I remember watching Barbarian very clearly. I was with my friends in my living room, passing around a bottle of wine. The lights were off. The volume was up. We clung to each other, alternating between holding our collective breath from fear and laughing so hard we had tears in our eyes.
When the movie ended, we all stood up and applauded at the television, thrilled by the rollercoaster of emotions we’d been taken on. It sounds like I’m being dramatic for effect, but Barbarian was the first horror film in a long time that we’d all truly enjoyed the experience of watching thanks to its balance of side-splitting humour with genuine dread and fear.
Barbarian’s Writer And Director Is Making The Resident Evil Reboot
Barbarian’s writer and director Zach Cregger’s next project, after his upcoming film Weapons that’s set to be released later this year, is a Resident Evil movie reboot. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you this, but the Resident Evil movies have been notoriously bad, though they did make a lot of money.
In fact, every single one of the films has a 37 percent or less on Rotten Tomatoes, which is pretty damning. The series was so poorly received that it was often held up as indisputable evidence that the video game adaptation was doomed to failure, before shows like HBO’s The Last of Us and Amazon’s Fallout bucked the trend.
Barbarian Already Perfected The Perfect Resi Moment
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It’s easy to dismiss the reboot as dead on arrival, but something Cregger said at Sony Pictures’ recent CinemaCon presentation made me rethink this. “There’s a moment that comes in almost every Resident Evil game where you find yourself in a dark passageway, your health is almost zero and there’s no way around,” Cregger said. “You have to go through but you know there’s something awful for you in the darkness.
“That is a thrill that the Resident Evil games have perfected… My movie will be built in the spirit of those games and follows one central protagonist from point A to point B, as they descend deeper into hell.”
Picturing this, I can’t help but remember one incredible scene in Barbarian that had me and my friends staring at the television, terrified but unable to look away. Tess, one of the movie’s protagonists, discovers a hidden basement in the rental home she’s staying in, and hears the pleas for help from the other person staying in the home with her.
Armed with nothing but her phone’s flashlight, she goes down the stairs, step by step, into what seems like impenetrable darkness. We know, as well as she, that there is danger down there, but she has no choice but to enter. It feels like Cregger has already perfected that feeling of knowing something terrible is in the dark, that you’re defenseless, and that there’s no way out but through.
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Barbarian And Resident Evil Have Lots In Common
Of course, it’s too early to say if this reboot will be as good as fans doubtless hope it will be. I’ve been known to vouch for films too early based on their star power and directorial chops, only to be proven absolutely and unequivocally wrong when I actually get into the cinema. But here I am, doing it again.
Barbarian was a success of viral marketing, buoyed by an unconventional vision that paid off with critics and audiences in a major way. It surprised me with its mid-movie perspective shift, the way it played its protagonists against each other, and the strength of its performances. If the Resident Evil reboot manages to be as inventive and surprising as Barbarian was, we might finally have the first good Resi film on our hands.
But add to that the fact that Barbarian was an unexpectedly campy horror movie, grotesque and hilarious and over the top. Resident Evil, as well, is a very campy series – you’ll often find that word included amongst effusive praise for its best entries. Our own Stacey Henley has written just that about Resident Evil 4. The games have a lot in common with Barbarian, and given that the latter was so well executed, I can’t help but think that this is a match made in heaven.
