Zach Cregger's Resident Evil May Be the Best Horror Movie of 2026
A No-Nonsense Zombie Thrill Ride That Makes Hollywood Look Good Again
I LOVE THIS MOVIE!
With a year that produced the two most talked about indie horror films, BACKROOMS & OBSESSION, practically just flooding the film conversation with weekly essays and video breakdowns, here comes a studio picture made with a 70 million dollar budget based on a video game IP comes out of nowhere to declare itself the best horror movie of the year. And you know what….IT IS THE BEST HORROR MOVIE OF THE YEAR!
I’m talking about Zach Cregger’s RESIDENT EVIL, a rock’em sock’em hell ride into the abyss of viral corporate zombie doom. A no holds barred zombie smash mouth horror comedy that moves like a freight train caught on fire. It’s the kind of movie that makes Hollywood look good where we used to make movies like this on the regular, yet now everything has to have a narrative gimmick to simulate a must see experience that entertainment publicists try to ram down our throats with increasingly desperate results.
Resident Evil thankfully breaks that trend.
We start off with anxious medical courier Bryan, Austin Abrams, who takes a high paying, last minute job to deliver a secure case to Racoon City General Hospital during a heavy blizzard. The trip goes horribly wrong when he hits a mutated woman on a dark mountain road, triggering a nightmarish chain of events. As a viral outbreak rapidly collapses the city into chaos, Bryan discovers that his cargo contains the final, critical compound needed to synthesize a universal antidote.
And boy what a ride. The key factor here is the performance by Austin Abrams and the inspired direction of Cregger. Abrams is the first relatable horror protagonist since the George Romero zombie sagas starting with Night of the Living Dead. What Cregger does here is that he puts us, the audience, into the shoes of this guy, as if we are going through this ordeal our very selves. One moment exemplifies this to a Tee. After wildly shooing off from a 9mm Beretta at a mutated zombie, Bryan dutifully takes out his magazine cartridge as he approaches Racoon City and carefully counts how many bullets he has left so not to waste his odds at survival…THAT’S WHAT I WOULD DO!
Another moment is when he’s picked up by corporate scientist, Paul Walter Hauser and Umbrella enforcer, Kali Reis, where Bryan is tasked to load a very expensive gov’t issued semi-automatic machine gun, and he’s doing it in such a clumsy manner where the probability of something going horribly wrong is at 99.9 percent. It was truly hilarious to see the sequence play out because your mind is reeling that something seriously fucked is going to happen.
The mixture of terror and comedy, no doubt aided by Zach Creggers time in the comedy troupe THE WHITEST KIDS YOU KNOW, is truly inspired. He knows how to time a scare, how to time a comedic beat to its full effect. And what’s also downright revolutionary about the whole thing is that he does it all within a 95 minute run time. There is no fat to this beast at all. This is not John Wick going through the apocalypse unscathed. This is most of us, who watch these action movies where we live vicariously through these badass characters in a consequence free zone.
Although the movie functions like a video game as our hero maneuvers his way from set piece to set piece, it doesn’t feel easy at all. This is a hard slog and boy does Cregger constantly up the ante as the minutes rack up.
What I loved the most about RESIDENT EVIL is that there’s nothing elevated about it. This is not Backrooms or Obsession or any other A24 “cool kids at the table” indie style horror film. This is just a well done executed piece of horror comedy working on all cylinders. This is the kind of stuff I would like to see for at least of couple of years.
I am not looking for horror to reinvent the wheel. I’m not looking for characters with extensive psychological backgrounds to get me to empathize with them. I want stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Thankfully Resident Evil is that film. Buy a ticket and enjoy the ride, you’ll thank me later.
Author Bio:
Alain was an 80's kid who grew up in the movie theater and watched everything from E.T. to Robocop to The Fly. No genre was off limits. His writing has earned a list of accolades for his various screenplays. Check out his other articles: HERE.
Threads: @alskicollectables
