BACK IN THE GAME

Johannes Roberts gives it some jazz hands.

NNOTHING 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.”

Inspired by the storylines and characters of the first two games, Welcome To Raccoon City finds the titular town being swallowed up by zombies. Once the thriving home of pharmaceutical giant the Umbrella Corporation, Raccoon City is now a desolate wasteland. But worse, something lurks below the surface. And it’s downright evil. A teaser image features human test subject Lisa Trevor (Marina Mazepa). In the videogame, Umbrella scientists expose her to viruses and drugs that enhance her physical attributes, including strength and stamina. These compounds, however, mutate Lisa into something twisted and grotesque.