started from a semi-direct adaptation of the first and second Resident Evil games. The main characters are lifted straight from the game, scenes are recreated wholesale, it’s packed with references and callbacks, and most of the praise the film received mentioned its faithfulness. It’s debatable to what degree a new character helps the film adaptations, Welcome to Raccoon City is probably the best of the franchise, but it does impact one big problem.
Every fan of Resident Evil goes in knowing that the film will not kill off Leon Kennedy, Jill Valentine, or either of the Redfield siblings. Alice subverted that issue, but not for long, by the second or third film she becomes too important to kill off as well. This thoroughly weakens the tension of a horror story. What do the zombies and monsters of the Umbrella Corporation have to threaten the main cast with if they can’t be killed for brand recognition purposes?
The lead characters should be fighting for their lives, the odds should feel stacked against them. The main cast of Welcome to Raccoon City are not superhuman, they’re cops of various ranks. Alice becomes some sort of mutated human weapon for around fifteen minutes, but she’s all too human for the overwhelming majority. This is a problem that is not uncommon amongst popular films, but it’s one that Resident Evil is uniquely bad at adjusting to.
The Resident Evil films fall flat in their attempts to be frightening. They really aren’t horror films, the original series gives up on that concept around the third act of the first entry and Raccoon City plays out like Assault on Precinct 13 with CGI monsters. They are action films that pit their opponents against zombies and monsters, only occasionally slowing down to talk about the dreadful state of the world. This is in no way a problem of the actors, it’s entirely on the back of the screenwriter. Savvy viewers will know long before the violence kicks off which characters matter enough to survive the carnage, which will die without a word, and which will die in an important way. It’s that predictability that kills any semblance of tension or suspense and numbs the audience to most of the intended scares.
The standard horror protagonist is an innocent, in way over their heads and up against forces, they may not be able to comprehend. Films like The Exorcist see trained professionals enter a situation beyond their capabilities and struggle to survive. The average slasher is populated by unaware teenagers with no notable survival skills. Look to Laurie Strode, originally just a random babysitter. She turns out in the sequel to be a direct relative to the killer Micheal Myers, but even that tenuous connection was discarded in the recent remake. By now, she’s heavily armed and actively pursuing The Shape. Characters grow and change, and the default track leads from terrified innocent to action hero. The Resident Evil protagonists start out as super-soldiers from a cultural level, so the films never treat them as what they are. Fragile, mortal, human beings struggling to survive an impossible situation.
Resident Evil needs to master tension to create horror, and it needs to create horror in order to be a good film in the franchise. Survival horror is about struggling to get by when faced with an unstoppable foe and a bracing lack of resources. Jill and Leon have some pretty impressive feats under their belts, but the game sells how difficult that is by making it difficult to accomplish. The films do not have that luxury, but plenty of other horror films portray characters beating the odds. Through better writing, smarter characters, and a sincere embrace of horror elements, the most popular horror game franchise can finally have an actual scary movie to its name.
