BACK IN THE GAME

DIRECTOR JOHANNES ROBERTS EMPHASISES SCARES AND ATMOSPHERE IN HIS NEW RESIDENT EVIL MOVIE REBOOT

- BRYAN CAIRNS

NOTHING STAYS DEAD for long in Hollywood. The 2002 Resident Evil movie, based on the popular Capcom videogames of the same name, spawned five sequels, with the 2016 instalment serving as the final chapter for the adventures of protagonist Alice (Milla Jovovich). Five years later, director and screenwriter Johannes Roberts (Storage 24, The Strangers: Prey At Night) is resurrecting the franchise with Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City. This reboot will, however, take a different direction from the previous iterations, trading elaborate action sequences for scares and atmosphere – and with Alice nowhere in sight.

“I was super-passionate about doing the game,” Roberts tells SFX. “I had a lot of fun with the previous franchise, but this has nothing to do with that. That was a separate thing, its whole own entity, with Paul [WS Anderson] and Milla. These fantastic games had never really been tackled. It was a huge part of my growing up. It was an interesting time when games were becoming scary and cinematic. It was like, ‘Oh. Let’s do horror. Let’s do the first two games. Let’s do the mansion. Let’s do the police station’.

“Robert Kulzer, the head of Constantin Film in America, and I were very intrigued with what was happening in America at the time, which we felt was relevant,” he continues. “We used the Flint water crisis [where the city’s drinking water became contaminated with lead] as a good storytelling point. It’s smalltown America dying and we used that as the underpinning of the story.”