In Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, which is 90 minutes long, there’s a point where the main character, Bryan (Austin Abrams), is walking down the street. Zombies then start jumping off buildings down toward him. It’s basically raining zombies. And you might be thinking, how did they do that? Well, he actually made it rain zombies.
During Collider’s “Directors on Directing” panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2026, Cregger talked about the hardest scene he’s done in his career. And he focused on this one from the upcoming Resident Evil.
“[Austin is] running and they’re just detonating all around him, and it’s this really long gauntlet of leaping over cars and bodies exploding,” Cregger said. “And I didn’t want to do it with VFX. I’m not afraid to use them, but I wanted to do as many practical detonations as possible, because that was gonna make it look tangible and real.”
“So what we did is we had to set up all these frames and string all these 150-pound human sacks that were loaded with liquid blood and dress the street with snow and get the timing right,” he continued. “All these things had to happen together. Austin had to run at a consistent speed. We had to have a camera truck follow him really close. If he’d tripped, they would have run him over and killed him. And we had to time the dropping of these bodies, which are, like, six stories up—that is a long drop—and these things are 150 pounds, and they’re landing next to him, and exploding.”
“And so we have to make sure, hopefully, they don’t coat the camera, which they did on many takes,” Cregger said. “Hopefully, they don’t kill my star, which one of them dropped too soon, and it’s in the movie, it goes, like, an inch from his head. If he’d been an inch to the right, he would have definitely died. But I think it paid off. It’s awesome. I would do it 20 more times if I had to. We did end up supplementing some of the explosions with some VFX, but to do it practical, to get those real physics and see how everything really works, made it so much, so much better. And so it was dangerous, it took days, and it took a ton of rehearsal in planning, but I think it paid off. I’m really proud of that.”
Later in the panel, Cregger showed a less difficult but equally terrifying scene of Abrams’ character finding a flipped-over cop car and trying to help the officer inside it, only to be attacked by a zombie woman. He has to grab the cop’s gun as the woman chases him around the car, disappears, reappears, and he shoots her.
Cregger revealed on the panel that he hasn’t seen any of the other Resident Evil movies, but what he was pretty sure they didn’t do was really tap into the survival horror aspect that he loves from the games.
“I like this slow, creeping dread,” he said. “I like the idea of one person moving on their feet from point A to point B, and they have to enter a gauntlet and go deeper and deeper and deeper into hell. I like the idea of starting with a pistol, and you have to keep track of how many bullets you have, and then you graduate to a shotgun, and you get a machine gun, and the world just [is] hell-bent on destroying you, and you feel like you do not have enough resources to survive this, but you’ve got to figure out how to make it.”
“It just feels like there’s a movie there that I have yet to see, and I wanted so bad to make it,” he continued. “What I didn’t do is I didn’t take a story from the games and turn that into a movie, because I’m not going to do better than the games do. I am not gonna tell Leon’s story better than the game’s telling me the story. And I feel like it would be kind of a losing endeavor for me to try and redo something that was already done so excellently. And so, for me, a love letter to these games is to make a story that feels like the experience I get when I play the games.”
Resident Evil opens on September 18.
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