The following post contains minor spoilers for Resident Evil (2026).
The biggest movie in the world right now is Resident Evil, Zach Cregger’s reimagining of the long-running horror film franchise based on the classic video game series. Cregger’s take is a relatively stripped down vision of the Resident Evil concept, with a medical courier (Austin Abrams) delivering a mysterious package to a hospital in Raccoon City on the night of a viral outbreak. The courier’s journey begins with relatively grounded scares — a woman gets run over by a car, a dog chases our hero into a barn — but gradually the fear factor (and the scale of the monsters) gets bigger and more nightmarish.
The movie’s creatures are freaky and disturbing — and apparently way more of them were created using practical effects than you might realize. For example, the movie’s movement coordinator, Jakub Hudlický, posted footage online of some of the early rehearsal footage that went into creating the film’s most persisent antagonist, the “merged monster.”
In the film, the bodies of zombies that have been shot to pieces unleash tentacles which then can attach to and multiple corpses into new mutated and recombinated monsters. With enough bodies all smushed together, they start to look like a giant ball of limbs — which is exactly what they were. In Hudlický’s footage, you can watch multiple stunt performers all harnessed together and moving (and really rolling) as one.
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Even without any sort of prosthetic or digital effects to make these actors look like the undead, the movement alone is genuinely creepy and inhuman.
The practical creature effects in Resident Evil were designed by Legacy Effects and Shane Mahan, whose previous credits include The Terminator, Aliens, Predator, Jurassic Park, and many others. In this clip, Cregger talks about the importance of practical monster effects, and working with Mahan on Resident Evil.
Resident Evil is now playing in theaters.
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