Director Johannes Roberts revealed how Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City will incorporate the video game’s tone and style in the new film. The upcoming reboot, set for a September 3 release, will be the beginning of a new era for the Resident Evil franchise on both the big and small screen. In addition to the film, Netflix is producing an animated series centered around the Wesker siblings and an animated movie. Welcome to Raccoon City is the only live-action adaptation planned (so far) and this time around it will be a return to the franchise’s roots.
The Milla Jovovich-led Resident Evil films, the first of which debuted in 2002, were highly successful, but longtime fans of the video game franchise grew increasingly frustrated as the series veered wildly from its source material. Welcome to Raccoon City is set to adapt the first two video games in the series and will bring on board many of the original characters, including Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario), Chris Redfield (Robbie Amell), Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen), and Ada Wong (Lily Gao).
Roberts detailed how Welcome to Raccoon City will harken back to the original games’ format in a panel at SXSW (via EW). The director cited the video games being “scary as hell” as one of the things he wanted most in the film, but he also went into some details about how the film will echo the game. On top of emulating the dark, rainy atmosphere of the game, Roberts wanted to play with the camera angles as they operated in the game, using what he calls the “around-the-corner style of storytelling.”
The big thing for me on this movie is tone. The thing that I loved with the games was they were just scary as hell, and that is very much what I wanted, that atmosphere. It’s raining constantly, it’s dark, it’s creepy, Raccoon City is this rotten character. I wanted to put [that] in and mix it with the fun side, especially with the first game’s around-the-corner style of storytelling. We had a lot of fun, down to the fixed-angle-playing that the first game had when we’re in the Spencer Mansion.
Roberts’ latest comments will likely further boost fans’ confidence in the upcoming reboot. Jovovich and director Paul W.S. Anderson’s six Resident Evil films dropped the horror aesthetic pretty quickly in favor of a more action-oriented franchise, giving fans another reason to clamor for another Resident Evil film. With Welcome to Raccoon City being inspired by John Carpenter, it sounds like Roberts’ film will lean hard into horror in the best way.
The video game’s survival horror format also seems to be in play in the way that the film will unfold on the screen. The “around-the-corner style storytelling” coupled with the “fixed-angle-playing” that Roberts cites sounds like it will be particularly dread-inducing, just like it was in the games. All in all, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City sounds like it is shaping up to be what fans have wanted from a Resident Evil movie all along and that is reason enough to be excited for when September rolls around.
