Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil Is Horror, Not Action

Zach Cregger wants you to be scared. Not pumped. Not thrilled. Scared.

Sony has released two new posters and a behind-the-scenes featurette for the upcoming Resident Evil reboot, and the director of Barbarian and Weapons is using every bit of it to drive home exactly what kind of movie he’s making. “Resident Evil is kind of the flagship for survival horror,” Cregger says in the new video. “Horror — it’s not action.”

That’s a pointed statement, and it’s clearly intentional. The Milla Jovovich franchise — which ran for six films between 2002 and 2016 and grossed over $1 billion worldwide — was built almost entirely on kinetic action spectacle. Cregger is steering in the opposite direction, and he’s not being subtle about it.

The Philosophy: Dread Over Firepower

In the featurette, Cregger lays out his creative vision with the kind of specificity that should genuinely excite fans of the games. “What I love about survival horror games, and Resident Evil mostly, is this overwhelming feeling of dread,” he explains. “I have to go down this long, dark passageway. I have two shotgun shells. I know there’s a lot of sh*t in there waiting for me, and I know it’s really bad, but I have to go.”

That image — two shells, long dark corridor, no good options — is basically the emotional DNA of the entire franchise. And Cregger, who says he’s logged thousands of hours in the games, is chasing that feeling rather than the franchise’s mythology.

His lead character reflects that. Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier — not a trained soldier, not a special ops veteran. Just a guy. “I wanted this movie to tell the story of what would happen if some idiot like me were dropped into the world of a RE game,” Cregger said. “I’m terrible with guns. I don’t know how any of them work. I’d miss like 99 percent of all of my shots.” The point is that Bryan’s terror is relatable precisely because he has no business surviving any of this. That, Cregger argues, makes every near-miss more interesting than watching Leon Kennedy mow through zombies with practiced efficiency.

Notably, Cregger has never watched any of the previous Resident Evil films — not a single one. “The reason I didn’t see them is that I was such a fan of the games, and they just didn’t look like the games to me,” he said. “It was so obvious that they were not the games that I was like, ‘It’s not for me.’” That blank slate approach means his frame of reference is entirely the source material, not the adaptations that came before.

Where This Story Actually Lives

While Cregger isn’t adapting any specific game, he’s been clear about where his film fits in the franchise’s world. “I feel like this movie takes place alongside the events of Resident Evil 2,” he’s said. “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.” The new featurette even includes a point-of-view shot of a gun barrel inside a lab that looks like it was pulled straight from the games themselves — a deliberate visual nod to the franchise’s signature perspective.

Filming took place in Prague, with the city’s streets transformed into Raccoon City, and the project is now in post-production with its September release date fast approaching.

Constantin Film CEO Oliver Berben has already been vocal about the creative reset. “With Resident Evil, we have had an incredible journey with one of the most successful international IPs,” he said. “And now we are creating something new — not just a new story idea, but to allow a new generation to take the IP into their own hands and form something different.” He acknowledged the film is “far away from everything that is connected to Resident Evil,” framing that distance as a feature, not a bug.

The Posters (and the Fan Reaction)

The two new one-sheets, shared on the franchise’s official X account, are doing real work. The first shows a car on a dark forest road, headlights cutting through the dark toward what appears to be an infected woman — and if you look closely, the vehicle’s headlights and red taillights form a subtle Umbrella Corporation logo. It’s a small detail, but it’s the kind of thing that signals Cregger knows exactly what he’s doing. The second poster takes a behind-the-back view of Bryan walking into a snow-covered Raccoon City, quiet and ominous in a way that feels more like a nightmare than an action movie setup.

Not everyone is convinced. Fans have been vocal since the first trailer dropped, with some arguing the film barely resembles the franchise it’s named after. “Not a RE movie, just another spin off of the director’s universe with the name of Resident Evil to sell tickets,” one X user wrote. Another pointed out that without the title card, nothing in the posters would read as Resident Evil at all.

It’s a fair tension. The games have iconic characters — Leon Kennedy, Claire Redfield, Ada Wong — and decades of deeply invested fans who want to see those stories told on screen. Cregger’s Bryan is none of that. He’s an original character in a story that uses the franchise’s world as a backdrop rather than its lore as a script.

But here’s the counter-argument: every previous live-action Resident Evil adaptation has a “Rotten” score on Rotten Tomatoes. The Jovovich series topped out at 38% with The Final Chapter. The 2021 reboot, Welcome to Raccoon City, earned just $42 million worldwide. The formula hasn’t worked — not critically, not for the fans who wanted something faithful. Cregger’s Barbarian pulled $45 million on a micro-budget with zero franchise recognition. Weapons, his follow-up, earned $270 million and an Oscar. The guy knows how to make horror land.

The cast around Abrams is strong: Paul Walter Hauser (Cobra Kai), Zach Cherry (Severance), and Kali Reis (True Detective: Night Country) round out the ensemble, with Cherry reportedly playing a hospital scientist and Reis in an ex-military role that was originally written for a man.

Resident Evil, co-written by Cregger and Shay Hatten, opens in theaters September 18, 2026. Whether fans come around before then or not, Cregger sounds like a man who made exactly the movie he set out to make — and that alone makes it worth watching.