Spoiler alert: This article contains major spoilers for Resident Evil, now in theaters.
Resident Evil stars Austin Abrams as Brian, trapped in a zombie-infested nightmare, and every moment will make you laugh, scream, or feel sad. For almost the entire 95-minute runtime, he’s either running, shooting, or getting covered in blood by various undead monsters, like a rat-filled behemoth, a spherical blob, or an acid-vomiting demon. After working with director Zack Craig on last year’s horror film Weapon, Abrams takes center stage in Resident Evil and proves he’s more than capable of leading a film on his own.
Based on the popular horror video game series, Resident Evil tells a completely original story with some nods to the fan-favorite source material. Abrams stars as a bumbling medical courier who discovers his girlfriend is pregnant but agrees to have one last delivery before returning home. He must travel to a hospital in Raccoon City (ground zero for the zombie outbreak in the game) to deliver a mysterious package, but driving in the snow is no easy task. Almost immediately, he hits a strange woman with his car, buckles her seatbelt, and begins driving her to the hospital, unaware that she is slowly turning into a zombie. They were pulled over by the police and things quickly went awry. Brian is able to escape to a nearby farmhouse, but the woman doesn’t stop chasing him throughout the film.
Brian finds a shotgun on the farm to defend himself, but he realizes that the undead will stop at nothing to kill him. After blasting the woman and an infected farmer apart, their bodies fused together through the filamentous tendrils within each body. From there, Brian orders a package and is picked up by some scientists from Umbrella Corporation (the evil agency in the game), who explain that the package he delivers contains the antidote to the zombie virus.
Along the way, Brian was bitten by a zombie, but he hid the wound and the wound slowly infected him. As his condition worsened, he was taken to Raccoon City Hospital, but he was not given the opportunity to use the antidote. He transformed into a giant, tentacled monster in Umbrella’s laboratory, tearing apart the scientists trying to save the world. Their bodies merge with their own, and the terrifying Brian roars atop the hospital, a military helicopter targeting him.
and typeAbrams discusses how he transformed into the monster, the cold and chaotic filming conditions he endured, and the one scene the Resident Evil team didn’t allow him to film.
©Sony Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
How did you find the right voice for Brian’s scream? You really go all out and it can be used to be funny or it can be used to make a horror movie. Is this similar to your real scream?
There is no method behind this. It’s just letting go of all your inhibitions and not trying to look or sound cool and just letting it out. I can’t tell you, we spent weeks trying to figure this out. I don’t know the last time I had a natural scream, so I’m not sure. Whatever it is, it just feels right, especially in that moment of the character. It’s something you don’t know what to expect. You don’t want to know. It’s better to just feel it and let what happens happen.
If Brian wasn’t screaming, he was usually muttering “Fuck!” under his breath. Do you talk to yourself like this in real life?
I don’t know if I can say that I kept mumbling, “Fuck, fuck.” It’s relatively easy to think about the situation you were in at the time. In my daily life, gosh, if you do this all the time in your daily life, that means something is really wrong. These are signs that things are not going well. Please, if this happens, something needs to change.
I didn’t expect you to turn into a monster by the end of the movie. What was your first reaction when you read that surprising moment in the script?
That’s why I love Zach’s work. He’s willing to take those risks, kill the people you’ve been stalking – and more than that, let them destroy everything they’ve fought for. This is absolutely surprising and tragic. Everything this character goes through, the changes he goes through, the way he feels about his girlfriend and all of these sacrifices are basically for nothing. It tells the story of why this virus spread and continues to spread, and how it might be possible to fix it. I thought it was a cool origin story.
How much of your monster forms are practical compared to CGI and other special effects?
A lot of them are catching it. It would be difficult to make a set like this. It’s a mixture. It had to be me, and they definitely put something on my face. I don’t know how they added all the other different people to me and stuff like that. I don’t know if they kept your stuff at all. But we did experience it in action.
What instructions did Craig give you during the final monster battle? What’s going on in your head?
All you’re thinking is that I look like an idiot right now. It’s funny, because the problem with all this stuff is you might feel stupid, but the less engaged you are, the stupider you look. So actually, the more you get into it, the more people are like, “Wow, this looks cool.” But you know, “More monsters.” He would say that a lot. “More roars. More scary. More monsters. Keep monstering. Don’t stop monstering. Come on, imagine you’re a big, scary monster.” I don’t know, I’m making this up right now. Very interesting. I don’t remember the specific note. A lot of it is just playing and imagining in this open space.
The movie ends with Brian confronting a military helicopter. Do you know what happened to him next? Would you like to see this in another movie?
I have no idea. I have no idea. I really don’t know. Whatever you want, you want it to be best for the story, and I love Zach. But other than that, I just don’t know. I don’t want to get into some theory about things.
Another important part of the movie is Brian’s relationship with his pregnant girlfriend Michelle, who we never see in person. Who voices her? Did you meet in person or was it just a voice on the phone?
I think that’s Zach’s wife Sarah [Paxton]. We had other people at the time. She wasn’t where we were filming at the time, so it was difficult to try to patch a phone and then the phone would go off and become unreliable. We had other people read it, but I think he knew he wanted to put Sarah in as a fun Easter egg.
Did you create more of a backstory for his relationship with Michelle than we see in the movie?
Yes, to some extent. I had an idea myself, but I didn’t know how deeply Zach and I were invested in it at the time. But you need to know this in order to feel, as a whole, that there is dimension behind what you see.
How cold was it to shoot in Prague?
Every day has its ups and downs, but some days it’s really cold. But I don’t mind that stuff. One day, it rains like this, and then your jacket freezes. Then you’re covered in this outer layer of ice. But I love those things. Luckily there were some days where we got real snow, which was awesome, like completely covered. The stuff in the farmhouse is mostly snow that actually happened. The temperature was also in degrees Celsius, I don’t remember. There are some days when everyone is having a really hard time. But, anyway, man, it’s just the temperature.
How do you beat the cold while shooting without letting it get to you?
You just feel it. You make it part of the thing. But like I said, it’s not a big deal. It’s just cold. You know who’s worried about the women in skirts playing pedestrians. If anyone had to worry it was her, as she had to film the scene lying in the snow. She really is a killer and gets the job done without complaining. If anyone deserves a pat on the back, it’s her because everyone else has to dress up and not be in summer clothes.
Another thing that impressed me was all the running you did. Have you trained to run like this in the snow?
I don’t know if this is the way to do it, but you hope the person isn’t a runner. I want to see the person struggling with it. So no, there’s no specific type of running preparation because I think it’s more interesting to watch someone huff and puff and you think, “I don’t know if they can do that.”
What’s the messiest, goriest scene you’ve ever shot?
Definitely once we got into the delivery room. At that time, you were completely soaked in the blood, and the floor was completely covered with blood. People kept being carried away or nearly knocked down. At that moment in that movie, every part of me was completely covered in blood and slime.
How do you jump from a farmhouse to the ground?
It was one of the only things we had a stunt team come in to do. Beyond that, it feels important to do everything. That was a, well, I don’t know what to say, they just wouldn’t let me do it. But our great stuntman did it without any wires or anything on him. He just fell. I remember him saying afterwards that he banged his tailbone pretty hard.