Fans have reason to worry any time a beloved work gets adapted into a different medium, but few have as many reasons as fans of the Resident Evil video game series. While that franchise has spun off into seven live-action movies, the results have been mixed. The Paul W. S. Anderson movies starring Milla Jovovich take only the most external trappings of the games and apply them to a totally different genre of action and tone, while the 2021 reboot Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City remained superficially faithful to the games but did not tell a compelling story.For Zach Cregger, the secret to a good Resident Evil movie isn’t in the easter eggs or in originality. Rather it’s in understanding the pacing of the narrative. “To me, the most important thing to make it a Resident Evil story is the tone and the rhythm,” he told Deadline. “It’s like this kind of slow progression deeper and deeper into hell. And in the first act of the movie, he’s creeping into darkness, and then at a certain point, he’s running for his life.”cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});As demonstrated by the trailer for his take on Resident Evil, Cregger certainly isn’t disregarding other elements of the game. His film takes place simultaneously during the events of the 1998/99 games Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3, but it does not intersect with any of those entries’ main characters. Instead it follows a medical delivery guy named Bryan (Austin Abrams) who agrees to take a dangerous assignment to a hospital in Raccoon City, the heart of the outbreak. Bryan’s trip gets waylaid when a tense conversation with his girlfriend results in his getting into an accident. Afterward he must make his way alone into an unfamiliar situation.Well, unfamiliar to him. Fans of the games recognized several elements in the latest trailer, including a telltale typewriter and an unloaded shotgun. The latter sent Bryan searching for the ammunition, something in short supply, even when he found them. Like the scene of Bryan fumbling to load his gun, the pacing of the movie undercuts early buzz that compared it to Mad Max: Fury Road.“It sounds like an action movie, but it’s not,” Cregger clarified. “Resident Evil is a survival horror, not a survival action. He’s not a badass going around and karate kicking these zombies. It’s more intense, grounded dread, tone, and atmosphere. One of the things those games do so well is that they lay out such a distinct and effective atmosphere. And so, I feel like to me, what makes this a real love letter to those games is I’m trying to replicate that experience of feeling dread and tension.”Gamers will recognize that sense of dread that Cregger describes. A hallmark of the games involves going into something that seems like a safe institution, such as a mansion or a police station, only to find something grisly lurking beneath. Thus, Bryan will likely go into Raccoon City General Hospital thinking he’s in a safe place, but we viewers shiver in dread and anticipation at what he’ll uncover. Perhaps an zombie-fied animal of some kind, or mayhaps even a nefarious Umbrella Corporation laboratory hidden beneath?We viewers won’t know exactly what horror awaits until we get to see Resident Evil in a few months. But as Cregger points out, waiting in anticipation is as important to the franchise as the zombies.Resident Evil invades theaters on Sept. 18, 2026.The post Zach Cregger Promises Resident Evil Is Structured Exactly Like Old School Games appeared first on Den of Geek.